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Record Setting 500 Trillion-Watt Laser Shot Achieved
cylonlover writes "Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF) have achieved a laser shot which boggles the mind: 192 beams delivered an excess of 500 trillion-watts (TW) of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to a target of just two millimeters in diameter. To put those numbers into perspective, 500 TW is more than one thousand times the power that the entire United States uses at any instant in time."
[rimshot]
Is a BIGGER shark.
(To jump, I guess.) :-)
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"To put those numbers into perspective, 500 TW is more than one thousand times the power that the entire United States uses at any instant in time."
Except for the instant when the lasers were on, of course.
Enough energy to send a DeLorean back to 1985 over 400,000 times.
This signature is false.
To put that 500TW in perspective. Are your lights still on? If so, where did they get this amount of power? :)
I hope they did not have to trickle load their capacitors for a whole year...
...and you could vaporize a human target from space.
The final stage of the Star Wars program can now begin.
500 TW is more than one thousand times the *average* power that the entire United States uses at any instant in time.
How did they get the ant to stay still why they blast it?
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
One application of this type of engineering is to serve as an ignition swith for a fusion energy plant. In order to get a reaction going, you either need high temperatures and pressure or abslutely unbelievable temperatures and low pressure. Our sun, due to its massive size, has a lot of pressure. Here on earth we need temperatures that far exceed our sun to get fusion started. I understand we currently have laser ignition systems in tokamak (spelling?) systems, but this system would generate much higher temperatures in a quicker time period than we could with other systems.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Has the National Ignition Facility managed to ignite anything yet?
"To put those numbers into perspective, 500 TW is more than one thousand times the power that the entire United States uses at any instant in time."
So what you're saying is that the US is no longer the biggest waster of energy on the planet? Nice.
I'm thinking, mount this bad boy on a turret on an island somewhere, and use it to destroy asteroids in threat range. I'm much more inclined to do this on a turret on the ground than a satellite; although the satellite would make the weapon more effective against space-based targets, it would also allow it to be directed at points on the earth. As a laser beam can't bend, all you could do to attack terrestrial enemies with it is shoot planes/satellites out of the sky.
'Cause it won't belong before we see a "commercial" application for something like this.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
It still won't ignite a sustainable fusion reaction.
Sheesh, is that why my energy prices have gone up so much over the past few years. Do we really need more weapons?
I thought this "lamp" is meant so "turn off" (permanently) enemy missiles, aircraft, tanks, whatever.
I like my spaghetti with source.
Off the cuff, 500 TW divided by 1.58 MJ implies the beam lasted only a few nanoseconds. So, "To put those numbers into perspective", 500 TW is more than one thousand times the power that the entire United States uses for a few nanoseconds."
Imagine a networks of massive underground tunnels that reflect the laser as demanded to one of 1000s of turrets around a nation's borders. Once aligned for a shot, it fire and travel through the network to the turret which would targeting incoming missiles. Heck, the laser could be split into 3 at some point and 3 turrets could target the same object for increased accuracy.
Yeah, impractical, but cool.
As an amateur, if I go over 1.5KW I get into trouble with the FCC.
Then again, maybe this would qualify under Part 15 or 18.
... what the hell is an instant of time? Is it as t approaches zero?
come on fhqwhgads
What does this translate to in jiggawatts?
And now to test the full power of this fully armed and OPERATIONAL battle station.
you scare me you frickin US-Americans. First thing I thought was: Oh, nice, now they can correct the eyeballs of a lot of shortsighted people - but all comments are about attacking someone, tstststs
"However, though the potential national security benefits of such a powerful laser are clear...."
All we need is a few mirror wielding satellites and the world will be our oyster!
"Hello I am President EVIL, deposit 1 billion dollars in this swiss bank account or your capitol city will be lazered!"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Don't worry about the scientist's carbon footprint. Apparently they charged the electricity to Al Gore who thought it was a rounding error on his electric bill.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
This is impressive, of course another way to state it would be: it delivers the energy of one laptop battery in one pulse. One must keep in mind the difference between energy and power.
The power is high, but there's not much total energy. 1.85 megajoules is only about half a kilowatt-hour. Energy cost about $0.10. No asteroid-melting potential here.
The National Ignition Facility is for nuclear weapons testing. It's for studying H-bomb type events without having to detonate a nuclear weapon. It's not a prototype for energy production.
But don't you think after doing fusion research on millimeter targets they might be tempted to try fusing (sic!) larger, unfriendly objects as they come along? ;-)
I like my spaghetti with source.
–– that was the term I was looking for.
I like my spaghetti with source.
"However, though the potential national security benefits of such a powerful laser are clear, NIF also provides unique opportunities for wholly scientific pursuits." (article @ )
I like my spaghetti with source.
I once did a 180 proof jello shot.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Not quite zero. Plank time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time
Now I have "Can't time this!" set to the music of MC Hammer in my head.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
N/T
So will it be easier now to implement fusion power? Was ignition a problem before? Now we only need to successfully contain the plasma for the reactor to successful and commercially viable?
"Do not look into laser with remaining eye."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
...it's like lasing a stick of dynamite
Time's fun when you're having flies. - Kermit the Frog
Or, only about 0.5 killowatt-hours, or the same amount of energy used by your microwave being on for 30 minutes.
The time duration is a critical detail to these "mind-boggling" numbers.
I like thinking of laser pulses in terms of equivalent kinetic energy of an object travelling at the speed of a bullet (500 meters per second)
From what I've found online I think the pulse duration was about 4 nanoseconds. That means at that power the total energy delivered was about 2 megajoules.
The formula for kinetic energy is 0.5 * mass * velocity^2
Therefore if the velocity is 500 m/s then the mass would be 2 million / (500*500) * 2 = 16 kg.
So it's about the equivalent of a 16 kg or 35 pound projectile travelling at the speed of a bullet.
Ouch.
So, here we have 1/2 a petawatt (500 terawatts).
How does that compare to the LHC's giga-electronvolts (gEv) and tera-electronvolts (tEv)?
Or can it start a bbq?
fire 192 beams in to a target area of 2mm without crossing the streams?
The 500 trillion watts thing made me think and do some math about how much power the US actually uses at any given moment. According to the EIA, in 2010 the average annual electricity consumption for a U.S. residential utility customer was 11,496 kWh. So doing some math, that's only about .21 watts per second, and based on an estimated 115 million houses in the US, that's only just over 24.1 million watts per second. Of course this doesn't take into account commercial power use which is likely a lot higher, but I found it surprising that in a given second, the nation's households only consume 24.1 million watts.
Submitter and "editor" - you suck.
Every week i hear a new story about advances in laser technologies, but shark related advancements (laser mounts, shark compatible targeting for lasers, and underwater shark optics) are NEVER covered.
Good people go to bed earlier.
There has got to be a better way to get a quick sun tan.
Headshot!
500 Trillion Watts is old news. A petawatt laser has existed for years, now. The record set by NIF is energy per pulse. The petawatt laser has only 190J per pulse, whereas the NIF has ~100000 times more energy per pulse.
Good way to get a quick suntan?
gaaa ok /60 = .022 kWh/minute (still 1.31 kW)
.022 kWh/minute /60= .365 Wh/second (still 1.31 kW)
11496kWhper year/365=31.5 kWh per day
31.5 kWh per day/24= 1.31 kWh/ hour (or 1.31kW)
1.31 kWh per hour
______________________________________________________
When you find a number that is back of the envelope crazy, check your numbers.
That number would mean that every person has one 30 watt bulb going for 8 hours a night, and that's it.. no fridge, no fans, no pc.
Will it do BluRay?
The greatest right given is the right to be wrong...
Do not look into laser with remaining charred neck-stump.
Its budget is from the NNSA, the part of the Department of Energy which deals with weaponry.
The design is ill-suited for civilian energy production research, and there is little attention to investigating cost-effective engineering necessary to get fusion power. By contrast the large tokamak being built in France does have significant engineering application (e.g. materials which could withstand the neutron flux in semi-commercial powerloads) as part of its scientific program.
The underlying facts: There is nothing important to learn in the nuclear reactions of fusion. Everything difficult is in the complex radiative transfer and fluid dynamics and thermodynamics in extreme circumstances. The goal of the NIF is to generate calibration data for the classified software simulation codes for nuclear weaponry without nuclear test detonations. You can do certain kinds of "subcritical" experiments to test the explosives and fission primary without a full yield nuclear explosion, but there isn't anything equivalent for the secondaries without the NIF.
The target of the NIF is, in some ways, a miniature recreation of the thermonuclear secondary of H-bombs. In fact, until about 15-20 years ago the actual setup used in the DOE laser fusion experiments was classified: the lasers are not directly heating or compressing the fusion fuel. They are heating a metal outer-surface called a "hohlraum (German for hollow room)" named so in the initial breakthrough Ulam-Teller design for the fusion weapon.
The outer metal shell fully ionizes which then releases a dense gas of X-rays which equilbrate themselves as the speed of light inside the container and themselves heat and ablate the surface of the inner fusion pellet. The gas being pushed off from the inner pellet imparts momentum inward imploding and fusing the inner pellet.
This is how an H-bomb works, except the initial x-rays are provided by a fission primary implosion. The real key is that you do not want the heat/blast from the primary---that would ruin the fusion assembly. You just want a clean X-ray pulse first.
Personally, I don't favor excess spending on nuclear weapons, and would favor funding into a variety of heterodox experimental fusion configurations which have a chance, if small, of eventually providing commercially successful power generation.
I am sure Hollywood (and maybe environmentalists) would love the idea of a one time use optical disk that disintegrates while being watched.
Most movies these days are barely watchable one time so if the disk disappears in a puff of smoke you have achieved all the enjoyment you are going to get out of it anyways.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
There's a point to firing that much power at a point to prove something. Did they open a worm hole or a micro black hole? If not, they'll face a big electric bill at the end of the month.
...there was an unexplained bright flash at Iran's Bushehr-1 nuclear complex and the facility is no longer visible to high-resolution spy satellites.
1.85 MegaJoules / 500 Terawatts = 3.7 nanoseconds.
3.7 nanoseconds
Think about it... that much energy delivered... in 3.7 nanosecond.
That truly does boggle the mind.
post to remove incorrect mod. Never mod after 2 gin & tonics! Always wait until 4...
Seeing a lot of discussion, but not much real information here, so I'll contribute.
For starters, here is the website: https://lasers.llnl.gov/
And here is a page of that site that has some explanation about how it works: https://lasers.llnl.gov/programs/nic/icf/how_icf_works.php
I've actually toured this facility, and it was pretty damn cool. A few points that stuck in my memory:
The generally do one shot each night. They prep it during the day, then they all go home and it goes off at night with not many people there, because that's safer.
The electricity usage is intense but very short, lasting only around 20 billionths of a second. They do this by charging up their capacitors and then discharging them very rapidly. They said the air conditioning for the building actually uses more power than the laser.
They talk about the "seven wonders of NIF", which are seven advances in materials and technology that were made during the project which made it all possible. I thought the rapid crystal growing was pretty wicked. Info on them here: https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/nif/seven_wonders.php
In the actual ignition step itself, while you might think you shine the powerful laser on the thing you want to heat up, that's actually not how it works. They have the thing they want to heat, and near it (like 1mm) is this little metallic trough thing. They blast the laser into the trough thing and when the light hits that it creates microwaves, and the microwaves heat the target. Of course by the time it's done all those parts are completely vaporized.
Also of interest, around April this year the place was shut down for maintenance for a month. For about two weeks during that period some filming for the next Star Trek movie took place inside the NIF facility. So check out the pix and see if you can spot the NIF scenes when the movie comes out. It does kinda look like the engine room of a starship: https://lasers.llnl.gov/multimedia/photo_gallery/target_area/?id=5&category=target_area Obviously, the whole lab is full of nerds who like Star Trek, but they were not allowed to see what was going on.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
So, I'm guessing the moment was a very little moment :-)
Thank you much for the informative post. I was just reading the blurb on their website, and it gives the impression that it is for fusion energy. I suppose it is mostly for PR reasons, but the blurb gives the impression that it is solely for fusion research (from their site) :
<quote>
The National Ignition Facility: Ushering in a New Age for Science
Scientists have been working to achieve self-sustaining nuclear fusion and energy gain in the laboratory for more than half a century. Ignition experiments at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are now bringing that long-sought goal much closer to realization.
[...]
Experiments conducted on NIF will make significant contributions to national and global security, could lead to practical fusion energy, and will help the nation maintain its leadership in basic science and technology. The project is a national collaboration among government, academia, and many industrial partners throughout the nation.
</quote>
Your post makes a lot more sense however.
According to the show, the USS Enterprise in TNG produces 12.75 billion GW at any moment in time, so we have already the capability to produce more energy than that.
More info here: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/USS_Enterprise_(NCC-1701-D)
Sorry, but 500 trillion Watt are just 500 Gigawatt. So the Enterprise produces 25.5 million times the power of that laser. Also, the Enterprise can sustain that power for a bit longer than just a few nanoseconds.
Indeed, 12.75 billion Gigawatt is the energy equivalent of 141.7 kg per second. The mass equivalent of 500 Gigawatt on the other hand is a mere 5.56 micrograms per second.
All stories about high powered lasers should be captioned thusly...
Uh, no. Mega is million. Giga is billion. Tera is trillion. 500 trillion is in fact 500 TW.
if apple doesn't snatch it first, that could really give the us economy a boost i suppose ... until the tech gets copied
Free speech was meant to be free for all... how can anyone grow up in a nanny state ?
Finally something I can use to keep those awful Kzinti off my lawn!!!!
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)