CovOps
Age : 42
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 |  Subject: Laser Heats Up Fusion Future  Tue May 20, 2008 10:55 pm | |
| The world's most powerful laser has heated matter to a truly sweltering 10 million Celsius.
The Vulcan laser concentrated energy equivalent to 100 times the world's electricity production into a spot just a few millionths of a metre across.
Writing in the New Journal of Physics, scientists said they could create the conditions for fractions of a second.
The experiments demonstrated concepts which could be key to building a future nuclear fusion reactor.
The UK has proposed an even more powerful laser facility, known as Hiper (High Power laser Energy Research), which will study the feasibility of laser fusion as a potential future energy source.
"Hiper is a proposed, very large-scale facility and so we have to check that our understanding is correct," explained Professor Peter Norreys of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Oxfordshire where the experiments took place.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7407963.stm
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