Another sensationalist claim. At best, fusion technology is 30 years away.
"There are a lot of reasons to be skeptical about Lockheed's announcement, says Mahajan, who, with a team of scientists, designed a new way to reduce waste from nuclear reactors in 2009. First, fusion reactors right now are pretty big. Mahajan says making them smaller is extremely hard to do—you need a very confined space, with loads of material at extremely high densities, and then you need to get that power out of the reactor to be used. "So it's both the physics and the engineering which are extremely, extremely daunting," he said. "We know of no materials that would be able to handle anywhere near that amount of heat."
Mahajan called Lockheed's announcement "poppycock." He said, "Getting net energy from fusion is such a goddamn difficult undertaking," he said. "We're all aware that there's always a finite chance of some breakthrough which is beyond the powers of imagination." But if there was a genuine breakthrough, he said, "we'd be screaming from the treetops."