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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]
"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.
...and you could vaporize a human target from space.
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?
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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.
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I heard a radio program (NPR I think) talking about this. The entire energy was about the same as rubbing your hands together for a few seconds.
Can anyone verify? It was early on a Monday morning, so it could ahve been the haze of the weekend...
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... so, where did they get this amount of power? I hope they did not have to trickle load their capacitors for a whole year.
They plugged in a ZPM.
As a means to prevent malicious use of the weapon, require multiple access keys to activate it, and provide one each to the governments of the UN Security Council members. Unanimous, active participation would then be required to fire the weapon, which would only realistically be achieved due to a true threat to the entire planet.
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."
It's a bit more energy than that, but it's not a remarkable amount of energy. 1.85MJ is enough to turn just under 1L of water from 100C liquid phase to 100C vapour phase. ie - it's enough to boil 1L of water, if the water is already at the boiling point.
Latent heat of vapourization for H2O is about 2200 kJ/kg.
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Apparently it was my morning haze. 1.85 MJ is the equivilent of leaving your old-school 60 watt light bulb on for the 8 hours while you are at work.
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I think you'd find the range of a UV laser in the atmosphere to be pretty depressing. Also the deployment problem is focusing.
Its sorta like being able to set off a small pile of unconfined gunpowder in a lab vs having an actual deployment-ready cannon.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
By that logic, we shouldn't have useful electricity since flying kites in storms doesn't produce a sustainable current.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
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.
correction: rubbing your hands together saying 'muahahaa'
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.
. . . as soon as the batteries for it are fully charged . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I'm thinking, mount this bad boy on a turret on an island somewhere, and use it to destroy asteroids in threat range.
This laser system is perfect for that use... as long as the asteroids are 2 mm in diameter, stay still long enough to focus 192 lasers on them, and are close enough that the beam path won't be distorted so much that the lasers will miss (i.e. about 1 mm).
For the rest of the asteroids out there (~ 100%) I guess we're still screwed.
"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.
http://xkcd.com/898/
...it's like lasing a stick of dynamite
Time's fun when you're having flies. - Kermit the Frog
You have no idea how hard I rub my hands together. Let's just say I've worked up some muscles for that very type of activity.
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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.
Nothing to do with weapons.
NIF is, in part, a nuclear weapon stockpile research program. Substantial periods of the NIF operational calendar are devoted to defense research. This fact is frequently used to smear the program.
One common attack is that the fusion energy aspect of NIF is a cover for nuclear weapons research. How one is supposed to believe the US needs cover to do things it often does in public view I'm not sure, but that's the claim.
NIF offers the possibility, however remote, of abundant `clean' energy. As such it has a lot of enemies. Energy scarcity – self inflicted or otherwise – is an important enabler of hair-shirt statism.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
lots of optics, very precisely aligned.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
We don't need it. But then, we don't technically need houses, or cars, or heating, or highways...etc. We could all just live in teepees. Nobody wants to live in teepees though. The drive for a higher standard of living propels society to be productive and invent new things.
Using that logic, we can just send up a couple of Brits with a tea kettle and we'll have that asteroid moved before supper!
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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