One hundred and ninety-two lasers focused on a single point, all turned on and fired up. This was the scene last Monday at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in California, as government scientists took a key early step toward developing a carbon-free energy supply.
By heating up frozen hydrogen pellets with energy from laser beams, scientists hope to create miniature suns on earth --- a radical idea that would make Austin Powers' nemesis Dr. Evil proud.
Energy given off by the suns, which could run as hot as 800 million degrees (Farenheit, not that it really matters at those temps), would in turn heat up liquid salt, generating massive amounts of steam power to power homes and businesses. And, it would do so without the greenhouse gases of coal power or the radiological waste of nuclear.
As Thomas Friedman reports in the New York Times, the government-funded National Ignition Facility, housed in a building the size of three football fields and ten stories tall, is the agency at the center of the laser experiment.
Last week was the first time the lasers were fired simultaneously at high energy, in this case at an empty core of the chamber that may someday hold the hydrogen pellet.
The experiment was successful, "no small feat" as Friedman notes, but the next major feat will be to repeatedly fire the lasers at pellets and achieve energy gain -- in other words, producing more energy from the pellets than it takes to fire the lasers. Scientists at NIF estimate this is two or three years away.
Farther away still is turning the technology into a commercially feasible enterprise, though estimates for a pilot fusion power plant run about $10 billion, the same as a new nuclear facility. The Obama Administration's stimulus package certainly provided a power surge on the renewable energy front, as OhMyGov reported recently. We'll be watching as this and other game-changing innovations bubble up from the nation's top private and publicly-funded laboratories.
Dr. Evil's underground lair? Or, the interior of the NIF target chamber
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