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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Umbran" data-source="post: 6409635" data-attributes="member: 177">As a note - when I said one of these could power my town - that was in a theoretical sense.  It would require running the thing at or near full output, which is not normally something you want to do with a power generating plant.  With one and a half, you'd be running with more suitable margins.  Or maybe one, with a nice offshore wind turbine farm as a supplement...That brought me to another point.  Several folks in other places have asked why a company as big as Lockheed would need partners to help develop this.  Lockheed knows power generation, after all - they build nuclear power plants for navy vessels.  I suspect the first concept for the fusion reactor was similarly for large navel vessels.  So, why does Lockheed need partners?The answer is in my point above.  Assume Lockheed has cracked the basic fusion issue, and they can fit in in a 7'x10'(x10') space*.  Think, for just a moment - how do you get all that electric power *out* of that tiny space?  With a normal power plant, you have much more space, you don't have to crowd the outgoing cables together.  For this, all that power has to come out of a very small surface area.  The currents would be enormous.  If you use classic copper wire, the heat would similarly be enormous.  If you get it out on superconducting cables... well, you need superconducting cables.  Either way, with the enormous current would come enormous magnetic fields as well, which would put physical stresses on the thing...So, there are some engineering and materials challenges implied by that power output and size that nobody, Lockheed or otherwise, has ever tried to meet.  *The power plants on modern nuclear vessels are more like 30' to 40' per side.</blockquote>

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