Posted on 03/02/2002 4:54:40 PM PST by aculeus
And I'll finish up my cold fusion reactor, shortly after I perfect my "Infinite Improbability Drive," which, interestingly enough, seems to be required to get the cold fusion reactor to work...
Mark
You'll find that repeatability and predictability
are characteristics that distinguish science from
the I'll-believe-anything-you-tell-me-if-you-
say-Jesus-said-it standard of proof that passes
for you and your ilk, KC.
So where did you find enough unobtanium required to fuel it? :)
I have one of those things lying around my la-BOR-a-tory, somewhere. Or I did have. Or will have. (Durned time machine, always mixing me up!)
Gerry Yonas passed along your inquiry re: Z. We are continuing to make progress. Most recently, we completed the project to move the Beamlet laser from LLNL (Beamlet was the prototype laser for the national ignition facility). We were successful in reconstructing the laser next to Z and then synchronizing it within 3 ns to the peak radiation output from Z. We then were able, for the first time, to image imploding capsules with a backlighter. We have done some nice symmetry measurements of imploding capsules. We also have been working to refurbish the facility. This year, Congress supplied $10M (the first installment in what we hope to be a $60M total) to begin the refurbishment. When completed, we should have 26 MA into a z pinch (18 MA today) and 350 TW of x-ray power with 2.7 MJ of x-ray energy (200 TW and 1.8 MJ today). This will provide a significant improvement in precision, capacity and capability.
Finally, we are also using the Z facility to generate very high magnetic fields for materials studies. We have achieved 2 Mbar isentropic compression in Al and have launched flyer plates to greater than 26 km/s velocities. All in all a very versatile and useful machine.
Hope this answers your questions. We have a Web site http://www.sandia.gov/pulspowr/PPT.html that is a bit out of date but over the next few months we hope to bring it up to snuff.
Regards,
Jeff Quintenz
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