Re: PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE -- Number 702 September 28, 2004 by PhillipF. Schewe and Ben Stein

From: Uncle Al (UncleAl0_at_hate.spam.net)
Date: 09/28/04 

Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 12:19:05 -0700

Sam Wormley wrote:
>
> PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE
> The American Institute of Physics Bulletin of Physics News
> Number 702 September 28, 2004 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein
>
> TWENTY MILLION AMPS OF CURRENT, released from a bank of capacitors
> over 100 nsec and sent into a cage of wires, is converted at
> Sandia's Z facility into 1.8 mega-joules of soft-x-ray energy, with
> a peak power of 200 tera-watts. Thus the Z machine is the highest
> peak-current pulsed-power device in the world (over nanosecond
> timescales), and the most potent source of soft x rays (radiation in
> the 100-10,000 eV range). The total x-ray energy conversion
> fraction---utility power turned into x rays---is 10-15%, much higher
> than for any other x-ray source. This makes the Z machine
> potentially useful for studying two important transactions: nuclear
> fusion reactions, maybe for producing commercial power;

bull*** of the most loathsome order

> and the
> radiation spewing out of nuclear bombs.

Ah, the agenda! All fusion research is weapons' codes refinement.

> Owing to treaties, the
> physics of nuclear weapons cannot be studied directly by explosions
> but only indirectly by tests such as those at Sandia National Lab
> with its Z machine.

Riiight. Remember the Eleventh Commandment and diamond anvil presses
heated by pulsed lasers and pulsed neutron sources. When your budget
is big and top secret you use once and toss.
 
> The newest development in this subject is Sandia's ability to
> photograph the sequence in which the tiny array of wires carrying
> the stupendous mega-amp current implodes (the vaporizing wires are
> pinched inwards by a huge magnetic field) and forms an
> x-ray-emitting plasma.

They dumped the fast sketch artist and got a synchrotron? This kind
of fast imaging was perfected in the Manhattan project. Now we have
fine grain solid state detectors and volumetric detector spinoffs from
particle accelerators.

> The first surprise, once the dynamics of the
> event could be unfolded from data recorded with special crystals,
> was how long the pinched wires survived the ordeal. The series of
> photos, taken using a separate (weaker) x-ray source to backlight
> the interaction zone, should allow the Sandia researchers to
> optimize their wire-array design in order to produce even greater
> x-ray yields. (Sinars et al., Physical Review Letters, 1 October
> 2004; contact Daniel Sinars, dbsinar@sandia.gov, 505-284-4809; website
> http://www.opp.sandia.gov/pbfaz.html)

More studies are needed. Shouldn't all this be done in ISS FBUAR to
avoid gravity sagging?

[snip]
 
> The He-6 nuclei are made at a
> special beamline at Argonne National Lab by smashing a beam of
> lithium ions into a target. The stray He-6 atoms made in the
> process (about a million per second) are drawn into and lodged
> within a trap at a rate of about one a minute.

59,999,999/minute of them are getting away. Crappy yield. Needs a
better manager. Heck, needs 100 better managers, and their
secretaries and support staffs. The first progress reports will be
out in a jiffy, baed on extrapolated optimistic projected operations.
Can we have our productivity bonuses now?

[snip] 

-- 
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
 (Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz.pdf
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