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Nuclear Fusion Real Soon Now
Mr. A. Coward writes "Researchers at the
National Ignition Facility are attempting to produce nuclear fusion. They'll focus 192 amplified lasers on a pellet of frozen hydrogen. 'NIF experiments will be the first to create fusion that gives off more energy than it takes in.' That will have to be quite a bit, since it will take 500 trillion watts to ignite the pellet in the first place. The facility has been plagued with delays, and so far only 4 of the 192 lasers have been completed. Researchers believe they will first achieve fusion sometime around 2014."
You obviously have never been shopping with your wife AND a three year old :-)
Question: What. do. you. get. when. you. combine. deuterium. pellet. terrawatt. laser. and. ancient. earth. leader. from. the. asian. steppes?
Answer: Khan. Fusion.
Not exactly on topic, but just to keep with the topic, I think it would be a tremendous breakthrough if we could get more energy out of fusion than we put in.
I was recently talking about fusion (a dinner conversation, in passing, nothing too detailed) with a professor from mit who is specifically working on fusion. My background on the subject is about zero so I asked "stupid" questions.
So I asked him if they have it working yet and the answer was yes. Then I asked him if they can get more energy out in a controlled fashion than is put in and again the answer was yes. Finally I asked him to give a concrete example and he said that everything actually at this point works on paper!
The point being that the theoretical work is pretty much all good and at this point they need to build a big test reactor to get some practical work done. Some practical problems still being considered were things such as location and financing.. but it, nevertheless, works.
Yikes. You let her get away with Waaaay too much time in Fashion Bug, dude.
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