WASHINGTON - After more than a decade of work and $3.5 billion, engineers have completed the world's most powerful laser, capable of simulating the energy force of a hydrogen bomb and the sun itself.
The federal Energy Department will announce Tuesday that it has officially certified the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, clearing the way for a series of experiments over the next year that eventually is hoped will mimic the heat and pressure found at the center of the sun.
The facility, the size of a football field, comprises 192 separate laser beams, each traveling 1,000 feet in one-thousandth of a second to converge simultaneously on a target the size of a pencil eraser.
While the laser at the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, is expected to be used for a wide range of high-energy and high-density physics experiments, its primary purpose is to help government physicists ensure the reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons as they become older.
The laser "will be a cornerstone" of the weapons stewardship program, "ensuring the continuing reliability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile without underground nuclear testing," Thomas D'Agostino, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said in an interview Monday.
The NNSA, a semi-independent arm of the Energy Department, oversees nuclear weapons programs.
The NIF laser was proposed in the early 1990s, when the project's cost was put at $700 million. Construction began in 1997. Its early years were marked by setbacks including trouble, eventually overcome, in keeping its critical optics perfectly clean and free of dust.
NIF is expected to ramp up power gradually in a series of experiments over the next year, culminating at a power level in 2010 to achieve what scientists call "fusion ignition": enough heat and pressure to fuse hydrogen atoms in a tiny cylindrical target so that more energy is released than is generated by the laser beams themselves.
That is what happens when a hydrogen bomb explodes and inside the sun, at its center. It's also what scientists would one day like to achieve on a continuing basis to produce a clean, safe form of energy by fusing atoms instead of splits them apart.
Edward Moses, director of the NIF project who has led its development since 1999, said he is ever more confident that NIF will achieve "fusion ignition."
"It's now operational," Moses said in a telephone interview. "The lasers are there. The targets are there, and we've proven the optics. But now the proof is in the shooting. We've got to put all this together and shoot the targets. It's the first time anyone has ever done experiments at this scale."
NIF's 192 laser beams produce 60 to 70 times more energy than a 60-beam system at the University of Rochester, which is the world's second most powerful laser, Moses said.
In addition to helping diagnose the functioning of nuclear warheads, the NIF laser is expected to be used in astrophysics, allowing scientists to mimic conditions inside planets and new solar systems.
Moses said he sees NIF as key in the move toward developing a fusion energy source. "What we want to show is scientific proof of the principle of fusion energy," said Moses, predicting that some experiments for a short time may produce 50 to 100 times more energy than the lasers generate.
Kanastrous wrote:
I'm delighted by the the sheer wow-cool factor but how does an instrument like this serve as a nuclear weapon-detonation simulator?
All the separate high powered laser beams converge in one spot, said spot houses a hydrogen pellet which is hit with the combined power of said laser beams.
Basically it is a chance to measure the second stage of a standard fission-fusion H-bomb, just at a much tinier (and easier controlled) scale. Measuring an full scale fusion explosion tend to rather detrimental to all the sensitive equipment involved.
It isn't thus limited. One can stick pretty much any material in there and see how it behaves under extreme temperatures and pressures. Since fission is not uniform, there will generally be much fissile material subjected to such conditions before the reaction finishes, so such experiments could lead to more accurate models of fission as well.
While the laser at the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, is expected to be used for a wide range of high-energy and high-density physics experiments, ... .
"The fool saith in his heart that there is no empty set. But if that were so, then the set of all such sets would be empty, and hence it would be the empty set." -- Wesley Salmon
Oh, if only we could live in a world where journalists aren't stupid enough to post phrases like this:
WASHINGTON - After more than a decade of work and $3.5 billion, engineers have completed the world's most powerful laser, capable of simulating the energy force of a hydrogen bomb and the sun itself.
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
Kanastrous wrote:
I'm delighted by the the sheer wow-cool factor but how does an instrument like this serve as a nuclear weapon-detonation simulator?
All the separate high powered laser beams converge in one spot, said spot houses a hydrogen pellet which is hit with the combined power of said laser beams.
Basically it is a chance to measure the second stage of a standard fission-fusion H-bomb, just at a much tinier (and easier controlled) scale. Measuring an full scale fusion explosion tend to rather detrimental to all the sensitive equipment involved.
I still don't get it. How does a laser "help government physicists ensure the reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons as they become older?" What do they do? Laser a piece/sample of a warhead?
"And this is the house I pass through on my way to power and light."
~James Dickey, Power and Light
Tahlan wrote:I still don't get it. How does a laser "help government physicists ensure the reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons as they become older?" What do they do? Laser a piece/sample of a warhead?
In essence, yes. Checking the material properties of small samples under extreme temperature/pressure validates computer models of a full scale initiation (of the warhead).
Tahlan wrote:I still don't get it. How does a laser "help government physicists ensure the reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons as they become older?" What do they do? Laser a piece/sample of a warhead?
In essence, yes. Checking the material properties of small samples under extreme temperature/pressure validates computer models of a full scale initiation (of the warhead).
OK, so they take a small sample of a warhead; that I can wrap my head around. But I've always understood and envisioned the core of a warhead to be a finely balanced/tuned geode-like construction that is so finely tuned and sized that one cannot simply scrape material off of it for any reason. Am I wrong in that respect? Or is there some leeway, and the amount of material removed from the warhead is so miniscule as to not affect the warhead but is sufficient enough to reliably test?
"And this is the house I pass through on my way to power and light."
~James Dickey, Power and Light
There are a dozen ways around that. For instance, they could take dismantled warheads that are about the same age as the current ones and measure those. Or they could take material that was left over from the building of the warheads and test that. It's not like they have to be testing the weapons themselves.
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Darth Wong wrote:Oh, if only we could live in a world where journalists aren't stupid enough to post phrases like this:
WASHINGTON - After more than a decade of work and $3.5 billion, engineers have completed the world's most powerful laser, capable of simulating the energy force of a hydrogen bomb and the sun itself.
Would energy density be any more accurate?
I find myself endlessly fascinated by your career - Stark, in a fit of Nerd-Validation, November 3, 2011
Darth Wong wrote:Oh, if only we could live in a world where journalists aren't stupid enough to post phrases like this:
WASHINGTON - After more than a decade of work and $3.5 billion, engineers have completed the world's most powerful laser, capable of simulating the energy force of a hydrogen bomb and the sun itself.
*cries* Goddamnit that was so painful to my brain. What the fuck would N^2 * m be anyway?
Seriously, this has been very badly needed to preserve the American nuclear arsenal, and will probably end up having numerous secondary benefits besides. Anyway, yes, the key thing is materials testing and that can be done on decommissioned weapons easily enough and potentially new components (if we're building new weapons in the future). It just provides us some crucial pieces of experimental data to confirm that our modeling and simulations are actually on target, but a sufficiently necessary component that it's very valuable.
The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth. -- Wikipedia's No Original Research policy page.
Darth Wong wrote:Oh, if only we could live in a world where journalists aren't stupid enough to post phrases like this:
WASHINGTON - After more than a decade of work and $3.5 billion, engineers have completed the world's most powerful laser, capable of simulating the energy force of a hydrogen bomb and the sun itself.
Would energy density be any more accurate?
"Poopy diapers" would have been more accurate.
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
I live near this facility and have a professional friend or two who work directly on this project. I got to go on a tour once. The site is awesome, though security regs prevent me from having any pictures to show for it.
