National Ignition Facility Makes History with Record 500 Terawatt Shot
The National Ignition Facility (NIF), based in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, achieved a historical milestone on the road to commercializing fusion energy. On July 5, NIF delivered 500 terrawatts of power to its target, which is 1,000 times more power than is used in all of the United States at any one time. NIF, which built the largest laser in the world, concentrated 192 lasers on a fuel pellet to achieve its goal. The amount of power is a step forward to achieving “ignition,” generating more power from a fusion reaction than what is delivered on the target. From the article:
Fifteen years of work by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) team paid off on July 5 with a historic record-breaking laser shot. The NIF laser system of 192 beams delivered more than 500 trillion watts (terawatts or TW) of peak power and 1.85 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to its target. Five hundred terawatts is 1,000 times more power than the United States uses at any instant in time, and 1.85 megajoules of energy is about 100 times what any other laser regularly produces today.
The shot validated NIF’s most challenging laser performance specifications set in the late 1990s when scientists were planning the world’s most energetic laser facility. Combining extreme levels of energy and peak power on a target in the NIF is a critical requirement for achieving one of physics’ grand challenges — igniting hydrogen fusion fuel in the laboratory and producing more energy than that supplied to the target.
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