0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.
NIF's beams are intended to deliver more than 60 times the energy of any previous laser system. When fired, the pulse will last just a few nanoseconds (billionths of a second) but it will impart 500 trillion watts of power - more than the peak electrical generating power of the entire United States. This intense energy will be focused on a ball-bearing-sized pellet of fuel, ablating the surface and compressing the remaining material inwards. "This process will create temperatures of 100 million degrees and pressures billions of times greater than Earth's atmospheric pressure, forcing the hydrogen nuclei to fuse and release many times more energy than the laser energy required to spark the reaction," said Dr Moses.
