U.S. Laboratory Breaks Laser Record
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Re: U.S. Laboratory Breaks Laser Record
#2Sorry, but The goal of the facility is to validate simulations of Hydrogen Bombs and test high energy laser not to generate net energy as they don't have anyway to capture energy produced in this test.
Still cool though.
Re: U.S. Laboratory Breaks Laser Record
#3Sorry, but The goal of the facility is to validate simulations of Hydrogen Bombs and test high energy laser not to generate net energy as they don't have anyway to capture energy produced in this test. Still cool though.
But validating simulations of hydrogen bombs is fusion research, isn't it?
Re: U.S. Laboratory Breaks Laser Record
#4Sorry, but The goal of the facility is to validate simulations of Hydrogen Bombs and test high energy laser not to generate net energy as they don't have anyway to capture energy produced in this test. Still cool though.
But validating simulations of hydrogen bombs is fusion research, isn't it?
Except not all fusion research is particularly useful for building a fusion power plant. I mean if we where really desperate we could dig a large hole fill it with water, set a H-Bomb off under it and then extract energy from that water. However, while that works the ROI is rather limited compared to say just extracting geothermal energy in the first place.
PS: That could actually work, at 5% thermal efficiency a Castle Bravo device ~= 63,000TJ = 17500000000.014kwh *.05 = ~1GW for 1 month.
Re: U.S. Laboratory Breaks Laser Record
#5Did they put the lasers on a shark yet?
Re: U.S. Laboratory Breaks Laser Record
#6Sorry, but The goal of the facility is to validate simulations of Hydrogen Bombs and test high energy laser not to generate net energy as they don't have anyway to capture energy produced in this test. Still cool though.
Not exactly. Or to put it more precisely, the goal is to better understand fusion, which by the way, helps us better understand bombs that use it and perhaps more importantly the old bombs we have laying around that we knew would work in 1974 but now we aren't so sure.
That said, one application of the NIF is as the ultimate incinerator. Using it to literally rip apart hazardous waste (either the nuclear or more mundane variety) into lower atomic number atoms which are not a problem.
And of course if they can get out more than they put in, then an energy neutral (and fast) disposal system.
That said, the physics of the place are astounding, I got to tour the place about 10 years ago when it was still being built and man, it is right up there with the LHC in terms of extremely large and at the same time precise physics machines.
Re: U.S. Laboratory Breaks Laser Record
#7Sorry, but The goal of the facility is to validate simulations of Hydrogen Bombs and test high energy laser not to generate net energy as they don't have anyway to capture energy produced in this test. Still cool though.
That may be the goal they sold to Washington, D.C., but the real goal was to develop high power laser technology. "Nuclear stockpile stewardship" was just a way to keep the tokamak politicians from killing the project out of spite.
Re: U.S. Laboratory Breaks Laser Record
#8Someone can probably explain this, but it seems odd that they took 192 beams to produce "about 100 times what any other laser regularly produces today." The semantic error aside, excluding the other most powerful lasers, how do you put together 192 beams and only get 100 times the power of an individual beam? Discuss...
Re: U.S. Laboratory Breaks Laser Record
#9Someone can probably explain this, but it seems odd that they took 192 beams to produce "about 100 times what any other laser regularly produces today." The semantic error aside, excluding the other most powerful lasers, how do you put together 192 beams and only get 100 times the power of an individual beam? Discuss...
Mostly, "about 100 times what any other laser regularly produces today" doesn't make any sense unless you include a timespan reference (since energy accumulates over time). Unless I'm being thick and "today" is a timespan reference (i.e. "24 hours") rather than a preposition (i.e. "currently").
Re: U.S. Laboratory Breaks Laser Record
#10Sorry, but The goal of the facility is to validate simulations of Hydrogen Bombs and test high energy laser not to generate net energy as they don't have anyway to capture energy produced in this test. Still cool though.
That may be the goal they sold to Washington, D.C., but the real goal was to develop high power laser technology. "Nuclear stockpile stewardship" was just a way to keep the tokamak politicians from killing the project out of spite.
Where do you get this impression? I'm a grad student at Los Alamos National Lab, a partner of Lawrence Livermore and a major contributor to NIF. I don't do nuclear physics, but I've attended a couple talks on NIF and spoken to several of the contributing physicist. The impression I get is that the number one purpose of the NIF is stockpile stewardship. Fusion energy research is a side project which is highlighted mostly for public relations.
In particular, I never hear anyone talk about the laser technology in anything but instrumental terms. (Instrumental to understanding the nuclear physics.)