![]() To ensure the “pea” is bathed evenly in energy, it will be placed inside a “hohlraum”, a hollow, gold-plated cylinder little larger than a drug capsule, into which the ultraviolet beams from the lasers will be directed. This is the target - a hollow plastic sphere containing a mix of deuterium and tritium, the two “heavy” isotopes of hydrogen. This raw power is focused on an object the size and shape of a small pea. These are capable of delivering 60 times more power than any previous system, producing a burst of two million joules of energy, roughly equivalent to that consumed by five trillion (a million million) 100-watt lightbulbs. At the heart of the NIF facility is an unparalleled array of 192 lasers, housed in a 10-storey building the size of three football fields. The stumbling block to tapping this priceless resource has always been that triggering the process requires the generation of improbably vast amounts of energy. This is an expensive and complicated process fraught with inherent dangers and largely unresolved questions, such as how to dispose of the hazardous radioactive waste left behind.įusion, the process of compressing two nuclei into one, uses easily available materials, yields up to four times as much energy and, producing harmless helium as a byproduct, leaves behind no troublesome radioactive waste. ![]() If the NIF team is successful, the ultimate result could be nothing less than an 11th-hour solution to the twin crises facing a world catastrophically dependent on rapidly diminishing and environmentally harmful fossil fuels.Ĭurrent nuclear reactors utilise fission, the process of splitting the nucleus of a single atom into two. The goal, which it hopes to achieve by next year, is the Holy Grail of nuclear physics the creation of energy through controlled and sustained nuclear fusion - the process that generates the heat and light of the Sun. government’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), whose day job is maintaining the nation’s nuclear arsenal.įollowing certification by the Energy Department at the end of March, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 50 miles east of San Francisco, is now embarking on a series of experiments with its $3 billion National Ignition Facility, a decade after work first began on the project. In fact, a project to create a miniature star in a “test-tube”, triggering a scaled-down thermonuclear explosion and paving the way to the possibility of unlimited cheap, safe and renewable power, is the brainchild of the U.S. It sounds like something from science fiction, the centrepiece of a Bond villain’s bid for world domination. TECHNICAL NOTE: To see this graphic play Adobe Flash Player needs to be installed and enabled
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