Record Setting 500 Trillion-Watt Laser Shot Achieved 252
cylonlover writes "Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility (NIF) have achieved a laser shot which boggles the mind: 192 beams delivered an excess of 500 trillion-watts (TW) of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to a target of just two millimeters in diameter. To put those numbers into perspective, 500 TW is more than one thousand times the power that the entire United States uses at any instant in time."
Now all they have to do is put it on a shark! (Score:2, Funny)
[rimshot]
Re:Now all they have to do is put it on a shark! (Score:5, Funny)
That's not funny.
Alderaan died that way.
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How many Bothans died to bring you that information?
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The article doesn't say, but I'm really curious as to what kind of stuff you can blow up with this thing. Seriously. On one hand there's this massive number of watts, on the other hand the duration of the pulse is so short.Do you need total energy to be really high to blow up anything big, or would this laser do the job?
Mark.
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192 sharks.
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Re:Now all they have to do is put it on a shark! (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm, did you send it via Skype [slashdot.org]?
Re:Now all they have to do is put it on a shark! (Score:5, Insightful)
Important difference: The LHC was built to be massively powerful because there were (apparently accurate) calculations of what would be needed. Ignition of a fusion reaction has been Real Soon Now for decades. Evidently, the theory behind nuclear fusion reactions is not nearly as good as that behind the Higgs boson. That is the point of my snarky remark.
Ignition of a fusion reaction was done a long time ago. The theory is sound. The problem was never theoretical. It is technical: how to keep the hot plasma contained without using up more power generating magnetic fields than the amount of power produced by the reaction. And then actually building such a containment devices with such powerful magnets that are flawless. And then finally making the device with such low tolerances that it could be feasible in a commercial environment and maintained with very long duty cycles and very little maintenance. which means materials that can resist gama rays for many years, and can be easily replaced and maintained etc. its a huge engineering problem -- not a scientific one.
Nuclear fusion has been real soon now for decades because the theory is so sound and so simple that its easy to underestimate the technical challenges.
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Evidently, the theory behind nuclear fusion reactions is not nearly as good as that behind the Higgs boson. That is the point of my snarky remark.
The theory is solid in both cases and at the most fundemental level is actually the same theory [wikipedia.org], not only that but the LHC found the Higgs by sifting through the debris of trillions of tiny fusion reactions.
One Thousand Times (Score:5, Insightful)
"To put those numbers into perspective, 500 TW is more than one thousand times the power that the entire United States uses at any instant in time."
Except for the instant when the lasers were on, of course.
Re:One Thousand Times (Score:5, Funny)
"To put those numbers into perspective, 500 TW is more than one thousand times the power that the entire United States uses at any instant in time."
Except for the instant when the lasers were on, of course.
Meanwhile, we seek green energy, wind farms, etc. All this so some geeks can fire a laser and then party on about it.
and I wasn't even invited!
Re:One Thousand Times (Score:5, Insightful)
For another perspective, the 1.85MJ of energy is approximately 0.5 kWh, which is how much your boiler spends for a shower. So basically geeks that play with these lasers instead of showering spend roughly the same amount of energy.
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You seem to be misusing/misplacing the decimal point there. To heat 1 kilogram of water by 1 degree, you need 4186 Joules or 4.2 kJ. So you can heat up 5.5 liters of water to 100 degrees, or (more realistically) 11 liters of water to 60 degrees.
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Nope. AC is correct. In fact, that was the original definition of 1 calorie (energy needed to heat 1 liter of water by 1 *C).
Now why one nutritional calorie equals 1kCal (4.18kJ) - from where you confusion most likely arises - is anyone's guess.
Re:One Thousand Times (Score:4, Informative)
Nope. The original definition (by some French guy, according to Wikipedia) was that 1 calorie heats one gram of water by 1 *C. I remember learning that the original definition was for one kilogram, that's why it was called kilocalorie, and was first measured by Joule. Wikipedia contradicts my history knowledge, but not my numbers.
Or, to put it another way ... (Score:5, Funny)
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Enough energy to send a DeLorean back to 1985 over 400,000 times.
... Or, 100 million times the power to fill a house with popcorn from a military satellite.
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now all you need is a spinning mirror... (Score:5, Funny)
...and you could vaporize a human target from space.
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That and a phase conjugate tracking system.
Re:now all you need is a spinning mirror... (Score:5, Funny)
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Or make enormous Swiss cheese.
Oww, it burns! (Score:4, Informative)
500 TW is more than one thousand times the *average* power that the entire United States uses at any instant in time.
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Mean instantaneous power would presumably be calculated by deciding on a sampling interval, determining the wattage at each interval, summing the sample values, and dividing by the number of samples. I mean, if you could somehow come up with a mathematical function, you could ostensibly use an integral, but here in the real world, we tend towards summation.
The real question (Score:3)
Fusion Ignition (Score:5, Interesting)
One application of this type of engineering is to serve as an ignition swith for a fusion energy plant. In order to get a reaction going, you either need high temperatures and pressure or abslutely unbelievable temperatures and low pressure. Our sun, due to its massive size, has a lot of pressure. Here on earth we need temperatures that far exceed our sun to get fusion started. I understand we currently have laser ignition systems in tokamak (spelling?) systems, but this system would generate much higher temperatures in a quicker time period than we could with other systems.
Re:Fusion Ignition (Score:5, Funny)
One application of this type of engineering is to serve as an ignition swith for a fusion energy plant.
They should totally tell the guys at the National Ignition Facility about this. </sarcasm>
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I believe this system is intended to create high pressures needed for fusion. The high temperatures of the surface are to create a shock wave.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_confinement_fusion#ICF_mechanism_of_action [wikipedia.org]
Re:Fusion Ignition (Score:5, Informative)
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Not really, as the ignition and heating systems for a tokomak in no way resembles the NIF (National Ignition Facility). Nor is such a system practical for a tokomak because you cannot get the spherical access required.
The NIF, despite massive amounts of greenwash, is a tool for studying fusion for nuclear weapons - not an energy production research project.
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Stellar application potential (Score:2, Funny)
I'm thinking, mount this bad boy on a turret on an island somewhere, and use it to destroy asteroids in threat range. I'm much more inclined to do this on a turret on the ground than a satellite; although the satellite would make the weapon more effective against space-based targets, it would also allow it to be directed at points on the earth. As a laser beam can't bend, all you could do to attack terrestrial enemies with it is shoot planes/satellites out of the sky.
Re:Stellar application potential (Score:4, Insightful)
As a means to prevent malicious use of the weapon, require multiple access keys to activate it, and provide one each to the governments of the UN Security Council members. Unanimous, active participation would then be required to fire the weapon, which would only realistically be achieved due to a true threat to the entire planet.
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I think you'd find the range of a UV laser in the atmosphere to be pretty depressing. Also the deployment problem is focusing.
Its sorta like being able to set off a small pile of unconfined gunpowder in a lab vs having an actual deployment-ready cannon.
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http://xkcd.com/898/ [xkcd.com]
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Even if you lost 90% of the power, you're still talking about 50 TW. That's not small change, when what you're shooting is made out of ice.
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A suffeciently engineereg targeting mirror system in orbit could aim a ground based laserand probably be cheaper. Question, how colimated (sp) is the beam, and over what range?
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Good thing comets are made out of ice.
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Using that logic, we can just send up a couple of Brits with a tea kettle and we'll have that asteroid moved before supper!
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I'm thinking, mount this bad boy on a turret on an island somewhere, and use it to destroy asteroids in threat range.
This laser system is perfect for that use... as long as the asteroids are 2 mm in diameter, stay still long enough to focus 192 lasers on them, and are close enough that the beam path won't be distorted so much that the lasers will miss (i.e. about 1 mm).
For the rest of the asteroids out there (~ 100%) I guess we're still screwed.
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"I'm thinking, mount this bad boy on a turret on an island somewhere, and use it to destroy asteroids in threat range. " Given the amount of actual power involved, I'm thinking, "Mount this bad boy on a toilet somewhere, and use it to destroy hemorrhoids in threat range."
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Oww.
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so how long before we get phasers??? (Score:2)
'Cause it won't belong before we see a "commercial" application for something like this.
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. . . as soon as the batteries for it are fully charged . . .
And let me guess (Score:2)
Re:And let me guess (Score:5, Insightful)
By that logic, we shouldn't have useful electricity since flying kites in storms doesn't produce a sustainable current.
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Putting the hyperbole in perspective... (Score:3, Informative)
Off the cuff, 500 TW divided by 1.58 MJ implies the beam lasted only a few nanoseconds. So, "To put those numbers into perspective", 500 TW is more than one thousand times the power that the entire United States uses for a few nanoseconds."
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You find the concept "power" a bit tricky hey?
The summary is correct. YOU are confusing power and energy.
Re:Putting the hyperbole in perspective... (Score:5, Informative)
Sigh...
/., I'll use a car analogy: energy is analogous to how large the gas tank is (gallons, liters, etc.), power is how quickly that gas gets consumed (g/sec, mL/sec, L/100km, mpg). The average power consumption of the U.S. is a few hundred gigawatts...period. There is no gigawatts per second, or any other monstrous measure that pretends to be power, because the "per second" is already built into the Watt unit.
You are conflating power with energy. Don't feel bad: the press gets it wrong more than half the time.
Energy is a bulk quantity: a total amount. Power is a rate: how energy over how much time. Because this is
Correcting your statement: 1.85 MJ is more than one thousand times the energy that the entire United States uses in a few nanoseconds The original statement comparing 500 TW to the (average) power consumption of the U.S. was correct.
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I think the parent understood energy/power (else he couldn't do the math to express duration). I think he phrased the last part poorly, but trying to convey that TFA is exploting a general misunderstanding of the nature of power to create a very different conceptual picture in the minds of the reader. If you took average US power consumption over a whole second during one firing of these lasers and a second where the lasers weren't fired, you wouldn't be able to make out the difference that one might intu
Instant of Time (Score:2)
... what the hell is an instant of time? Is it as t approaches zero?
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Actually, yes.
Given the magnitude of the laser, compared with the total energy consumed (1.85 MJ) the laser show lasted a few hundredths of a second at best. But saying instant of time sounds more impressive than the actual numbers. Though I suppose they could have said "about as long as my last marriage" and still been in the ballpark
Plank time (Score:2)
Not quite zero. Plank time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_time [wikipedia.org]
Now I have "Can't time this!" set to the music of MC Hammer in my head.
Paging Doc Brown (Score:2)
What does this translate to in jiggawatts?
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What does this translate to in jiggawatts?
500,000. Aren't SI units wonderful?
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Actually, "jigga" is an acceptable though rarely heard way to pronounce "giga". So your answer is 500,000. This does, however, highlight that watts are units of power and joules or watt-hours are the actual energy expenditure. If only gigawatts were necessary for the car's time travel, then one could use an arbitrarilly small amount of energy as the time expenditure approaches zero.
I love this quote snippet... (Score:2)
"However, though the potential national security benefits of such a powerful laser are clear...."
All we need is a few mirror wielding satellites and the world will be our oyster!
"Hello I am President EVIL, deposit 1 billion dollars in this swiss bank account or your capitol city will be lazered!"
Depends on your perspective (Score:3)
This is impressive, of course another way to state it would be: it delivers the energy of one laptop battery in one pulse. One must keep in mind the difference between energy and power.
Not much energy. (Score:4, Interesting)
The power is high, but there's not much total energy. 1.85 megajoules is only about half a kilowatt-hour. Energy cost about $0.10. No asteroid-melting potential here.
The National Ignition Facility is for nuclear weapons testing. It's for studying H-bomb type events without having to detonate a nuclear weapon. It's not a prototype for energy production.
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http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusion-researchers-answer-your-questions [slashdot.org]
Question 21.
No, NIF is 90% for nuclear weapons research (Score:5, Interesting)
Its budget is from the NNSA, the part of the Department of Energy which deals with weaponry.
The design is ill-suited for civilian energy production research, and there is little attention to investigating cost-effective engineering necessary to get fusion power. By contrast the large tokamak being built in France does have significant engineering application (e.g. materials which could withstand the neutron flux in semi-commercial powerloads) as part of its scientific program.
The underlying facts: There is nothing important to learn in the nuclear reactions of fusion. Everything difficult is in the complex radiative transfer and fluid dynamics and thermodynamics in extreme circumstances. The goal of the NIF is to generate calibration data for the classified software simulation codes for nuclear weaponry without nuclear test detonations. You can do certain kinds of "subcritical" experiments to test the explosives and fission primary without a full yield nuclear explosion, but there isn't anything equivalent for the secondaries without the NIF.
The target of the NIF is, in some ways, a miniature recreation of the thermonuclear secondary of H-bombs. In fact, until about 15-20 years ago the actual setup used in the DOE laser fusion experiments was classified: the lasers are not directly heating or compressing the fusion fuel. They are heating a metal outer-surface called a "hohlraum (German for hollow room)" named so in the initial breakthrough Ulam-Teller design for the fusion weapon.
The outer metal shell fully ionizes which then releases a dense gas of X-rays which equilbrate themselves as the speed of light inside the container and themselves heat and ablate the surface of the inner fusion pellet. The gas being pushed off from the inner pellet imparts momentum inward imploding and fusing the inner pellet.
This is how an H-bomb works, except the initial x-rays are provided by a fission primary implosion. The real key is that you do not want the heat/blast from the primary---that would ruin the fusion assembly. You just want a clean X-ray pulse first.
Personally, I don't favor excess spending on nuclear weapons, and would favor funding into a variety of heterodox experimental fusion configurations which have a chance, if small, of eventually providing commercially successful power generation.
Not such a big deal (Score:2, Funny)
I once did a 180 proof jello shot.
Put simply, out of deference to you, Kent... (Score:3)
Surprising how little power we actually use (Score:3)
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You either missed this [slashdot.org], or have a very short memory.
Caution: (Score:3)
Do not look into laser with remaining charred neck-stump.
More info about NIF - Start Trek connection (Score:3)
For starters, here is the website: https://lasers.llnl.gov/ [llnl.gov]
And here is a page of that site that has some explanation about how it works: https://lasers.llnl.gov/programs/nic/icf/how_icf_works.php [llnl.gov]
I've actually toured this facility, and it was pretty damn cool. A few points that stuck in my memory:
The generally do one shot each night. They prep it during the day, then they all go home and it goes off at night with not many people there, because that's safer.
The electricity usage is intense but very short, lasting only around 20 billionths of a second. They do this by charging up their capacitors and then discharging them very rapidly. They said the air conditioning for the building actually uses more power than the laser.
They talk about the "seven wonders of NIF", which are seven advances in materials and technology that were made during the project which made it all possible. I thought the rapid crystal growing was pretty wicked. Info on them here: https://lasers.llnl.gov/about/nif/seven_wonders.php [llnl.gov]
In the actual ignition step itself, while you might think you shine the powerful laser on the thing you want to heat up, that's actually not how it works. They have the thing they want to heat, and near it (like 1mm) is this little metallic trough thing. They blast the laser into the trough thing and when the light hits that it creates microwaves, and the microwaves heat the target. Of course by the time it's done all those parts are completely vaporized.
Also of interest, around April this year the place was shut down for maintenance for a month. For about two weeks during that period some filming for the next Star Trek movie took place inside the NIF facility. So check out the pix and see if you can spot the NIF scenes when the movie comes out. It does kinda look like the engine room of a starship: https://lasers.llnl.gov/multimedia/photo_gallery/target_area/?id=5&category=target_area [llnl.gov] Obviously, the whole lab is full of nerds who like Star Trek, but they were not allowed to see what was going on.
Re:To put that in perspective (Score:5, Informative)
I heard a radio program (NPR I think) talking about this. The entire energy was about the same as rubbing your hands together for a few seconds.
Can anyone verify? It was early on a Monday morning, so it could ahve been the haze of the weekend...
Re:To put that in perspective (Score:5, Informative)
It's a bit more energy than that, but it's not a remarkable amount of energy. 1.85MJ is enough to turn just under 1L of water from 100C liquid phase to 100C vapour phase. ie - it's enough to boil 1L of water, if the water is already at the boiling point.
Latent heat of vapourization for H2O is about 2200 kJ/kg.
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Apparently it was my morning haze. 1.85 MJ is the equivilent of leaving your old-school 60 watt light bulb on for the 8 hours while you are at work.
Re:To put that in perspective (Score:5, Funny)
correction: rubbing your hands together saying 'muahahaa'
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It's quite a bit more energy than that. 1.85 MJ is the equivalent energy of about 50 mL, or 1.7 fluid oz of gasoline.
Re:To put that in perspective (Score:5, Funny)
You have no idea how hard I rub my hands together. Let's just say I've worked up some muscles for that very type of activity.
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Re:To put that in perspective (Score:5, Funny)
... so, where did they get this amount of power? I hope they did not have to trickle load their capacitors for a whole year.
They plugged in a ZPM. [wikia.com]
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Move to Nigeria then. I am sure you will have very little of what you despise.
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... shall I continue?
You could, but you'd just be wasting your energy...
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Sheesh, is that why my energy prices have gone up so much over the past few years.
No
Do we really need more weapons?
Yes, but this isn't one.
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It's not a weapon. It's energy research (fusion in particular) - you know, for power generation?
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No, it's not. I suggest you do some reading before spouting off. This weapons BS is mongering by gizmag for page views.
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Not a lamp. Also not a weapon.
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Nope. It's fusion research stuff. Nothing to do with weapons.
The shark thing comes from here. [knowyourmeme.com]
Re:Why does everyone mention sharks? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing to do with weapons.
NIF is, in part, a nuclear weapon stockpile research program. Substantial periods of the NIF operational calendar are devoted to defense research. This fact is frequently used to smear the program.
One common attack is that the fusion energy aspect of NIF is a cover for nuclear weapons research. How one is supposed to believe the US needs cover to do things it often does [yahoo.com] in public view I'm not sure, but that's the claim.
NIF offers the possibility, however remote, of abundant `clean' energy. As such it has a lot of enemies. Energy scarcity – self inflicted or otherwise – is an important enabler of hair-shirt statism.
Obligatory warning label (Score:3, Funny)
"Do not look into laser with remaining eye."
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It'd be a rounding error on my bill too. 500 TW over the pulse time is about 0.5 kilowatt-hours, which would cost about 5 cents.
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lots of optics, very precisely aligned.