Laser could rival energy from sun's center

[Algorem]

http://www.cleveland.com/newsflash/national/index.ssf?/base/national-3/111677008051210.xml&storylist=national


By H. JOSEF HEBERT
The Associated Press

LIVERMORE, Calif. (AP) — Ed Moses talks of the "grand challenge" that has consumed him for the past five years, comparing it to trying to hit the strike zone with a baseball from 350 miles away or tossing a dime into a parking meter from 40 miles. "That's the precision we have to have," says Moses, the director of a high-energy physics adventure to produce the world's most powerful laser — one that scientists hope will create in a laboratory the energy found at the center of the sun.

In a building the size of a football stadium, engineers have assembled the framework for a network of 192 laser beams, each traveling 1,000 feet to converge simultaneously on a target the size of a pencil eraser.

The trip will take one-thousandth of a second during which the light's energy is amplified many billions of times to create a brief laser pulse 1,000 times the electric generating power of the United States.

The goal is to create unimaginable heat — 180 million degrees Farenheit — and intense pressure from all directions on a BB-size hydrogen fuel pellet, compressing it to one-thirtieth of its size...

Super laser at a glance

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/11706107.htm

The National Ignition Facility is a 192-beam laser at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif. Construction began in 1997 with completion expected in 2008. Four beams are now operating. When completed, the NIF laser will be 10 times more powerful and generate 40 times the energy of any previous laser. Facts about the project:

_Cost: $3.5 billion.

_Purpose: To duplicate conditions found inside the sun and in a nuclear explosion. Scientists plan up to 700 experiments a year related to nuclear weapons programs, astrophysics and other basic sciences.

_Weapons benefits: By duplicating the conditions of a nuclear explosion in a laboratory, NIF is viewed as key to studying the conditions of aging nuclear warheads without actual bomb testing....

[The Doctor.]

1. And then....

BANG!!!

[Gman]

2. I'm glad we don't live on Alderaan

[patricia92243]

3. So, are they trying to build a new bomb or find an alternate heat source?

[Ready4Change]

4. Trying to determine if current weapons stockpiles are functional.

At some point the nuclear material in the current stockpile of weapons will degrade to the point they won't detonate. One goal is to more precisely determine that point, so as to replace them only when needed, rather than earlier in order to have a safety factor.

Another use is generating more information on fusion reactions, to help figure out the means of making usable fusion reactors.

But that's apparently not the main focus.