World's Most Powerful Laser Could Find its Way to Fusion Power

The United States National Ignition Facility at  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has succeed in firing the most powerful laser beam to have ever been recorded.

192 laser beams was all it took to deliver more than 500 trillion watts of peak power and 1.85 mega-joules of ultraviolet laser light to a target which was 2mm in diameter.

This is "1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time, and 1.85 mega-joules of energy is about 100 times what any other laser regularly produces today," said Breanna Bishop and LLNL spokesperson.

The NIF project is among the 4-step process towards making fusion energy an alternative to coal and oil in the Laser Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE) project, which is almost exclusively funded by the U.S government.


How Does the NIF Work?


NIF pulls electricity off the power grid, stores it over a period of one minute in farms of large high-voltage capacitors and immediately releases in a 400 microsecond burst, LLNL's bishop said.

The resulting energy is widely taken to run turbines and there is very little wasted heat [during the process] as  this is a fusion reactor, UC Berkeley's Kammen said.

All together, the NIF cost about US$3.5 billion dollars, but it is not currently known how much a counterpart of this plant would take to build in the mid-2020's. 

Although the project is costly, it is clear that it will definitely pay off in the long-term of things.

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