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Can World's Largest Laser Zap Earth's Energy Woes?
newviewmedia.com writes "Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory plan on using a laser the size of three football fields to set off a nuclear reaction so intense that it will make a star bloom on the surface of the Earth. If they're successful, the scientists hope to solve the global energy crisis by harnessing the energy generated by the mini-star."
Okay, no, nothing will likely go wrong (at least, nothing dangerous to anyone more than a few hundred yards from the event in the worst case scenario). But damn if this doesn't sound like the opening to the plot of a disaster movie.
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The National Ignition Facility is not doing research into energy production. The research they're doing will not have applications in energy production. The hope is that by understanding ignition other nuclear fusion projects will be able to make better progress.. it is completely pure research, as you would expect from a national laboratory.
My understanding from friends who work at LLNL is that it's an open secret that at the NIF they are not working on energy production, but, rather, thermonuclear ignition for weapons research. It's still pure research, in that they're working to produce controlled thermonuclear fusion rather than designing bombs outright, but the purpose of understanding fusion per se is so that we can better understand the current state of our present arsenal as it gets older. At least that's what they tell me.
So, we have a tiered layer of secrecy about NIF:
1. for the public: we're doing energy research for a petroleum-free tomorrow
2. for people who probe: we're doing fusion research to model our ageing weapons stockpile
3. [ guess the real reason here ]
I'm betting the third line is only marginally related to the first two, given the history of activity at LLNL.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
> I recall reading that the NIF is the first stage of a prototype
> for an actual method of producing steady thermal power
> from fusion, i.e. a viable electricity source.
LLNL has been saying this for years, but it's never been true.
The primary purpose of the NIF is to give the bomb-making establishment something to do so all the physicists won't find real jobs. I am not making this up, it's well recorded and easy to verify.
The justification they release into the defence establishment is that NIF will be used to tune the hydrodynamics code they use to design h-bombs. Everyone outside LLNL dismisses the need for such a project, and the other weapons labs (like LANL and Sandia) have been particularly scathing.
To the public, LLNL releases a stream of reports about "unlimited power" and such, but calculations made over 30 years ago demonstrated there is no hope for this. At best, with completely new solid-state drivers, you might be able to get 1/10th the power out that you put in, BEFORE conversion from thermal to electrical. ... with the current designs. Look up HiPER.
Maury