Giant super-laser passes 500 TRILLION watts The National Ignition Facility has followed up on its March firing with yet-another record, flicking the switch on a pulse that topped 500 trillion watts and 1.85 megajoules of UV laser. Back in March, the NIF at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had previously fired a 411 trillion watt pulse. As noted by the lab, …
Its 100 times more powerful than any other regularly operating LASER out there today? That means there is a 5 trillion watt LASER somewhere?
(and shouldn't LASER be capitalised since it is an acronym for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation? or has modern society turned 'laser' into a word?)
An acronym is, by definition, a word
"A word formed from the initial letters of other words"
As far as I'm aware, acronyms do not have to be capitalises unless the initial letters of what they refer to are capitalised (such as is the case with NASA for instance). Clearly acronyms referring to organisations are usually capitalised, but those like sonar, radar and laser rarely are.
Of course acronyms have to be widely used enough to be accepted into recognised dictionaries before they can meet the rules of a game like Scrabble. So that means words like radar are acceptable. The sloppy tendency of many people to use the term acronym to refer to mere abbreviations doesn't help, but that doesn't change the accepted definition.
No it's not a word
You've misinterprested the definition.
"Who" is a word, and also an acronym, it's an acronym BECAUSE it's a word.
Arguably LASER is some sort of backronym as it's now a commonly accepted word, but previously meant nothing as a word, which therefore makes it just an abbreviation.
An accronym that dosn't spell something understandable is just an abbreviation.
Just because an abbreviation spells somethign pronouncable does not make it an acronym.
FACT!
if LASER stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation I'm just wondering what does the American spelling stand for as they tend to spell it Lazer rather than LASER, or is it just to fit in with American language as opposed to British (like agonize, apologize, authorize, baptize, centralize, characterize, civilize, colonize, computerize, criticize, crystalize, dramatize, organize, etc).
'-ize' are perfectly acceptable in English, a fact not always recognized by the dictionaries that accompany software. A quick scan of e.g. Jane Austen will confirm that the original English spelling was usually 'z' and the Americans simply kept it - it was the Brits that morphed to 's'.
I'm a bit puzzled that you think that Americans 'tend to spell' laser with a Z - do you have evidence for this?
It's evidence that LASER has passed or is passing out of the realm of acronyms and into the realm of neologisms (as laser or US lazer). It is virtually certain to become recognised as an ordinary word in the near future if it isn't already, because it's made it into everyday life and speech (unlike, say, SCUBA, which is still used only in connection with one specialism). Compare RADAR / radar, coloquial usage "on your radar".
The Amercans may be regularizing its spelling in line with other American spellings, regardles of the word's origins. They have a somewhat more phonetic and less etymological approach to spelling than in GB English. In passing I know that the OED has turned traitor to time-honoured GB English usage, but in my book there's only one word that should end in -ize, and that's Americanize.
Nope. The word "laser" is now in dictionaries, and does not have to be capitalised. Take for example the Cambridge dictionary:
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/laser?q=laser
Oxford:
http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/laser?q=laser
Merriam-Webster:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/laser
Well, not really, it's a bit of a FUD to be honest. Power/Energy are related by time, in this instance the laser only fired for 0.00037 of a second. If they'd dissipated the same energy in less time, it would be a more "powerful" laser despite having no impact on the US power consumption.
The power consumed "in an instant" (t=0) has no meaning.
Well POWER consumed in any period of time has no meaning. Energy consumed over a period of time does, it IS the power. Power at an instant is defined as the derivative of Energy with respect to time which means it possible to state the instanteous power consumption in the same way it is possible to state the instantaneous speed of a car, even though over zero time the car moves zero distance. So certainly the original poster is correct, the power being dissipated during the shot IS the sum of the laser and the normal consumption of the US, however it's not actually being drained from the grid, since it got stored up earlier over a longer period of time.
NIF hasn't even achieved ignition let alone net energy gain.
The fundamental problem with NIF as an energy source is the fact that it uses LASERs, which are typically about 14% energy efficient.
As it would also use Steam generation as with a Tokamak, the net energy gain needs to be on the order of 15-20x to break even. Tokamak is about 3-5x.
If you wanted to point out interesting sites on someting in the Oort cloud. God forbid if you accidently hit the moon, as it would probably burn half way through before the duty cycle turns off.
Why can't I get toys like that? As for the electric bill, honestly, I'm good for it... I can make $150.00 installments for the next what, 5 or 6 thousand years?
The article gives to beam energy: 1.85e6 Joules. Use the magic formula Power = Energy / Time to get the amount of time this laser can fire continuously (<4nano seconds). While you are at it, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent and find that 1.85e6 Joules is less then .5kg of TNT, or less than £0.10 of electricity. While you are at it, take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility and you will find "In the same month [January 2012], the NIF fired a record high of 57 shots, more than in any month up to that point." 0.5 kg of TNT twice per day is not going to put a big dent in the moon. There is some good news: $150 buys the electricity for about 10 shots (~1% efficiency).
I don't know much about physics apart from not pissing uphill... Does it say in the article - cause if it did, i completely missed it - if the energy produced is more than that they used?
Just out of curiosity, not saying it is a useless experiment if they haven't achieved that yet
It doesn't produce energy, just takes it in. One of the potential applications here is that when you fire enough energy at a small point, like they have done here with multiple lasers converging on a small area, you can ignite a fusion reaction which can then be used to generate lots of clean power, far more than you used to power the laser.
In this scenario the laser is simply the starter motor that kicks off the fusion reactor.
I wonder who down-voted you? that is pretty much the gist of it...
The Lasers initiate fusion, then that energy is used, the idea being they can reach break even with Intertial Confinement much easier than they expect they can with magnetic confinement, plus the advantage is when you turn it off, its off, whereas a TOMAK would still be full of hot plasma.
Personally I think we need some combination of the two to achieve fusion efficiently without the use of a deep gravity well.
I think you can be sure that if they broke the laws of thermodynamics they would probably had made that their lead story, across the planet.
Or they'd have been framed for murder a la Chain Reaction in a cover-up due to the world not being ready for free energy...
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Oh, why so sour? :-P
IIRC the OP only talked about 'igniting'. And in a discussion about fusion I would take that to mean nuclear not chemical burning. (I can't speak for nuclear physicists, but astrophysicists always use ignite and burn to describe the onset and process of nuclear fusion - so stars burn hydrogen and eventually most will get hot enough to ignite helium.) That said, I think you were right and the OP didn't know what he was talking about.
The idea it was 'chemistry' was mine. It was meant as a joke. And you're right: they're reactions of nucleons not orbital electrons. But once you get over that, plasmas, particularly those found in stellar interiors, posses the kind of potentials and gradients and rich complexity you see everywhere else in chemistry; this is the chemistry of the Weak force, rather than the Electromagnetic one. Still I'm happy chemists aren't interested in the really hot stuff.
*ponders whether I should tell him the real definition of a metal*
"Pray enlighten us all as to what water burns to ?"
Ooh, simples, according to Wikipedia:
16/8 O + 1/1 H → 17/9 F + 0.60 MeV
17/9 F → 17/8 O + e+ +ν_e + 2.76 MeV (half-life of 64.49 seconds)
17/8 O + 1/1 H → 14/7 N + 4/2 He + 1.19 MeV
Please don't try this at home! Any questions?
Top questions, with answers of yes, and maybe.
We have a claimed 500 trillion watt laser. That means that in one second (if it could run for that long) it would release 500 trillion joules of energy, or about five times the energy of the bomb that hit Nagasaki. That has big hole making potential, in my book, although it's small by modern nuclear weapon standards.
Could that plunge the US into darkness? Only if carefully divided amongst critical power distribution nodes, so you'd need to move your laser energy about with pin point accuracy. People might notice when a truck labelled Silverburn Laser Services Ltd turns up, vapourises an electricity grid switching station, and drives off again. Having said that, total US electricity generating capacity is "only" about 1 terawatt. Assuming your laser is 5% efficient (OK as a ball park) then you need 10 peta watts of input, so ten thousand times more power than the entire generating capacity of the US, so if you over-rode all the safety systems and linked the US grid together (whilst stroking a long haired white cat) you could cause a national black out by sucking all the power out of the grid (and melting it at the same time).
Trigger another recession? Probably not, as we've got a big enough one at the moment to mask most things. Added to which destruction usually begets reconstruction, and that appears to create growth. Even if you used your one second of tera-laser in downtown New York city, things would certainly be very bad indeed for the inhabitants. But would that matter in London, Los Angeles, Berlin etc? Probably not (and vice versa if you chose one of those to experiment on).
The article does not explain the mechanism of the laser. So we don't know if its a regular laser, pulse laser, x-pulse laser or a heavy laser.
Since its pre-fusion tech, I would be willing to assign it the same damage as an Inner Sphere small laser.
Sounds so good when you use terms like megajoules. Then you convert it, and find that the cutting edge of laser death in the twenty first century is a beam that's zipping out about half a kWh, worth about 5p when bought from the 'leccy board.
In El Reg units, wouldn't that be about 23 cups of tea?
"The Death Star is in firing position, Lord Vader"
"The emperor will be pleased - put the kettle on commander"
We have a National Ignition Facility? Holy shit, that's cool. A national facility to burn things. Man, I love this country - we have the NIF, Freedom, Liberty, The Right To Bear Arms*, and Britney Spears. What more could we ask for?
* - which the bears aren't too happy about, TBH
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