Laser's Jolt Rivals Sun's Center

In a building the size of a football stadium, engineers have assembled the framework for a network of 192 laser beams, each traveling 1,000 feet to converge simultaneously on a target the size of a pencil eraser.

The trip will take one-thousandth of a second during which the light's energy is amplified many billions of times to create a brief laser pulse 1,000 times the electric generating power of the United States.

The goal is to create unimaginable heat -- 180 million degrees Farenheit -- and intense pressure from all directions on a BB-size hydrogen fuel pellet, compressing it to one-thirtieth of its size. The result, the scientists hope, will be a fusing of atoms so that more energy is released than is generated by the laser beams, something scientists call fusion ignition. It is what happens when a hydrogen bomb explodes.

Four of the beams have been tested.

www.wired.com...

ahh... this sounds a little outragouse, especially if this is private research into something this potentially harmfull. is this new or is there another thread that i missed?

Sounds pretty cool !
But what happens if they start a chain reaction and cant control it ?
I think we play to much with this stuff with out thinking of what could
happen.

...has been working on Nuclear Fusion as a source of energy for decades.

This is not the first time this has been attempted.

Google "Tokamak"


www.pppl.gov...