ikanreed wrote:
NIF released their April update halfway through May this month. Usually they’ve been very punctual. I thought the following quote of note:
A NIF Facility Maintenance and Reconfiguration period began on April 25 and was scheduled to continue until May 15. The NIF team’s goal is to upgrade NIF’s peak power to 500 trillion watts in preparation for this summer’s experiments.
That’s insane. The Hiroshima bomb was in the neighborhood of 60 trillion joules of energy. They’d pass that in an eighth of a second. I don’t pretend that’s even near how long they’re firing, but that’s still an unimaginable amount of power.
No, that was 500 Trillion WATTS not JOULES. The highest NIF has gotten I believe was 1.8 Megajoules per shot. Maybe a bit higher.
