The Telegraph: Scientists plan to ignite man-made star

Tue Feb 17, 2009 12:21 am » by **Herbert**

This world is getting crazier and crazier by the minute...

In the spring, a team will begin attempts to ignite a tiny man-made star inside a laboratory and trigger a thermonuclear reaction.

Its goal is to generate temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius and pressures billions of times higher than those found anywhere else on earth, from a speck of fuel little bigger than a pinhead. If successful, the experiment will mark the first step towards building a practical nuclear fusion power station and a source of almost limitless energy.

At a time when fossil fuel supplies are dwindling and fears about global warming are forcing governments to seek clean energy sources, fusion could provide the answer. Hydrogen, the fuel needed for fusion reactions, is among the most abundant in the universe. Building work on the £1.2 billion nuclear fusion experiment is due to be completed in spring.

Scientists at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, nestled among the wine-producing vineyards of central California, will use a laser that concentrates 1,000 times the electric generating power of the United States into a billionth of a second.

The result should be an explosion in the 32ft-wide reaction chamber which will produce at least 10 times the amount of energy used to create it.

"We are creating the conditions that exist inside the sun," said Ed Moses, director of the facility. "It is like tapping into the real solar energy as fusion is the source of all energy in the world. It is really exciting physics, but beyond that there are huge social, economic and global problems that it can help to solve."

Inside a structure covering an area the size of three football pitches, a single infrared laser will be sent through almost a mile of lenses, mirrors and amplifiers to create a beam more than 10 billion times more powerful than a household light bulb.

Housed within a hanger-sized room that has to be pumped clear of dust to prevent impurities getting into the beam, the laser will then be split into 192 separate beams, converted into ultraviolet light and focused into a capsule at the centre of an aluminium and concrete-coated target chamber.

When the laser beams hit the inside of the capsule, they should generate high-energy X-rays that, within a few billionths of a second, compress the fuel pellet inside until its outer shell blows off.

This explosion of the fuel pellet shell produces an equal and opposite reaction that compresses the fuel itself together until nuclear fusion begins, releasing vast amounts of energy.

More on link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/scienceandte ... -star.html

Tue Feb 17, 2009 4:14 am » by **Ourgreatcountry**

Sure lends creditability to the claim that Jupiter doesn't have the mass to be a sun. Seems if we can make a miniature sun on earth...then anything would be possible.

Tue Feb 17, 2009 2:07 pm » by **Inhdi**

...
At a time when fossil fuel supplies are dwindling and fears about global warming are forcing governments to seek clean energy sources, fusion could provide the answer. Hydrogen, the fuel needed for fusion reactions, is among the most abundant in the universe. Building work on the £1.2 billion nuclear fusion experiment is due to be completed in spring.
...

(The bolds are mine)
Bear in mind that both fission (splitting) and fusion (union) of atomic particles produces radioactive leftovers...clear sign that we should not continue to do it. On the other hand, annihilation (cancelling) leaves no waste since it's not really a reaction: process that undefectibly leaves a waste-product. The cancelling (annihilation) can only take place between matter and anti-matter, and it's in this direction that experimental science should spend those £1.2 billion. (In a way they already are with the numerous particle colliders scattered around the globe...they're just not telling).

On a side note; there's eyewitness evidence that, through reverse engineering, nasa discovered that the engines of the recovered spacecraft used the process of annihilation to produce the energy necessary for interstellar flight. To round it up they also discovered a new element! The fuel used in the engine's process of annihilation is a mysterious element that doesn't seem to exist in our solar system. They called it E115 or 'element 115' for it's atomic number, also giving it a place in our very own periodic table.

Tue Feb 17, 2009 2:59 pm » by **Hansom**

crazy crazy crazy, stupid scientists wont be happy till they've destroyed the universe. And why ? to see if they can

Tue Feb 17, 2009 5:58 pm » by **Towelie**

Theres a couple of threads on this topic, somewhere on here.

Tue Feb 17, 2009 7:24 pm » by **7hidden7agenda7**

actually the fusion process should produce helium.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hb ... rocyc.html
The above link shows the fusion process. The end result is a helium ion (alpha radiation), and 2 protons. The alpha radiation becomes helium when it picks up 2 electrons, and can be stopped by a sheet of paper or 2. There is radiation during the process, but the "waste product" (ie helium) is not radioactive.