Diciamo che speravo di sbagliarmi.
Cito alcuni punti salienti dall’articolo del Bollettino, potremmo definirli le quattro ragioni per cui ci si dedica alla “fusione laser”:
[…]I’m sure you you’ve heard the story that people in Congress—there are people who started to press for going back to nuclear testing. So the Stockpile Stewardship Program does need to demonstrate that the “science-based” approach does work. And as I said before, NNSA decided to build new experimental facilities (one of which was the National Ignition Facility), efforts were made to construct new simulation codes to help certify the weapons, and investments were made in new generations of advanced computers that these codes required and could run on. And NIF was meant to, in part, validate the design code approaches used for the weapons. Before NIF was even completed, they chose a target experiment that—in combination with simulation codes advances—could demonstrate that we knew what we were doing.
One of the key target experiments that they picked was: We’re going to show that we can ignite and sustain a fusion reaction in the laboratory. That’s why NIF was called the National Ignition Facility. This goes back to the late ‘90s, with NIF’s groundbreaking in 1997.
[…]Now, it turns out that’s only one of the uses of NIF. You might ask, “Why did they pick ignition?” First, because the science is so cool, and you can demonstrate that you know what you’re doing. Second, because when you get to ignition, you get a huge blast of radiation, just enormous, as well as extremes in temperature and pressure. And that you can use to test for example, the properties of various materials critical to weapons. You can answer questions like, “Suppose I had different kinds of material in the bomb? How would they respond to this blast of radiation? To these temperatures and pressures?” Thus, as far as temperature, radiation environment, and pressures are concerned, you could do that experiment right there at NIF. So this second use relates to the fact that you can replicate the physical conditions during a nuclear blast.
And there’s a third reason, by the way. We’re going to have nuclear weapons for a long time, no matter how much we want to get rid of them. They’re going to be hanging around until we have a different regime of trust between countries. What that tells you is that going into the distant future—in the next 50, 60, whatever, 100 years—if you want to you have these weapons, you have to deal with them. That means you need a cadre, I think almost like high priests, high priests of weapons, that you actually trust that they know what the hell they’re doing. The generation of folks that built the original bombs, they’re basically retired or gone altogether. Now we have a whole slew of new folks, youngsters. They’re supposed to know how to do this.
[…]And you want to train them how to do this.
But now you can’t build entirely new weapons anymore. So what do you do? What you do is you see whether or not you can train them to work on physics problems that are just about as hard as building a weapon, designing a weapon, but still related to the physics of weapons. In fact, it turns out that the physics problem that they set themselves to solve—getting ignition and sustained fusion at NIF—is actually harder than designing and building a functional nuclear weapon. You may be surprised to learn that doing things on NIF turns out to be harder; it is harder. […] And thus, this facility can be used to train the next generation of weapons designers; you can regard it as a teaching facility for the next generation.
[…]If you succeed in doing this—attaining ignition and sustained burn—you’re sending a signal to adversaries that you have the capacity to actually do the things you say you can do. And that’s a big deal—it definitely is a fourth motivation for striving towards ignition and gain.
Non credo si possa essere più chiari di così.
Più energia libera per tutti. Rilasciata di colpo, anche a casa tua.
Chissà se, sotto sotto, pure Iter, alla fin fine, a quello punta, ad essere una palestra per i prossimi architetti di nuove bombe, o se invece noi europei ci crediamo veramente che possiamo sperperare come ci pare perché avremo centrali a fusione per scaldarci con calma. Che a crederlo possibile ce ne vuole, ma chi può dirlo? Abbiamo geni a tutti i livelli (e magari ci riescono davvero alla faccia mia).
Più o meno come mi son sentito quando ho visitato l’acceleratore del CERN
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Pensa da acceso…
I plasmi sono una cosa fantastica, affascinante.
Vederli dal vivo è una cosa molto diversa che vederli in un video. E no, non ho visto quelli del Tokamak, ma quelli dei laser CO2 da 500Watt…
Plasma ho “visto” solo un vecchio taglio laser
Facciamo ‘sto plasma dal vivo allora! Servono solo un microonde e un po’ di incoscienza: per il primo organizziamo una colletta, mentre per la seconda dovremmo essere già a posto così
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Dico solo che potevano pulirlo il forno prima di filmare l’esperimento 
eh penso siano gli sperimentatori precedenti che hanno fallito, quei residui che vedi…
Stupid idea production… è tutto un programma…
In compenso l’uva è un ottimo amplificatore di microonde… Microwaving Grapes Makes Plasma - YouTube
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Cioè non mi posso più fermare a pisciare contro una pianta in santa pace?
Wow!! Clamoroso!
Certo che puoi… sarà il carburante per la produzione di luce: mica le piante possono fare tutto da sole… 
È scienza, è sogno, è meraviglia… soprattutto hanno (circa) ricreato una proto spada laser, cioè quel tipo che ha preceduto quelle che abbiamo visto per anni al cinema, meno evolute, con “pacco” batteria a zaino… una lavoro niente male…
World's first proto-lightsaber! - YouTube
Nonostante già ora i ghiacciai della Groenlandia tendano a fondersi più rapidamente di quelli antartici, i modelli si sono basati solo sui dati di questi ultimi per calcolare il ritmo di fusione e il conseguente innalzamento del livello dei mari, una sottovalutazione che potrebbe essere consistente: According to an updated model, glaciers in the icy north could be slipping into the sea up to 100 times faster than previously forecasted.
Mi sa che converrà tenersi alla larga dalle coste.
Tutti in Piemonte 
Io so nuotare.