Nuclear Fusion is a Reality

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) -- a laser test facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. -- turned on its 192 laser beams for a brief instant on March 15, unleashing a record-setting 1.875-megajoule blast into a target chamber.

The lasers were combined, gathered and focused through a series of lens into a 2.03-megajoule shot, said Ed Moses, NIF director -- a record for the facility.

That pulse of energy lasted for just 23 billionths of a second, yet it generated 411 trillion watts of power, NIF said -- 1,000 times more than the entire United States consumes at any given instant.

“It’s a remarkable demonstration of the laser from the standpoint of its energy, its precision, its power, and its availability,” Moses told Nature magazine.

But it’s barely half the battle. NIF hopes to dramatically increase the power of the laser shots by the end of year, intending to ultimately use the facility to harness the energy reaction that occurs naturally within the sun: fusion.

“This event marks a key milestone in the National Ignition Campaign’s drive toward fusion ignition,” Moses said.

In fission, atoms are split and the massive energy released is captured. The NIF aims for fusion, the ongoing energy process in the sun and other stars where hydrogen and helium nuclei are continually fusing and releasing enormous amounts of energy. In the ignition facility, beams of light converge on pellets of hydrogen isotopes to create a similar, though controlled, micro-explosion

http://news.discovery.com/tech/world-most-powerful-laser-120322.html.

Why a book?

I have written this book because I think that people need to be informed to make good energy decisions in directing their Government.  It is difficult to stay informed on political issues.  It is even more difficult to stay informed on a technical topic like energy and how it interacts with something as double sided as political issues.  Yet it is imperative that people stay informed and well connected to direct their Government.

Several things that have changed over a long period of time make staying informed more difficult, make people more disconnected from their Government, and divide us from each other.  People used to sit on their front porches and talk to each other as they walked around their neighborhoods.  As time and transportation abilities progressed, people drifted apart and now we live and work sometimes great distances apart.  We are more distant from our families and more distant from our co-workers.  We go into work, then we come home, and those are two different worlds.  Seldom do we live close to others of our co-workers.  Seldom do we live in areas where we walk around and talk to our neighbors.  Those things would be fine in one sense, except that they have not been replaced by a quality communicaton substitute.  Men came together in parts of their daily work and discussed issues.  Old men sat in corner stores and discussed these things in light of the past.  Women came together as they worked out their daily life taking care of the home and children, or even more recently as a part of the workforce.  Today, politics is a shunned topic in those areas.  That makes it difficult to talk about life and politics with each other the way we used to.

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