The Glade 4.0

Let's let ourselves speculate, for a moment.

Let's imagine that Lockheed-Martin's best estimates are entirely realized and this works exactly as they hope.

Do you have any idea how much that changes the world? Politically, Socioeconomically, Environmentally - it's an absolutely revolutionary upheaval. It will be very good for some of us, and very bad for some other groups with particular agendas, but the world will never be the same again.

Most people don't realize just how big a new source of energy will be.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Even if it takes them twice as long, that's still all true.

Most people (in the first world, at least) do realize that fusion is even more powerful than fission, and just generally better, but they don't necessarily know the details about cleanliness or scale, and have not thought through all the implications.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Interestingly enough, all of this was announced back in February of last year, but apparently no one noticed.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

That's what I get for typing a reply too quickly as I'm heading out the door to work. Coro and Elmo were correct, I was initially thinking of cold fusion, which would definitely be a physics problem. This proposal is more of an engineering problem.

I'll be curious to see how much energy will be required to go into the whole process - containing the reaction, and extracting and producing the deuterium and tritium from seawater. It's possible these reactors might only be feasible for very limited uses, which would still be greatly beneficial.

You have a high opinion of "most" people.

Whereas I think that "most" people don't know the difference between the two, and would be hard pressed to point to the letter "f" in a dictionary given the state of STEM education in this country.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Fusion power plants don't have that many advantages over fission ones. They produce less radioactive waste and are less dangerous, but those aren't world-changing breakthroughs. Fusion isn't free energy from water, either, the tritium has to be bred from lithium so the available resources are limited. Of course, fusion produces so much energy that we have enough for thousands of years, but we have thousands of years' worth of resources for fission plants as well. The real problem with nuclear power is people are irrationally terrified of anything to do with radiation, a problem that unfortunately also applies to any theoretical fusion plant.

The fact that it supposedly fits on a truck is honestly the real world-changing breakthrough. It's not hard to generate power, it's hard to store it as well as transport it to homes from where you generated it. If they can be made that small that means you can generate electricity literally anywhere, with minimal transmission losses. However, convincing the NIMBY crowd that they they should accept a miniature fusion reactor right in their backyard.....good luck with that one.

I'd love one right in my back yard, or basement or...

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I'll take one...

they can put it right next to the cell tower I'm renting to the wireless providers.

See my comments above. People are morons.

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Holy shitsnacks!

I would like to place one in the 12-meter tall bipedal weapons platform that I am building.

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I'm saddened that no one has mentioned Mr. Fusion

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

If it makes you feel better I brought him up in a facebook conversation with a friend who teaches astronomy and physics while discussing this.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I don't have a particularly high opinion of most people; I just realize that the average person has at least heard of things like this. While this board is populated by people generally of above average intelligence, contrary to our conceit we are not some enclave of informed and intelligent people surrounded by complete morons. The "average" person is not the idiots that TV shows go out of their way to find that can't answer easy questions in front of the camera.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Are you completely on crack?

The level of radiation, particularly radioactive waste, from a fusion plant is far FAR less than from a fission plant. More importantly, fission plants are much safer - they can't melt down. As for tritium, there's plenty of lithium to breed it from - there are 13 million tons in known reserves on land and an estimated 230 billion tons of lithium in seawater. So yes, it pretty much is free energy from water; you just can't take sufficient tritium from water directly.



Most of the time, people's everyday power would come from larger, fixed units that would most likely simply go in place of fixed power plants. You don't have to convince everyone anyhow; as long as you give people the message "your energy is going to be a lot cheaper" and keep hitting that, you'll convince most people through self-interest. The remaining loons can just be steamrolled through normal legal and legislative process.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Friends don't let friends build mecha. Hovertanks are much better.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

We like to throw around the fact that this will 'change the global economy' - etc. (and I don't dispute that it will) But I'm more interested in the thought experiment for the moment: setting aside the technical limitations, lets presume that this essentially eliminates any and all power based limitations worldwide. We'll use the article's limitations on size-- truck sized, so no hand-held fusion units and cars cannot be powered by fusion yet, (semi's and trains, sure, but not personal cars) But other than that we'll assume power is so cheap as to be free once the infrastructure is in place.

How does life change?

answering my own question and speculating WAY WAY outside any expertise I have:
Military:
with a power unit that small it may be possible to make high speed tanks mounting lasers or rail/coil guns as weaponry. Presumably naval vessels could travel farther faster. With power limitations removed, presumably large flights of aerial platform drones could be used semi-permanently for battlefield reconnaissance, C&C.

Airplanes could travel farther faster for commercial flight, expanding the globalization. From an economics point of view, shipping would become far cheaper, making trade tariffs required for more protectionist states but eventually bringing the world closer to the 'one world economy'

From a spaceflight point of view, it may be possible to reduce power limitations on orbital craft (which operate on a tiny energy budget) Launches from large jets will be more common than rockets-from a pad, saving some fuel costs, but rockets will still be required to get to orbit and move within the solar system. Moonbases will become a much more feasible. (Lunar regolith has significant Deueterium & He3 IIRC)

There's a lot of speculation there. Lets say these are in production in 10 years. There's a long time then before they become commonplace and things change gradually. So, if Lockheed stays right on schedule, in 15-20 years we might se serious effects, maybe longer. People tend to want to leap right to the point where they're widespread and imagine "how things are" - which is fun, but without the intervening "how did we get from here to there" it may not make much sense.

I remember lots of books about "the future" when I was a kid that predicted by this time we'd be living in a high-tech world that wouldn't even resemble the 1980s. Yeah, we have lots of toys we didn't have then and lots of new conveniences, but I'm still living in a house that looks a lot like the 80's and driving a car that's fundamentally the same. My clothing is not all that different - style changes, but nothing like the Jetsons-wear the kiddie "science" books imagined back then.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The only thing that's really changed a lot since the 80s has been information technology. Everything else is pretty much stagnant. Some things, like transport speed, have actually gone backwards.

Given the size of reactor they're talking about, drones would most likely still use combustion, as would helicopters, fighter jets, and military land vehicles. I have no idea how small it could eventually be reduced so it's best to err on the side of caution and assume that these sorts of things would be limited to larger platforms like cargo planes, strategic bombers, and ships, at least within our lifetimes. Eventually, very small ones might appear, but unless they're a solid prediction by the experts I would not include them in any estimate.

With ships in particular, all ships could have nuclear power which would greatly reduce the need for oilers. This would greatly increase tactical and strategic flexibility - not only are the ships not tied to their fuel supplies, but be eliminating some of the supply ships you eliminate the maintenance and personnel costs of those ships, which means considerable savings in the long run. This is the sort of thing that allows lesser defense spending without the disproportionate cuts in military capacity that usually accompany it. Personnel costs in particular are important because those personnel can still cost long past their time in the military.



While air travel might be cheaper, I predict the limits of human endurance on an airplane would remain its limiting factor. Supersonic flight might be easier since fuel consumption would be less of a factor, but the issues of making a supersonic airframe would remain, and aircraft cannot grow much larger without corresponding increases in runway length everywhere they need to go.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

While their are mobile applications of a power-plant like this (Naval vessels, mostly, as well as space vehicles/stations), Diamondeye is correct - most applications of it would be stationary. We're not talking about Doc Brown's Mr. Fusion devices. These are still mammoth, multi-tonne devices.

The thing is, clean cheap energy changes everything else.

(1) Goodbye to carbon-based combustion. Note, I didn't say goodbye to combustion. The new fuel of choice becomes Hydrogen, whether by directly burning hydrogen gas (less efficient), or more likely, through fuel cell production. Making Hydrogen is horribly inefficient and requires huge amounts of electricity - which, suddenly, we have. Not only that, the process of separating it from seawater will give our fusion plants more tritium. This leads to several other massive changes on a world scale:

(2) Let the middle-east evolve, socially, or die. Isolate the Islamic world economically until they either join the civilized world or tear themselves to pieces. We don't need to cater to them anymore for our society's life-blood.

(3) Is Climate Change a real problem? Are humans causing it? It no longer matters. Our carbon emissions have just dropped by 90% in a decade.

(4) Cheap Energy drastically changes the economic landscape. Energy, right now, is an extremely valuable commodity. It will cease to be such, reducing costs of doing business, and day to day living. The first reaction is how great this will be economically, but massive economic change is rarely great in the initial stages. There will be serious growing pains, and they will really hurt.

Safety concerns still exist with fusion, but they're far more local. Any individual technician working on a fusion reactor can still easily be saturated with a lethal dose of neutron radiation if something goes wrong. However, there is zero chance of a runaway reaction - disasters would be instant, localized, and contained. Frankly, there's just as much individual risk working in a coal or oil plant, and carbon-burning plants have far more risk - both in probability and scale, on an environmental/area scale.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

That wouldn't be exactly instantaneous either, mainly because storing hydrogen (not to mention crash-proofing it!) is still something of an issue. I imagine hydrogen will slowly take over from fossil fuels regardless though, simply because they're going to get harder and harder to extract.

People will of course assume "big oil" will somehow prevent this from happening, but I think most likely the big oil companies will simply morph over time into "big hydrogen".

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Oh, it would take a few years to set up the infrastructure to mass produce them, and the retail units to swap them into vehicles in need of a refill, but the safe/crash proof devices already exist that can already safely power electric vehicles - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

No way, too many problems with eels.

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Not the fuel cell itself, the storage for the hydrogen. So far all fuel-cell vehicles have been demonstration prototypes and there's a big difference between something being made to work in a demonstration model and being ready for the average person to handle in daily life- or more to the point, the significantly-below-average person to handle.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."