electricpower:

Lockheed’s Skunk Works promises fusion power in four years

Until someone figures out a way to manufacture antimatter, fusion is by far the cleanest and most abundant source of power we can hope to harvest. We’ve known this for a long time, but fusion is hard, and it’s expensive to build the giant lasers or toroidal plasma containment systems that are needed to get it to work. By most estimates, we’re something like 40 years away from an operational fusion power plant.

“Most estimates” do not, apparently, include research being done at Lockheed Martin’s secretive advanced development center, Skunk Works. At Google’s Solve For X, Charles Chase describes what his team has been working on: a trailer-sized fusion power plant that turns cheap and plentiful hydrogen (deuterium and tritium) into helium plus enough energy to power a small city. It’s safe, it’s clean, and Lockheed is promising an operational unit by 2017 with assembly line production to follow, enabling everything from unlimited fresh water to engines that take spacecraft to Mars in one month instead of six.

DVICE

laboratoryequipment:

Magnetism Drives Iron-Based Superconductors

In traditional electrical lines, a significant amount of energy is lost while the energy travels from its source to homes and businesses because of resistance. Superconductors, materials that when cooled have zero electric resistance, have the promise of someday increasing the efficiency of power distribution, but more must still be learned about superconductors before they can be widely used for that purpose.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Iron-Superconductors-May-Rely-on-Magnetism-062612.asp.aspx?xmlmenuid=51

smarterplanet:

Japanese breakthrough will make wind power cheaper than nuclear
A surprising aerodynamic innovation in wind turbine design called the ‘wind lens’ could triple the output of a typical wind turbine, making it less costly than nuclear power.

via mothernaturenetwork:

(via emergentfutures)