Posted on 05/23/2005 2:23:38 PM PDT by RWR8189
LIVERMORE, California (AP) -- Ed Moses talks of the "grand challenge" that has consumed him for the past five years, comparing it to trying to hit the strike zone with a baseball from 350 miles (563 kilometers) away or tossing a dime into a parking meter from 40 miles (64 kilometers) away.
"That's the precision we have to have," says Moses, the director of a high-energy physics adventure to produce the world's most powerful laser -- one that scientists hope will create in a laboratory the type of energy found at the center of the sun.
In a building the size of a football stadium, engineers have assembled the framework for a network of 192 laser beams, each traveling 1,000 feet (305 meters) to converge simultaneously on a target the size of a pencil eraser.
The trip will take one-thousandth of a second during which the light's energy is amplified many billions of times to create a brief laser pulse 1,000 times the electric generating power of the United States.
The goal is to create unimaginable heat -- 180 million degrees Fahrenheit (82 million Celsius) -- and intense pressure from all directions on a BB-size hydrogen fuel pellet, compressing it to one-thirtieth of its size.
The result, the scientists hope, will be a fusing of atoms so that more energy is released than is generated by the laser beams, something scientists call fusion ignition. It is what happens when a hydrogen bomb explodes.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
Here Kitty, Kitty, Kitty.
/India
/Sarcasm?
Death Star picture ping! Somone should keep a running count.
Must be springtime - the perennial stories about the fifty year "Twenty Year Project" of nuclear fusion are cropping up again, right on schedule.
I once owned stock in the defunct-since-1991 KMS Fusion in my home town of Ann Arbor, back when I was young and naiive. It took them three years and $2.5 million to decontaminate the building.
This is the kind of technology we need for campstoves. With this kind of heat output, a can of beans wouldn't take very long to heat up.
MITCH (V.O.)
I am known by many names. I am the One. Turn to me and be saved.
KENT
Oh, Sure.
MITCH (V.O.)
Cut the crap, Kent, you've built a weapon.
KENT
How did you know that?
MITCH (V.O.)
I know everything.
KENT
Oh. God.
"Oooops!"
"Let's see now, lefty-loosey, righty-tighty"
"I wonder what this switch does"
Someone had to do that - post a picture of the Death Star destroying Alderon...
:o)
And it will produce laser fusion research grants so cheap, you won't have to meter them.
How much energy over time are they talking here? Our nation's power output is 3,800 billion kWh yearly.
Still thats A LOT. I hope this works.
Well, I'm gonna just sit and wait until I hear what Art Bell thinks about this!
"No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die."
In the News/Activism forum, on a thread titled Building the world's most powerful laser, isthisnickcool wrote:
"Well, I'm gonna just sit and wait until I hear what Art Bell thinks about this!"
I'm guessing Art will claim it's a secret Pentagon project to shoot down UFOs.
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