By Jeffery Bausch
Article HERE:
If you blinked, you missed it. Last week, Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility (NIF), home to the world’s most energetic laser, fired its 192 laser beams for 23 billionths of a second. The result was a staggering/record-setting 1.875 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light, altogether blasted into the facility’s target chamber center.
NIF Target Chamber: (Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Power generated in that short amount of time: 411 trillion watts of power. To put this into perspective, that much power is 1,000 times more than the entire United States of America consumes during any given moment.
“This event marks a key milestone in the National Ignition Campaign’s drive toward fusion ignition,” said NIF Director Edward Moses. “While there have been many demonstrations of similar equivalent energy performance on individual beams or quads during the completion of the NIF project, this is the first time the full complement of 192 beams has operated at this sound barrier.” Rest of the article HERE:
Article HERE:
If you blinked, you missed it. Last week, Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility (NIF), home to the world’s most energetic laser, fired its 192 laser beams for 23 billionths of a second. The result was a staggering/record-setting 1.875 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light, altogether blasted into the facility’s target chamber center.
NIF Target Chamber: (Credit: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
Power generated in that short amount of time: 411 trillion watts of power. To put this into perspective, that much power is 1,000 times more than the entire United States of America consumes during any given moment.
“This event marks a key milestone in the National Ignition Campaign’s drive toward fusion ignition,” said NIF Director Edward Moses. “While there have been many demonstrations of similar equivalent energy performance on individual beams or quads during the completion of the NIF project, this is the first time the full complement of 192 beams has operated at this sound barrier.” Rest of the article HERE: