National Ignition Facility (NIF)
At Livermore, California announced today that it has reached an important milestone in its quest for fusion power.
On March 15, NIF launched 192 lasers at the same time and recorded-breaking 1.
UV laser of 0. 875 billion joules.
"This event marks a key milestone in the development of the National Ignition movement towards fusion ignition," said NIF director Edward Moses . ".
"Although during the completion of the NIF project, there have been many similar demonstration of equivalent energy performance, this is the first complete addition to running 192 beams with this energy.
Like breaking the sound barrier, this is very exciting.
"While the pulse lasted only 23 billion seconds, it produced a peak power of 411 trillion watts-1,000 times higher than the peak power used at any time in the United States.
Before passing through the measuring device on the road to the target room, the UV pulse is 2.
3 million joules, the world's number one, are nearly 100 times the energy of any other laser in operation.
The beam is also one of NIF's most accurate records ever.
The energy generated is within 1.
Target 3%.
NIF says accuracy is critical to the pressure and temperature required to achieve fusion ignition.
The energy distribution between the beams determines the way to obtain a symmetric internal explosion in capsules containing fusion fuels.
NIF operations manager Bruno Van wentham said: "In 2003, we showed this level of performance on the single beam line, and in 2008, we were in a four-beam
"Reaching this level of performance on all 192 beams with this precision, quality and reliability is unprecedented and very exciting.
"This experiment is part of the NIF project designed to design small power plants called Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE)
They claim that this will provide a rich and sustainable clean energy source.
To this end, laser pulses are a big step on the road to the main destination of NIF: fusion ignition and energy gain in laboratory environments.