What would you do with a laser beam that delivered over 500 trillion watts of peak power? You better ask the engineers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory who just broke a world record by creating the highest power laser shot in history. The laser is actually, not just a single beam but a collection of beams, approximately 192 individual beams, which were fired at the same time. The beam (or beams) delivered 1.85 MJ of ultraviolet laser light. What is even more amazing is that the powerful beam was targeted at a single point only 2mm in diameter.

It all starts with a single laser that is then split into 48 separate beams. The beams are then redirected into amplifiers using mirrors which amplify them. After four bounces, the beams are further split into the 192 rays. And talking of the electricity bill, the laser consumed more than 1,000 times the power used in the U.S. at any instant in time. This is also equivalent to 12,500 more times the electricity that Britain used in 2006. I would hate to be the one running that operation. Fortunately, the laboratory is part of the National Ignition Facility, the world’s foremost laser research center mandated to create a laser powerful enough to ignite hydrogen fusion and supported by the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Complex.

The nuclear experiment will entail compressing a frozen hydrogen fuel cell at a hundred billion atmospheres and transform the lasers into extremely intense X-rays in 1/1,000,000 of a second. The result? The controlled nuclear fusion reaction will create a small star that hopefully will generate more power than the one used to fire the laser. What’s in it for you? For once, it could mean new clean power sources that would see the end of oil, coal and fission nuclear power, all from a tiny one of a billionth of a joule laser. It’s mind-boggling indeed.

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