According to Lockheed research teams we will have the technology to build the reactors.
http://news.yahoo.com/lockheed-says-makes-breakthrough-fusion-energy-pr…
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Very cool stuff. Here is a video from Lockheed -
Also http://sploid.gizmodo.com/lockheed-martins-new-fusion-reactor-design-ca…
As someone who has some experience with high vacuum plasma physics and fusion reactors, don't get your hopes up here. Fusion is "a generation away" and has been since the 1960s. There a ton of problems with current designs that have to be overcome before an actual viable reactor is even worth thinking about. These guys made it smaller and quicker to iterate on.. so what? The largest obstacle with large scale reactors (i.e. Tokamak/ITER-sized designs) is plasma instability (kink/elliptic/sausage/etc) which isn't even a concern at the lab scale they're working with.
Fusion power in our lifetime? Sure. Fusion power in a decade? Not a chance.
Uhh, what is it you exactly have experience in?
http://inspirehep.net/record/1088737/files/figures_instab_locations.png
I agree, and the fact is it doesn't matter if it's Lockheed, NASA, DARPA or any other expert source claiming early feasibility for fusion technology because unless an actual properly functioning prototype is presented, it's all just babble at this point. People are tired of being oversold on this idea; if this news was that important, Lockheed's stock would have rallied instead being sold off like the rest of the market today.
I see this as a shift in the mentality. Weirdly enough I attribute this to rooftop solar and terrorism. We are finally shifting our idea of how to build an electric grid from something on a national scale to something on a small city scale. If these small reactors can fix the issue of plasma stability, then why not just build tens of thousands of these small scale reactors and deploy them that way. It will make the grid easier to maintain, remove the threat of an attack on the grid doing large scale damage, and allow the grid to be far more flexible than it is now. Cities can change rapidly to meet the demands of growth and industry. So rather than spending 2 to 4 years building a power plant you could deploy one of these in a couple of months and have the closest thing to long term pop up power that doesn't require massive liquid fuel generators.
Plasma confinement time increases with the cube of the reactor volume (i.e. you need a big ass reactor before you can contain fusion long enough to extract meaningful power from it).
As an analogy: if a net-power producing reactor is the Saturn 5 rocket, then Lockheed is the neighborhood kids firing off bottle rockets in the backyard. It's a step in the right direction, but not exactly a breakthrough.
I like to think they are more like North Korea, in your analogy
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