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Drilling For Oil With Megawatt Lasers

Posted by michael on from the lasers-do-it-hotter dept.

Deglr6328 writes: "The U.S. Department of Energy's Fossil Energy site has a story about using lasers to drill through rock at 10 to 100 times as fast as conventional rock boring technologies. One of the lasers tested was the 2.2 megawatt M.I.R.A.C.L., which was originally designed in 1985 for the star wars program. A cool video clip of its test firing can be found at the GTI page here. It looks like we'll be stuck with fossil fuels like oil and natural gas for some time, so we might as well do it James Bond style!" Sounds more like Real Genius style to me. Who brought the popcorn?

4 of 151 comments (clear)

  1. Heh, it's a weapon alright... by Feng · · Score: 5

    Anyone notice the number of kills painted on the side of the laser in the pic off the page?

    Looks like five planes, a missile and two other things I can't make out.

    Feng.

    --


    --- if y cn rd ths y cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgmmng!
  2. Fossil fuels aren't inevitable by fhwang · · Score: 5
    It looks like we'll be stuck with fossil fuels like oil and natural gas for some time ...

    Sure, the new drilling technology is cool, and its engineers are to be commended. But but the tree-hugging lefty in me feels obliged to point out that our reliance on fossil fuels isn't so much an inevitability as it is a political choice we have made.

    Take, for example, the recent actions of the German government to encourage wind power. Due to a plan initiated ten years ago, the state of Schleswig-Holstein now generates about 19 percent of electricity from wind, and nationwide the wind industry employs about 15,000 people.

    The first way to lose a political argument is to agree with those who say "this is the only way to do it." There's always another way to do it (see also: Perl); very often, there's a better way to do it, too.

    --

    Do domain names matter?

  3. I can see it now... by lowe0 · · Score: 5

    "No, Mr. Tux... I expect you to die..."

  4. More details on MIRACL by Vireo · · Score: 5
    MIRACL stands for Middle Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser. As its name implies, it is indeed a chemical laser, that is, one that gets the lasing medium excited with a chemical reaction instead of a more conventional current source or flash lamp. The structure of MIRACL is really one of a reactor, with the starting material being C2H4 (ethylene), NF3 and helium. This mixture is burnt to provide free fluorine atoms that reacts with injected deuterium molecules further down the stream. This reaction is really violent, so that the laser is in a perpetual explosion state. Vibrationnally excited deuterium-fluorine molecules in the produced supersonic flow thus constitutes the lasing medium. So you now have to put mirrors and windows inside this reactor to get your laser. One of my profs said once "I don't understand why they use chemical lasers as lasers; they would be much more efficient as bombs".

    Main source: Lasers and Electro-Optics, Davis, Cambridge Editor.