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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."
"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.
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.
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
That's not funny.
Alderaan died that way.
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...
correction: rubbing your hands together saying 'muahahaa'
Sigh...
/., I'll use a car analogy: energy is analogous to how large the gas tank is (gallons, liters, etc.), power is how quickly that gas gets consumed (g/sec, mL/sec, L/100km, mpg). The average power consumption of the U.S. is a few hundred gigawatts...period. There is no gigawatts per second, or any other monstrous measure that pretends to be power, because the "per second" is already built into the Watt unit.
You are conflating power with energy. Don't feel bad: the press gets it wrong more than half the time.
Energy is a bulk quantity: a total amount. Power is a rate: how energy over how much time. Because this is
Correcting your statement: 1.85 MJ is more than one thousand times the energy that the entire United States uses in a few nanoseconds The original statement comparing 500 TW to the (average) power consumption of the U.S. was correct.
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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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!
Important difference: The LHC was built to be massively powerful because there were (apparently accurate) calculations of what would be needed. Ignition of a fusion reaction has been Real Soon Now for decades. Evidently, the theory behind nuclear fusion reactions is not nearly as good as that behind the Higgs boson. That is the point of my snarky remark.
Ignition of a fusion reaction was done a long time ago. The theory is sound. The problem was never theoretical. It is technical: how to keep the hot plasma contained without using up more power generating magnetic fields than the amount of power produced by the reaction. And then actually building such a containment devices with such powerful magnets that are flawless. And then finally making the device with such low tolerances that it could be feasible in a commercial environment and maintained with very long duty cycles and very little maintenance. which means materials that can resist gama rays for many years, and can be easily replaced and maintained etc. its a huge engineering problem -- not a scientific one.
Nuclear fusion has been real soon now for decades because the theory is so sound and so simple that its easy to underestimate the technical challenges.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
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.
Hmm, did you send it via Skype?