National Ignition Facility cutaway - click for detail
Good luck and best wishes to all the hard working men and women at the National Ignition Facility! These brave and honorable people are working hard to make sustainable nuclear fusion possible. I am amazed that I haven’t heard of the National Ignition Facility before. It is a place where huge lasers are powered up and directed at a very small piece of valuable material. This material is called tritium. What is supposed to happen is that the lasers get so focused and powerful that they all hit the tritium at the same time. Then the tiny ball of tritium undergoes a number of processes including a powerful shockwave and becoming more dense. At a certain point the ball of fuel gets so hot and so dense that nuclear fusion takes place. This is very cool indeed because if this process becomes a success, then it will be possible to generate energy via a chain reaction. Thus more energy will be created than required to start the reaction. We are talking about a great deal of energy here. This is the same kind of process of energy generation that happens in a star.
This is a BIG process. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is bigger than three football fields and is ten stories tall in certain areas. Some people think these kind of gigantic energy experiments and research are a waste of money and resources. But I completely disagree. We must try to harness this kind of power. Some of the lasers fire infra-red energy. But then when the laser beams hit the spherical chamber where the tritium is housed, the lasers turn blue.
Honestly, as a US Citizen, I don’t care how much this project costs. I just want them to do it. By even trying to hit such a high level of technology we are without a doubt learning a great deal of other important things. I read that the laser power generated by this facility is many times more powerful than any other laser on Earth. The intriguing thing about the NIF is that if successful, we could research into new branches of technology that require a tremendous amount of energy. One form of technology that is possible but extremely power dependent is levitation. We know how to do it, (well I don’t completely understand how but some scientists do) it just sucks up too much energy to make it happen. But if there was an over abundance of clean energy, that kind of technology could be made possible.
I really commend and respect any person who takes the time to work on impressive projects like the National Ignition Facility. The technology that could be developed as a result of this facility is on the level, of civilization changing stuff. This is the kind of advancement that I bet makes aliens that observe us in cloaked ships say, “Hmm. Looks like these humans are doing pretty well. Let’s continue watching and see if we can steal any ideas!”
-Tyler
SOURCES:
Wikipedia, “National Ignition Facility” retrieved Sept 15th, 2010: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, “NIF”, retrieved Sept 15th, 2010: https://lasers.llnl.gov/