Warren and I toured the National Ignition Facility (nuclear fusion testbed) nestled in the Lawrence Livermore National Labs today, the origin of the hydrogen bomb and some serious spook activity these days. I had to leave all electronics behind and get weighed before entering — strangely disarming. The guards were festooned with body gear that I had never seen before, all in black.
On the left is Ed Moses, the mastermind of this massive project to save the Earth. He is confident that they will achieve ignition and net energy gain in 2010. The long-term goal is a 100-300x fusion energy multiple on laser energy input.
The sights put sci-fi movies to shame. 192 lasers 100x as powerful as any predecessor converge to ignite a pellet of solid hydrogen, which collapses to helium, as in the sun, releasing a massive amount of energy (neutrons and x-rays)… with a nod to E=MC^2.
For 20 nanoseconds, the lasers deliver 500x the power of the entire U.S. power grid. The pellet reaches 3 million degrees Celsius.
They even rely on perfect crystals – grown to the size of oil barrels – for non-linear optics (harmonic frequency shifting from infrared). The rectangular lenses are huge, and atomically smooth on the surface, and precisely thick to 1/100th the wavelength of light.
Oh, and to watch it, they built an x-ray camera clicking at an impressive 50 billion fps.
Each of the 48 quad-pack lasers looks like scaled up versions of the fiber optic transceivers used in telecom networks. It was like a Lost in Space episode where we were shrunk to circuit-size midgets left to marvel at the world we had created.
The DOD requested a large door on the side of the target chamber so they can test their satellites for exothermic events (e.g., if North Korea set off a nuke in space, it could have dramatic effect).
While I winced several times that I didn’t have my 16mm lens with me, they gave me a great photo book of the project.
Leave a Reply