Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
goes on in a hydrogen bomb, so one can learn more
about bombs if you can make the micro-bomb go off,
justifying funding the program for decades from the
weapons part of DOE. If it does work, you can in
principle produce electricity, though that takes consider-
ably more engineering.
Although the physical device took more time and a lot
more money than originally planned, it did reach its
goals. The laser itself, the most powerful ever built,
exceeded its design speci
cations and the rest of the
facility also meets its specs. However, the micro-bomb
did not go off. The problem is that though the laser
delivers, for reasons not yet understood the pellet is not
compressed and heated enough. It was thought that pre-
vious smaller facilities had led to an understanding of
what goes on inside the chamber in which the pellet
resides, but those experiments were clearly not the com-
plete story, and the problem with the model of what
happens is still not understood. Diagnosing the problem
will not be easy, but meanwhile there are other things in
science and in weapons technology that the facility can be
used for. Is this another in the series of ever larger
failures? No one knows yet.
Magnetic: A magnetic con
nement system has a
donut-shaped chamber containing a ring of ionized gas
(the plasma) that carries a huge circulating electric current
con
fields.
Unlike inertial systems, magnetic systems have reached
the temperature necessary for fusion, but only through
external heating devices that themselves use so much
energy that you get no net energy out while they are on.
ned to the donut by very large magnetic
