National Ignition Facility Prepares for Fusion Test

Federal researchers are slowly testing 192 lasers that they hope will set off the world’s first controlled nuclear fusion reaction.

The lasers are housed at the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a $4 billion complex the size of three football fields that is part of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif.

The facility’s construction was completed this spring with tests directing more than a megajoule of energy at a target (a megajoule is the energy consumed by 10,000 100-watt light bulbs in a second). Now researchers are preparing for a first use of its full capabilities next year, when the battery of lasers will be trained on a small pellet of fuel in hopes of igniting it to trigger a brief but powerful fusion reaction.

While commercially operating nuclear fission reactors provide power — and a host of controversy over weapons use and waste disposal — nuclear fusion is a different process. A sustained string of uncontrolled fusion reactions can be used for military purposes such as a hydrogen bomb, and since the 1950s, scientists have chased controlled fusion reactions for potential civilian purposes.

NIF will offer them new opportunities to study the process in a laboratory setting.

Read more . . .

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Tags: controlled fusion, fusion reactions, Innovation, lawrence livermore national laboratory, megajoule, national ignition facility, new opportunities, nuclear fission reactors, nuclear fusion reaction

This entry was posted on Friday, August 21st, 2009 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Innovation, Project Energy, Scientific American, environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.