5min chapter

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating cover image

Laser Fusion: Is it Hype? Professor Charles Seife (#283)

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

CHAPTER

The Total Lifetime Cost of the National Ignition Facility

The National Ignition Facility in Illinois is the world's largest fusion facility. The project has cost more than $4 billion to build and operates for about 10% of that each year, says physicist Charles Thorne. NIF uses lasers which are basically a building size laser bank with 192 beams worth,. And then shined into a little rod called a gold sleeve very much like what happens in the secondary of a hydrogen bomb. This radiation gets converted to floating X-rays and you have tiny pellet sized isotopes.

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