Photo: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Scientist at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, are getting ready to do something spectacular: ignite a tiny man-made star inside a lab and trigger a thermonuclear reaction!
Scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, nestled among the wine-producing vineyards of central California, will use a laser that concentrates 1,000 times the electric generating power of the United States into a billionth of a second.
The result should be an explosion in the 32ft-wide reaction chamber which will produce at least 10 times the amount of energy used to create it.
"We are creating the conditions that exist inside the sun," said Ed Moses, director of the facility. "It is like tapping into the real solar energy as fusion is the source of all energy in the world. It is really exciting physics, but beyond that there are huge social, economic and global problems that it can help to solve."
Inside a structure covering an area the size of three football pitches, a single infrared laser will be sent through almost a mile of lenses, mirrors and amplifiers to create a beam more than 10 billion times more powerful than a household light bulb.
Igniting a tiny man-made star, what could go wrong? Seriously though, this is pretty nifty: Link | National Ignition Facility website | video clip at Wired Science
Is it time for an I Survived the Tiny Man-Made Star T-shirt yet? (Much in the line of our I Survived the Large Hadron Collider T-shirt)
So lets try and build a "Mini Sun" on the "Earth". What do you do if it is a complete success, and you can not put it out? Can we just call these fellas at the NIF "Gort"?
...I really need to read the article before commenting...
speaking of surviving the Hardon Collider, did they actual do collisions? I thought it was postponed because of some helium leak?
It's crazy!
Anyway, why should we worry? Pistol Shrimp fire that kind of heat off all the time.
http://tinyurl.com/7a3xpj
or alternatively
Who can recreate the best black mesa.
LHC already has that one guy so i think they're in the lead.
In addition there is no harmful radioactive bi-products or pollution produced from the process.
You guys should be excited!! This is a big deal, if they can ever get a fusion reactor to work. If they can get a net gain from the energy they put into the process, then the worlds energy needs would be solved overnight.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cglaHHuotz0
The wonderful thing about fusion is that you're basically able to choose the products of the reaction, based on what you decide to fuse, unlike fission which is guarenteed to produce dangerous radioactive particles. Fusion is 100% safe, unless you count the extremely high operating temperatures and high-energy neutrons (theoretically used to create tritium).
And even though the primary fuels are rare isotopes of hydrogen, there's enough deutrium to sustain all the fusion reactors we could possibly need for longer than the sun will live. And tritium, as I mentioned above, can actually be bred as a byproduct of the fusion reaction. Frickin' sweet!
And no, it's not like the sun or Spiderman 2 in the sense that we won't be seeing a sustained ball of fusing matter. In the case of inertial confinement reactors, reactions last a fraction of a second, multiple times per second. Think rapid pulses of energy.