One has to wonder...
... if the shot director said "commence primary ignition" and the whole lab made a downward -sweeping tone as it came up to full power.
Mines the one with the UV absorbing weave.
The world's most powerful laser has fired a record-breaking pulse that exceeded even its own design goals. For 23 billionths of a second, the 192 ultraviolet lasers in the National Ignition Facility generated the equivalent of 411 trillion watts of peak power, which the NIF described as being 1,000 times more energy than the …
Whether half the lab followed it with:
"Hwonkk Hwonkk-Hwonkk -Hwonkk -Hwonkk!
Hwonkk Hwonkk-Hwonkk -Hwonkk -Hwonkk!
Spatial rift -- OPENING!
Hwonkk Hwonkk-Hwonkk -Hwonkk -Hwonkk!
Hwonkk Hwonkk-Hwonkk -Hwonkk -Hwonkk!
Spatial rift -- OPENING!
HWEE HWEEE HWEEE HWEEE HWEEE!
HWEE HWEEE HWEEE HWEEE HWEEE!
TEMPORAL destabilization -- IMMINENT!
TEMPORAL destabilization -- IMMINENT!
If it "exploded", it couldn't have been in contact long enough to glow yellow hot. It certainly wasn't my experience when I did something similar. When I was in high school my lab partner and I dropped a large screwdriver across the terminals of a 12v auto battery the teacher had sitting in the front (this was before class started) There was some sparking, and the screwdriver welded itself to the terminals. It probably got really hot - no way to know as while it wasn't glowing no one was brave enough to touch it other than the teacher trying to knock it off with a wooden ruler.
Fortunately we didn't get in any trouble, since the teacher was the kind who didn't mind these sorts of "experiments" as its the sort of thing he'd have been likely to do himself . He once burned all the hair off one of his arms as an 8 foot tall flame leapt out of a gas nozzle when he was messing about for a class demo in a way the maker of that gas nozzle would clearly not recommend.
The battery was sitting on the table like that for the whole class, and after the first few seconds of sparking didn't do anything further, such as melting or exploding.
> They use magnetic fields to hold it in place.
Er, isn't the major advantage of the laser-ignited fusion that you don't have to confine the plasma? You shoot the lasers at a fuel pellet to ignite a miniature fusion explosion, harvest the energy from the short-lived fireball, then inject the next pellet for the lasers to ignite. So the reactor operates in a pulsed fashion, like an internal combustion engine.
Obviously, they will need the expertise of Dr. Otto Octavius, who has excellent experience building tritium reactors in the hollowed-out shells of buildings. It's only a wee little piece of the sun, after all, no big whoop. Use friggin magnets and such.
HAHAHA Huh?
A 10" gummy bear is 1000x bigger than a normal gummy bear.
http://giantgummybears.com/
I didn't look for values for Gummy Tongues, Gummy Brains, and Gummy Hearts...
I found that when querying "Texas is 1000 times bigger than..."
(They are in Raleigh, NC...)
Butt, I suspect that anyone eating a 10" Gummy Bear will prosume (produce and consume) all sorts of MJs trying to send that gelatin consumption back in time....
Its really not much.. the 23billionths of a second is such a short duration it makes all the comparison numbers massive the 411trillion watts for example is joules per whole second. Its still only 2MJ total, which has been said above is about a car battery.
The next trick is to get more than 2MJ energy out.... how are they doing on that front? have they ignited fuel yet?
(btw just like black holes mini suns need fuel the fuel pellets contain enough fuel for the mini sun to burn for a tiny fraction of a second, meaning it will self extinguish very rapidly, containment is not necessary.)
Their objective is to prove that they can generate more energy in a single laser-driven fusion event than they need to create this very fusion event. If you ignore the fact that they spent significant amounts of energy to build, maintain and operate the whole thing, you might call this 'break even'.
Ooh, and of course they have the plans in the drawer to build the next generation ignition facility, which might actually generate electrical power. But that is some 30 years in the future ... some things just never change.
All very clever from a techie point of view, but ultimately going in completely the wrong direction. Even if they reach their ultimate goal of harnessing fusion and generating terawatts (at a price too low to meter), it's a massively high risk strategy. Why do we need electricity/energy? Ultimately so that we can keep warm, lighten our darkness, cook our food and automate tasks. If we develop a society where we have to spend umpteen billion to build one fusion reactor (albeit one that will provide power for 100 million homes) we are done for. Because what happens when that reactor fails? Or becomes controlled by one person or corporation? And suddenly 100 million homes are cold and dark?
One of the biggest plus factors for many forms of renewable power generation is that they can be built and used and controlled locally. (Okay, same is true of coal, oil etc, but that's often dirty and dangerous) . There isn't a single point of failure that can affect thousands or millions of people. If I want to make a pot of soup I don't want to have to be dependent on 192 DEATH-RAYS under the control of some greedy/crazy government/corporation.
Small is beautiful folks.
Some things can be miniaturised - transistors, my earning power, etc.
Some things are subject to fundamental physical constraints which make them hard (maybe even impossible) to miniaturise.
It's been a long while since I looked in detail at NIF but I'd be very surprised if the technology could be miniaturised in any meaningful way.
In fact as has been pointed out, it's not even intended to supply power on a continuous basis (ie not pulsed) which in itself raises quite a few questions re adapting the technology for meaningful power generation.
Power from fusion is still twenty years away, same as it has been for decades.
K.I.S.S. is a good idea in general. All eggs in one basket is a bad idea in general. Not sure why so many downvotes for the K.I.S.S post, but I guess I'm next.
Thanks for that, I have indeed looked in reasonable detail at infernal and external combustion engines, both rotating and reciprocating, thank you. Thermodynamics was one of my favourite subjects when I took my physics degree. Solid state physics was another. I don't do physics any more, I are engineer.
Have YOU looked in any detail at how the fusion people are proposing to extract electricity from their pulsed fusion reactions?
Go on, give me a link or three, and someone with a clue will pull the physics and/or engineering to pieces within hours. Not *just* because it's pulsed, but the pulsing isn't exactly helpful.
Power from fusion is always twenty years away. There's a kind of poetry in that statement.
But, and it's a big but, we only need one working example to be able to replicate it.
Once we have one generator pushing out the watts, it can be used to power the next experiments, for free.
Overnight it will have more funding than the oil industry.
Not true about miniaturization. Scientists have noted that technology for much smaller lasers exists today, so the same facility could be rebuilt much smaller say ten years in the future, at which time advances the military is making in making high-powered compact lasers would allow it to be more compact ten years from then, etc.
Solar (PV or thermal)
It's not economically competitive yet against burning fossil fuel(*), but if those fuels were not available it could certainly take over the planet's electricity generation and maintain a technological civilisation.
(*) Had just about got there in Arizona, but then the gas industry worked out how to extract tight gas by fraccing, and now there's a natural gas glut in the USA.
Solar have a tendency to be quite unefficient at night and during winter.
Energy needs are at a peak during winter.
I won't even start to comment on the effects of desert sand dust on solar pannels or on mirrors.
However, solar is still a good way to reduce the energy needed for heating water in sunny areas.