Friday, June 12, 2009

NIF may be SOL


For those who have not been following the ins and outs of fusion related technologies a behemoth of precision technology is about to go online. The National Ignition Facility is set to fire its 192 precision lasers through thousands of focusing crystals, that may or may not have come from stolen lightsabers. and amplifiers. Though it could take another year (much like a big circular tube in Switzerland I seem to remember going online a while back) to actually achieve fusion capable energies. With a price tag of $3.5 billion it makes you wonder why the department of energy didn't just hire Doc Oc to complete the task in a beat up riverside warehouse, aside from the fact that he is brutally insane. Along with the worlds largest lasers the NIF boasts one of the worlds largest vacuum systems (eat your heart out Martha Stewart) to battle against the arch enemy of optics systems, dust. If successful this system could create a miniscule star in its target chamber as the lasers heat a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel to 100 million degrees fahrenheit at which point it may either collapse and produce fusion energy or end all time and space as we know it (or maybe just fizzle and pop). Lets hope that these scientists are not destroyed by government types resembling Morgan Freeman from Chain Reaction or that they are not actually building a giant battlestation with the power to destroy an entire planet.

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