
U.S. Laboratory Breaks Laser Record  - 3lit3H4ck3r
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/07/17/156909755/u-s-laboratory-breaks-laser-record-delivering-500-trillion-watt-beam?ft=1&f=1001
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Retric
Sorry, 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.

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ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
uvdiv
_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._

How?

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ChuckMcM
In the tour video they show a stream of plasma directed at the 'waste' of
interest. This has two effects, one it disassembles any molecular bond
reducing complex (and perhaps toxic) substances into their base atomic
components, and two it accelerates the decay of unstable nucleotides into
stable ones. I suspect that video is up on the NIF web site somewhere.

~~~
uvdiv
_In the tour video they show a stream of plasma directed at the 'waste' of
interest. This has two effects, one it disassembles any molecular bond
reducing complex (and perhaps toxic) substances into their base atomic
components,_

That's real but that's not NIF or anything resembling it. The temperatures to
tear apart molecular bonds are less than 10,000 degrees. NIF operates at
nuclear fusion temperature s -- 100,000,000 degrees.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_gasification>

[http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/coalpower/gasification/...](http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/coalpower/gasification/gasifipedia/4-gasifiers/4-1-4-1a_westinghouse.html)

<https://lasers.llnl.gov/programs/science_at_the_extremes/>

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dbarlett
If you're in the Bay Area, the LLNL tour [1] is well worth it. Ever seen an
800-pound crystal [2]?

[1] <https://www.llnl.gov/about/tours.html> [2]
[https://lasers.llnl.gov/multimedia/photo_gallery/overview/?i...](https://lasers.llnl.gov/multimedia/photo_gallery/overview/?id=7&category=overview)

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MSM
Sorry guys, I'm having an off day.

Can someone explain this a little bit? They were able to put 500 terawatts
into this beam, I think I understand that part. But that's 1,000x more energy
than the US is using right now.. so did they actually create that much energy
to begin with? This is where I'm failing at understanding.

~~~
jamesfrank
A watt is a unit of _power_ , not _energy_. Power is energy per unit time, so
NIF works by storing large amounts of energy in capacitor banks (transferring
it from the grid slowly) in preparation for a shot and then releasing all of
that energy over a very short timespan. Since the timespan is short, the
_power_ to target is extremely large.

~~~
madvoid
An example to back you up: if the laser pulse was 1 nanosecond, the energy
required to make the beam a 500 terawatt beam would be 500 kJ, or the energy
released by the combustion of one gram of gasoline

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28500e12+Watts%29+*+%2...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28500e12+Watts%29+*+%281e-9+second%29)

*Edited because of wrong numbers

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MSM
Once I got the "for dummies" (Thanks james!) I immediately made the connection
that it was an extremely short pulse-

However that really puts it into perspective, thank you.

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wahsd
Someone 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...

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CountHackulus
192 laser beams to make one monolithic laser. They're saying that the
monolithic laser is 100 times more powerful than any other monolithic laser
out there.

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cjdrake
Did they put the lasers on a shark yet?

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JoeAltmaier
The National Ignition Facility is fully operational \-- NIF Director Edward
Moses

Fire at will, Commander \-- The Emperor

