MIT Technology Review’s David Talbot offers some helpful perspective on that Lockheed Martin announcement of a breakthrough in nuclear fusion. The company says it’s on track to sell a small, very powerful reactor within a decade. Not surprisingly, the piece gives room to the skeptics to make their case, although they don’t have much info on the details of what Lockheed is doing:

Ian Hutchinson, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT and one of the principal investigators at the MIT fusion research reactor, says the type of confinement described by Lockheed had long been studied without much success.Hutchinson says he was only able to comment on what Lockheed has released—some pictures, diagrams, and commentary, which can be found here. “Based on that, as far as I can tell, they aren’t paying attention to the basic physics of magnetic-confinement fusion energy. And so I’m highly skeptical that they have anything interesting to offer,” he says. “It seems purely speculative, as if someone has drawn a cartoon and said they are going to fly to Mars with it.”

But it’s not just Lockheed on the case, by the way:

Lockheed joins a number of other companies working on smaller and cheaper types of fusion reactors. These include Tri-Alpha, a company based near Irvine, California, that is testing a linear-shaped reactor; Helion Energy of Redmond, Washington, which is developing a system that attempts to use a combination of compression and magnetic confinement of plasma; and Lawrenceville Plasma Physics in Middlesex, New Jersey, which is working on a reactor design that uses what’s known as a “dense plasma focus.”

Another startup, General Fusion, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, tries to control plasma using pistons to compress a swirling mass of molten lead and lithium that also acts as a coolant, absorbing heat from fusion reactions and circulating it through conventional steam generators to spin turbines (see “A New Approach to Fusion”).

And as I have written before, Silicon Valley has a growing interest in the technology.