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Extreme lasers and fusion - pure awesome

C

CupOfWater

New Member
arg-fallbackName="CupOfWater"/>
This is almost as cool as the LHC. They're using 193 lasers (each more powerful than any lasers ever built before), all firing at a BB-sized pellet of frozen hydrogen. This will heat the pellet up to several houndred million degrees, and fusion will occur....
Am I the only one thinking "FIRING MAH LAZ0R" when I read about this? :p

You can read more about it right here: http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=worlds-largest-laser-nif-2009-04-01
 
arg-fallbackName="Salv"/>
Oh cool, I watch a short documentary about this a short while ago. Awesome stuff.
 
arg-fallbackName="stulogic"/>
Seriously impressive stuff, was just watching a documentary about that not long ago. The next few years really is going to see some utterly ground breaking research and developments done in so many fields of science, I'm genuinely excited about the prospect of what's around the corner in a few years time.
 
arg-fallbackName="AndroidAR"/>
They should rename the National Ignition Facility to the "SHOOP DA WHOOP" Facility if they manage to accomplish sustainable fusion.

That would be awesome.
 
arg-fallbackName="ExeFBM"/>
I'm a skeptical that using 193 of the most powerful lasers ever constructed, to get fusion from 1 bb's worth of hydrogen is going to produce more energy than it consumes.
 
arg-fallbackName="AndroidAR"/>
ExeFBM said:
I'm a skeptical that using 193 of the most powerful lasers ever constructed, to get fusion from 1 bb's worth of hydrogen is going to produce more energy than it consumes.
Click to expand...

The article does state that the NIF reactor's LAZORS cannot fire anywhere near fast enough to sustain a continual, energy producing reaction. The NIF is more focused on generating a net amount of energy, essentially they are trying to get a design that works, so that a reactor that is used for commercial power production can be made.

But I would think that the BB of hydrogen is only used to get it started, and fuel is injected into the reactor to sustain the reaction.
 
arg-fallbackName="GoodKat"/>
They should use this to build a gian internal combustion engine with hydrogen as the fuel and lazors as the spark plug!
 
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