World's Most Powerful Laser

mattlary writes "The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reports that the University of Rochester plans on building the world's most powerful laser. The plans include upgrading the University's Omega laser with a pair of petawatt lasers. Sounds a lot like Real Genius to me."

Comments

If only...

[FroMan]

If only the world would spend its time and money on things that can't kill each other. Why does everything have to be about killing people?!?

[/sarcasm]

I hope all the sheep that always claim that the US only spends money on DoD stuff figure out that the government (DoE here) does spend money on things other than to kill folks. And its a frick'en laser, and it isn't meant to kill people. Amazing.

Otherwise pretty cool.

Granted the otherside of slashdot that complains about anything with nuclear in it are going to hate this cause its going to kill us all! Lunatics on the left, and even more lunatics on the other left.

Oink! Oink! Pork alert

[Animats]

And the petawatt will help in one of the lab's primary jobs -- "stockpile stewardship" of the nation's nuclear weapon arsenal, Loucks said. The vast majority of the lab's $49 million annual operating budget comes from the Energy Department, which pays for study of the energy phenomena that occur in nuclear explosions now that the nation no longer does nuclear testing.

The laser lab upgrade will add no more than a handful of jobs to the facility, which employs close to 250 full-time workers. But the petawatt will help ensure that federal money continues to flow to Rochester, McCrory said. "We could be a target ripe for closing if we don't stay technologically current," he said.

"Stockpile stewardship" is a code word for "keep people employed working on bomb-related stuff, even if we're not making any". Over at the Lawerence Livermore Senior Activity Center for Aging Physicists, it's their main mission. All the old guys who know how to design H-bombs will die off soon, and nobody will remember how to make them. It's been half a century since young smart people went into bomb design, after all.

Re:Fuel cells?

[Cecil]

Because the only plentiful source of hydrogen that we have access to is electrolysis of water, which by definition takes at least as much -- and in practice, much more -- energy as the conversion from hydrogen and oxygen back to water. It's a chemical process. You can't get more energy out than was originally put in. What's the point of a hydrogen fuel cell plant when we'll need a conventional power plant sitting beside the electrolysis facility?

Nevermind the fact that even if we did somehow find a plentiful source of hydrogen, we'd get at least an order of magnitude (if not many orders of magnitude) more energy by using it in a fusion reactor than we would in a fuel cell. Again, fuel cells are an entirely chemical process, you can only get a tiny fraction of the energy out of chemical reactions than you get from annihilation-of-mass reactions, such as fission and fusion.

A fusion reactor is many times cleaner and less dangerous than a fission reactor. And we have fission reactors all across North America. And even if you were to entirely discount the use of fusion as a common power source on earth, which I think would be idiotic, you cannot dispute the usefulness of fusion in space. Fuel is ridiculously expensive to get into orbit. The more juice we can get out of a given amount of fuel, the better. Fusion is the most viable power source for interstellar travel, when we come to that point.