Peter Tertzakian reports in Calgary Herald :
About a month ago, lost amidst the clamor of the global economic crisis, there was a subtle event in the world of energy, seemingly no more significant than the striking of a match, but one that is likely to make us change the way we think about our evolving energy needs.
Our energy use goes back to the discovery of fire, which is a long time ago. A 2008 archaeological discovery along the Dead Sea rift now suggests that our fire-making ability dates as far back as 790,000 years. We've come a long way since the days of our prehistoric hominid ancestors with bony eyebrows and sloped foreheads (though some days the state of the world leaves us to wonder.)
Although we've been using fire for nearly 800 millennia, our ability to control it with precision only began less than 200 years ago. In 1827, John Walker, an English chemist, discovered a way of treating small pieces of wood with chemicals that made them burn when friction was applied. The new disposable devices were sold as “Lucifer matches,” and were rapidly adopted. Concurrent with the industrial revolution, the ability to ignite fuel on demand with wooden matches was a milestone event that contributed to the beginning of society's modernization, and ravenous energy appetite.
On March 10th, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Labs in California (https://lasers.llnl.gov) ignited a newly completed high-tech match of their own. Delivering enough power to light up 10,000 100-watt light bulbs, 192 high-power lasers were focused onto a point no larger than a couple of match heads. The ensuing “flash” broke the one-megajoule barrier (a million joules of energy) for the first time ever—a milestone event in the world of high-energy physics.
Clearly, the scientists at NIF are not interested in a making a better barbecue lighter (that's already been done; the Zippo cigarette lighter was invented in 1932). The primary use of NIF's multi-billion dollar device is to prove that controlled nuclear fusion is a viable process for generating clean, nearly limitless electrical power on earth by inventing a workable fusion reactor.
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