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National Ignition Facility is Firing Up
VernonNemitz writes "Over near San Francisco in California, USA, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is starting to reach the end of 15 years of development work on the National Ignition Facility. The goal is to use 192 high-powered laser beams to blast a pellet of frozen hydrogen isotopes, turning it into a tiny (and thus safe) hydrogen bomb. Currently 4 of the lasers have been commissioned for use in tests; the eventual goal is to get more energy out of the exploding pellet than is dumped into it. Personally I think they'd have an easier time of it if they combined different ideas, but what do I know?"
This reminds me of buring ants with a magnifying glass. Scaled up a few times, and modified to be useful and all, but still the same root coolness (if you're a geek) multiplied.
What restraint they must have in not playing a very expensive version of the old game "lets put stuff in dad's vise and crush it!"
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rld ...
... give us plenty time to strap one on in Baikonur and escape the planet as it gets sucked up by "Black Hole San Francisco".
I hope they're gonna give us plenty of warning when they fire that thing up, over here in Trans..beria
All 'that free energy' has gotta come from somewhere.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Anyway the San Andreas is the wrong kind of fault for that.
Wouldn't it be hilarious if the fault really DID let go... and all the rest of the USA (or better yet, North America) slid beneath the waves?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
>in the sky continues to burn 24x7 at no cost, most of its energy completely unused
Yeah, but look how many cases of cancer it's causing. It can't be stored safely because it will remain radioactive for billions of years. There is no realistic plan for decomissioning. Some research implicates it in global warming and it's known to cause destructive storms. Concentrated exposure has been shown to cause smoking and charring in ants.
Other reactors of the gas-core gravitationally confined design have been known to explode, causing great environmental damage.
As soon as someone gets around to filing and reviewing an Environmental Impact Statement, we'll have to shut down that huge nuclear reactor in the sky and replace it with alternatives that environmentalists can accept.