Lockheed is claiming it can solve the world’s energy problems:
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html
I think it is hubris that makes a claim that they can go from nothing to a working prototype in 5 years when collectively the world’s best research scientists have spent 5+ decades and likely 100+ billion bucks with next to nothing to show for it. There is no doubt that having access to piles of money and eliminating the bureaucracy will speed things up (think Manhattan Project, but is Lockheed going to piss that much away on spec?), but I have no reason to think that just because a team was once great in the past on a totally different subject (aeronautics of the U2 and Blackbird) that that team can just switch over to something completely different. It smells like an attempt to jack up their stock price to me.
Now if they were claiming they already had a breakthrough and had something that was already showing enough positive net energy to mathematically pay for the start up energy given that converting to steam and twirling turbines results in a 60% loss and they had ‘only’ to work out how to effectively capture the neutronic energy at high efficiency, then I might be less pessimistic. Not optimistic, because that is still a non-trivial problem, less pessimistic.
When a web page advertising a scientific breakthrough of the magnitude Lockheed is suggesting reads like an infomercial with all the content removed, it really raises my skeptic’s hackles. Show me the science!
