World's Most Powerful Laser Could Pew Pew Its Way to Fusion
Power Scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
have fired the world's most powerful laser, which blasts out a
whopping 500 trillion watts of peak power. The system is part of
a four-step process toward developing fusion energy as an
alternative to coal and oil in the Laser Inertial Fusion Energy
project. It took 192 laser beams to deliver more than 500
trillion watts, or terawatts (TW), of peak power and 1.85
megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet laser light to a target 2mm in
diameter. This 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,"
Breanna Bishop, an LLNL spokesperson, told TechNewsWorld. The
NIF project is part of a four-step process toward developing
fusion energy as an alternative to coal and oil in the Laser
Inertial Fusion Energy (LIFE) project, which is funded by the
U.S. Department of Energy. The idea