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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."
A watt is a unit of power, not energy.
This laser (I can tell you without reading the article, as the laws of physics prevent the presumption) is only on for an EXTREMELY short duration, probably on the order of billionths of a second (that's 10E-9, for UK readers).
A peta-joule (as someone else pointed out) would be a LOT of coal. A petawatt for an extremely short duration isn't that much energy. Probably less than the entire university consumes for 1 second (I don't have accurate numbers on their power consumption, so don't micro analyze this statement).
The only use for such a short duration but high power laser is in physics experiments, and typically involves only a few dollars of electricity, so nearly no appreciable amount of coal or waste of any kind.
I'll pass on the political discussion though.
but how the hell can they harness that
In a word, magnets. The idea behind fusion, essentially, is that you raise a (hydrogen) plasma to sufficient temperature and pressure, and it will undergo fusion. If you get the conditions just right, it'll then continue to fuse once you've ignited it, thus supplying you with energy.
What you may not appreciate is that a plasma is electrically charged, and can therefore be contained using a suitable magnetic field. Arguably the most promising containment setup at the moment is the tokamak (from the Russian for bottle, iirc), which is a torus-shaped machine. Electromagnets around the torus create a circular magnetic field, which keeps the plasma contained in a ring. (My apologies if my information is out of date, I quit my PhD in plasma physics 4 years ago...)
Despite what the article says, however, fusion is not entirely pollution-free. One of the byproducts is a fairly large supply of neutrons. These neutrons are absorbed by the reactor, which will slowly but surely become radioactive. Therefore, you will eventually be left with radioactive waste to dispose of. You won't get anything like the quantity you get with fission, though, and fusion certainly doesn't produce any "conventional" pollution.
It's official. Most of you are morons.