Snipped from LLNL.gov.

The New NIF Laser at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory — the nuts and bolts information on how the laser actually works and how it will provide ignition to accomplish the Fuson feat of turning Nuclear Waste Into Energy — can be found in this overall, in-depth, performance status report with its complete text and 43 figures and in-color illustrations.

If you read the B4B posting called “Nuclear Waste Nobody Wants Turned Into Energy”, then this is the sister posting. There’s more data here than you’ll ever want or need. In fact, it would help if you were a rocket Scientist. Once into the subject, the data’s raw but explained and the text heavy. You’ll soon realize the overview status report was slanted to those with a scientific background. Nevertheless …

This lengthy status report (APPLIED OPTICS Vol. 46, No. 16 1 June 2007) is taken from a government publication. And this how the status report begins:

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is the world’s largest laser system. It contains a 192 beam neodymium glass laser that is designed to deliver 1.8 MJ at 500 TW at 351 nm in order to achieve energy gain (ignition) in a deuterium–tritium nuclear fusion target. To meet this goal, laser design criteria include the ability to generate pulses of up to 1.8 MJ total energy, with peak power of 500 TW and temporal pulse shapes spanning 2 orders of magnitude at the third harmonic (351 nm or 3) of the laser wavelength.

The focal-spot fluence distribution of these pulses is carefully controlled, through a combination of special optics in the 1 1053 nm portion of the laser (continuous phase plates), smoothing by spectral dispersion, and the overlapping of multiple beams with orthogonal polarization (polarization smoothing). We report performance qualification tests of the first eight beams of the NIF laser …

Read Full Article Here!

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