Posted on 07/16/2012 8:24:19 PM PDT by smokingfrog
Livermore, CA--On July 5, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF) achieved a historic record-breaking laser shot. The NIF laser system of 192 beams delivered more than 500 trillion watts (terawatts or TW) of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to its target. 500 TW is 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time, and 1.85 MJ of energy is about 100 times what any other laser regularly produces today.
Combining extreme levels of energy and peak power on a target in the NIF is a critical requirement for achieving one of physics' grand challenges--igniting hydrogen fusion fuel in the laboratory and producing more energy than that supplied to the target. In the historic test, NIF's 192 lasers fired within a few trillionths of a second of each other onto a 2 mm diameter target. The total energy matched the amount requested by shot managers to within better than 1%. In addition, the beam-to-beam uniformity was within 1%, making NIF not only the highest energy laser of its kind but the most precise and reproducible, according to LLNL. "NIF is becoming everything scientists planned when it was conceived over two decades ago," NIF director Edward Moses said. "It is fully operational, and scientists are taking important steps toward achieving ignition and providing experimental access to user communities for national security, basic science and the quest for clean fusion energy."
The user community agrees. "The 500 TW shot is an extraordinary accomplishment by the NIF Team, creating unprecedented conditions in the laboratory that hitherto only existed deep in stellar interiors," said Dr. Richard Petrasso, senior research scientist and division head of high energy density physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
(Excerpt) Read more at laserfocusworld.com ...
I was going to DVC in the early 80s and knew one of the machinists who ran Diamond Turning Lathe III to make the mirrors for Shiva. I saw those capacitor banks too. At that time there were the laser guys and the magnetic bottle guys. It was the latter that were the real power hogs... 900MW if I recall correctly.
Interestingly, not far away they were installing a laundromat of hard drives for "global warming research."
Sorry about the sloppy formulation. Culinary school only covered so much...
johnny
Thank you. But someone still needs to learn how to write an article, and it is not Freepers.
Thank you. But someone still needs to learn how to write an article, and it is not Freepers.
I’m curious to know if the containment vessel is pressurized, and if so, to what degree?
“Also why culinary school is better than journalism school”
Good one!
I remember a former editor of a major national newspaper (can’t remember which one and can’t remember his name) speaking to the Journalism Department at Duke. He advised the students to get a broad education and not stay within the confines of the Journalism school.
Your point is? Simply make it last longer! Problem solved. Sheesh, do I have to show you how to do everything?
” - - - This is nonsense.”
Agreed. However, we live in an age of Junk Science, and razamatazz “discoveries” such as this will feed “cold fusion” rumors for years.
BTW, has anybody figured out the safe lab distance one needs to be if there really was, (thanks to Kenyan GOVERNMENT RESEARCH, of course), Cold Fusion?
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One of the world’s largest money vortexes!
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Can you imagine what might have been done with all the capability represented in those projects in terms of people, machines, and money? It’s staggering.
Just google it: (1.85 megajoules) / (500 terawatts) = 3.7 nanoseconds. Or about 1/270,270,270th of a second.
My mind would wander in that realm every time I entered the grounds of LRL.
Countless monstrous chunks of stainless steel tunnel dotted with flanged openings, costing millions each to manufacture, were at the time scattered on the pavement like a giant wrecking yard, clogging the path we had to take to the laser project, which was among the least developed areas on the campus.
Thanks for the link.
>> 500 TW is 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time,
Cool. How long is one instance of time?
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