Super Laser at the National Ignition Facility | KQED QUEST
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- Опубліковано 5 вер 2024
- It's the largest laser beam in the world and it's being built in the Bay Area.
KQED's QUEST takes a look inside the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where scientists will shoot tremendous bursts of energy at an area the size of a pencil eraser. The goal? To recreate fusion -- which powers the sun and some nuclear bombs -- perhaps harnessing a new source of clean energy for the 21st century.
They actually DID make more power out of a fusion reactor than it uses already...for two seconds :P
This machine is not a power plant, it is just an experiment. We will learn a lot about fusion and fission both from this experiment, so much so that other countries are concerned about it. The knowledge gained from this may allow us to one day build fusion reactors.
@Netkiller3714 don't mistake, we are talking about pressure here not gravitation.
Even on the LHC which is more likely to create micro black holes, these black holes won't last more than a fraction of a second and even supposely we give them the energy to sustain they won't be able to do much
Yes, it has to be replaced after each shot.
Note that the NIF is not designed as a powerplant prototype, but to test the radiation hardness of new materials and to imitate properties of nuclear bomb explosions.
A world record for neutron yield was set by the National Ignition Campaign on Oct. 31, 2010, when 121 kilojoules of ultraviolet laser light was fired into a glass calibration target like this one filled with deuterium and tritium (DT) gas.
teemuruskeepaa, QUEST is about science topics local to Northern California, which is probably why it focused on NIF, and didn't go into other facilities.
The next phase of the National Ignition Campaign (NIC), a series of experiments and simulations to prepare NIF for fusion ignition tests in the coming months, began last fall. Shortly after the dedication of the NIF facility in May of 2009, NIC began conducting test shots to fine-tune the performance of NIF's lasers, calibrate its diagnostic equipment, and verify the sophisticated computer simulations that help to guide the design of NIF's fusion targets.
I saw the Director General for ITER, the larger fusion experiment in Europe, which will reach break even energy. He expects no commercially available fusion electricity before 2050.
awesome awesome awesome awesome! If only there were more support from the gov.
It triggers the reaction that could power itself. Think of it as using an explosion to break a wall in a dam. The rushing water will create more energy than the explosion itself but wouldn't happen without the explosion to begin with.
Look, I just want to see someone fire a super laser. Ok?
Wow. Amazing. How do they achieve such a high pressure in the target chamber?
@MercenarySlick You are right in fact is should loose some mass in conversion to energy
How is the heat supposed to be turned into a usable form of energy? Will the reaction produce more power than the lasers consume?
i hope this type of energy will help us in the future and will make us free from the nuclear energy
@swack22 amplifying joules and concentrating them on one TINY spot to make more energy. amplifying joules takes a lot of energy to do. But using it to make fusion, and actually succeeding in that, makes the motion machine you're speaking of possible. Because to my knowledge, fusion makes a LOT more energy than what is required to amplify and concentrate joules. Which then means this could be done endlessly, producing all the energy needed for anything including the motion machine
This is fusion, the type of nuclear reaction that goes on in the sun (when two or more small atoms merge into a larger one, releasing energy). Fission is when a large atom splits apart releasing energy. It is less efficient than fusion. Nuclear weapons use both types, while reactors have (until now) only been able to do the latter in a sustainable way.
no to do that you would have to have a much more massive star, plus if you did create a mini black hole it would disappear in a fraction of a second. they have made mini black holes in the hadron Collider
I would imagine that you get more energy out of the system than you put in, in a similar way to how an implosion based Nuke works.
You get some material you want to effect on an atomic level, apply a comparatively weak force to it in a very specific way, and boom (pun intended), you have a Nuke, or a fusion reaction in this case.
Or not, I'm not a physicist. But that's the way I've come to understand how the thing works.
@karthius hm so you put energy in a laser to afterwards transform it in electrical energy again? physics dictates that you cant have more energy output than input. and by the way: the high energy output lasts only for a very small amount of time. so its not plausible.
My interest in gravity has been renewed thanks to the LHC. If it actually generates micro black wholes. It would mean that density makes a gravitational field more intense and mass makes it's range greater. If this is true it might actually be a way to produce artificial gravity without having a huge amount of mass. Just my speculation however.
Right, but under special conditions, it can produce radioactive radiation. But it is not as much as it produced by normal power stations.
hey I'm interested in what you said about France and those other places. Do you have any video links or weblinks you could show? I'm all about the fusion man, I don't care where it comes from.
@nicksynnz ..Isn't the NIF expected to complete its break even experiment quite soon? And though the NIF can not actually produce sustainable fusion...as in a plant....what is your view on Laser Fusion vs. Containment Fusion...Laser vs. ITER? Is there yet any emerging consensus that one approach will be better / more practical than another?
Locally. And the 'hohlraum', the target, gets destroyed in these bursts.
the capsule seemed to get destroyed after the process which endure less than a second so it means it has to constantly be replaced?
@MercenarySlick no. distance or size matter as well, actually the effect of distance is more important than the mass one. Even the simplest Newton equation says so or the Einstein Gravitational field equation....
what im trying to understand is where the energy is coming from taking conservation of energy into account
my dad was one of the guys who worked on designing the structure. he took me to his office and showed me the plans and all that stuff on his computer. cool huh? haha
its just gonna make a big explosion?
where are they going to keep the energy?
makes me wonder what hapens IF that temperature in that chamber leaks a bit or if it even can hold such temperature.
If your amplifying jewels, then is this not defying the said to be impossible perpetual motion machine?
@Computator1 3times is about the mass of a stellar black holes you would need a stars that can go hypernova a dozen of times heavier than the sun if not a hundrent
I am wondering how this will compare to the Z machines that have been around for quite some time.
MercenarySlick and flollowthefleet1 have good points, this isn't likely to work and even if this idea works it can have problems. At 7:35, this is a possibility of Earth if they get this wrong. With astronomical #s people can drastically underestimate how big the bang will be. Imagine a "mini sun". Would the factory survive? would we survive?
@MercenarySlick more specifically mass warps space time and we perceive this distortion as gravity.
with this laser they might do fusion but how (with this machine) are they going to store the energy that will be released?
I F*CKING LOVE SCIENCE!!
I'm ah firin mah laza!! Shoop-da-whoop!
Talk about clean energy. Plus, it''s got great energy output, unlike solar or wind. If we could perfect fusion, the energy crisis would be a thing of the past.
We could call the weapon a "Mortality Sphere" or "Dangerous Star", or something along those lines. Let me work on it and I'll get back to you...
Earth is now the Death Star. May the force be with us!
This is all very exciting, but I don't see the practical application? Is creating a sustained fusion reaction the reason for it being built? Is this really worth the billions of dollars invested in its construction?
Yeah I mean it was created as a weapon.. I mean the first reports on it mention it was made in a weapons lab. Fusion power is great although think of what they could do with this.
Using a 5mm Deuterium-Tritium fuel capsule, the reaction is anticipated to produce 10-20 time the amount of energy than that required to power the 192 lasers in 50 billionth of a second
But isn't the mass an expendable unit that could potentially run out?
@Jah044445 No not every stars ends into a black hole, for that you need huge gravitational power, and that is only achieved on stars of at LEAST 10-20 times the mass of our sun, which actually will die as a white dwarf...
So micro sun just vanish once they run out of fuel and power to sustain them(gravity and internel heat sustain the sun , here is the laser beam)
Can we have an update? When does my fusion energy arrive - electricity is expensive!?
I dont know what fits the bill, all i know is that NIF is going to try something new and i also know that tokamak designs failed way too many times in the past.
I left my leanback for this
so they dont have a donut shaped chamber? it's all spherical?! that's something new
such high definition
@Chemoplasma
We have been making fusion bombs for years. We already know how to use it for weapons.
Trying to use fusion as a power source is what's the issue. Nuclear energy that we use now, fission, is also "not more than an explosion", its just controlled. The same way that they are controlling this.
Check your facts and don't point fingers.
If an excited electron produces a laser what would an excited proton produce?
the output of this laser complex is in petawatts about 1billion times the energy of nuclear plants...
because it doesnt increase by itself, you have to constantly apply energie, till the laser has so much power...
@tonebenderx
If it's leads to fusion reactors, then yes.
To quote Stephen Colbert: "WE HAVE A DEATH STAR!!!"
Fusion, the ticket to space for the human race. I'm happy that Ill be around to see mankind take such an enormous stride towards the future, but sad that I wont live to see the day they fit fusion reactors to space craft.
We're almost there
The efforts to create a commercially practical nuclear fusion energy demonstration power plant began in the 1950s. There are now well over a dozen experimental nuclear fusion experimental machines around the globe using numerous different approaches. None are anywhere close to the goal but that has no effect on the numerous claims that they are. They are all competing for limited funding so the sales hype keeps increasing.
The NIF administrators have always been masterful in obscuring the primary purpose of NIF when presenting to the press and the general public. It has always been primarily funded as a thermonuclear weapon (H-bomb) research tool.
The lab created a big splashy announcement regarding their 5 December 2022, shot which generated enough fusion energy to boil about two liters of water. The fusion reaction lasted for approximately 0.000,000.000.08 second before blasting approximately 96% of the extremely expensive D/T fuel away from the microscopic reaction center. The presenter failed to mention that the tritium fuel is radioactive. It took about a week to set up the experiment and since then the lab has had difficulty repeating the experiment. Later it was mentioned that the energy to power the lasers, for this shot, was over 100 times greater than the fusion energy that was generated. It's estimated that approximately $11 billion, of federal revenues, have already been consumed by this experimental facility.
But when you create a mini star, and that star dies, doesn't that result in a mini black hole which eventually ends up being not so mini?
i dont quite understand.... is it like the experiment doc octopus conducted in spiderman 2?
unfortunately this isn''t how gravity work.
And that would use a incredibly unbelievable amount of energy just to have a gravity we can recreate anyway with centrifugal force or constant acceleration in the case of a spaceship.
@Netkiller3714 I think you're confusing stars with black holes dude...
what powers the laser?
If this will make loads of energy, presumably enough to power itself, doesnt that break some kind of law of physics to do with everlasting energy?
well if it leaks i guess they will tell i mean gosh a football stadium size machine say a tiny peak size thingy does more for sure will be notable temperature will only be reached when the laser's all focus in the tiny chamber an as the video showed it got destroyed ( i think a mini super nova) so well its not like it was planned to resist the heat it will get destroyed( the hydrogen container not the machine).
Fusion was achieved in this lab in 2022! 🎉
The experimental shot you are referring to took place on 5 December 2022. The announcement was that they finally achieved more energy from the fusion reaction than the energy applied in compressing the the D/T fuel mixture. It was later reported that it took over 100 times more energy to pump the laser system to generate the compressing energy. The nuclear fusion reaction only lasted for approximately 0.000,000,000,08 second but the experiment took about a week to set up. The generated fusion energy was about enough to boil two liters of water. Approximately 96% of the extremely expensive and radioactive fuel was blasted away from the microscopic reaction center before it had a chance to react. There was no significant propagation of the fusion reaction before the fuel was blasted away from the reaction center. The so-called 'break-even' goal was supposed to have been achieved by 2012, in the NIF machine. The quest, for the holy grail of commercially practical nuclear fusion energy power plants, began in the 1950s.
The NIF administrators have always been masterful in obscuring the primary purpose and funding of NIF whenever presenting to the press and to the general public. It has always been primarily funded as a thermonuclear (H-bomb) research tool.
so you got a 500 trillion watt spark plug, how do you keep the cylinders firing and run for days?
There is a big diff between Produced and Uploaded.
They are splitting atom but lasers can't go thru if hydrogen atoms turned to more clear object. If hydrogen atom was zapped on target which is a little clear little transparent laser can isolate atoms better. Future of atoms is making target peneratable solid substance cannot isolate atoms compared if target atoms are slightly mixed to a transparent glass of atoms.
no, there is not, but:
100.000.000 will bie in the very tiny little and the rate of energy will decrease by 1/r^2, so after several meters, you have much less energy.
sencond, heat is nothing else than elctromagenetic energy, which can be closed or sealed by huge magnetic fields
and third: a functional fusion reactor will be fired by continous burning material, which will cool down the the surroundings bevor they go off in the fusion. comparable to a rocket nozzle (e.g. Saturn V)
Solar energy essentially is fusion energy. The sun is just so powerful that it throws energy all the way here. We'll never be able to build a reactor even close to the sun. New solar panels are in the works that are smaller, lighter, and many times more effective at drawing in and storing energy. So really I'm saying we already have the best fusion reactor at work, it's just billions of miles away, ha ha.
@damarul Umm has any hydrogen bomb ever converted the earth into a sun if your answer is no then there is no need to worry about this safe clean and practically unlimited source of energy
Anyone know whats the name of the song playing in the background at 4:37 ?
Fusion isn't the "key" to our future, only a possible one. So far you use more power to create the reaction than you produce after excluding the heat energy as waste. the idea is cool, but the sun already gives us enough energy per day to power the world for a year! Start there, harness that, and move towards.
Sounds like the god like power that created the universe in the first place. And He said let there be LIGHT and there was light.
black holes come only to existence if the star before has multiple sun-masses, not a gram of hydrogen
where do they house the shark?
This is heat fusion. What about cold water fusion?
Imagine having a little sun you can carry around.
does this mean they can make new elements by fusing not hydrogen but ununquadium?? :L that would be cool
Ok. So that thing will give off Billions of times more gravitational force then earth. Question. Would something that strong pretty much suck everything around it in? I honestly don't think a steel chamber will do much against a star. lol. I hope this idea was thought over thoroughly.
when the lasers hit the hydrogen and the temperature and pressure is increased to similar to that of the suns core, how is it possible for this pressure to be contained? the whole facility will explode and will probably cause an earthquake or somthing
2 years behind schedule it looks like
I know right?
Hahahahahaha! You just made my day!
@rbender49 We have been using fission bombs not fusion. fusion is joining atoms, fisson is splitting them "check your facts".
@MercenarySlick or is mass caused by gravity?
What about CEA don't they have one?
@MrCrackerwood I'm 12 years old and what is this?
RIGHT OUT OF SPIDER MAN,LOL, COOL
so this kind of technology would make us independant from the sun?
not really. there are physical limits; you can't use a pea to destroy anything, can you?
lol epic comment :P May the force be with you my friend.
If the energy increases 1000 million million times by the end of the amplification process, why not harness that instead of blowing up the planet?
If you eat a pea and it becomes lodged in your trachea then you just destroyed yourself lol
it's too far away and you can't get close to collect it
We are spending 3.5 billion on energy that we CANNOT HARNESS. Why not use it to learn how to harness the the light energy already produced by the sun?
Great project but don't like the naration much as it doesn't really mention some real projects that are underconstruction and which are more likely to achieve better stuff that SLNIF
but... they disproved E=mc2...