http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1242869/THE-WIDER-VIEW-Incredible-scenes-inside-fusion-plant.html THE WIDER VIEW: Incredible scenes inside a fusion plant By Mail On Sunday Reporter Last updated at 10:01 PM on 16th January 2010 Comments (25) Add to My Stories The Z Machine could be the answer to the world's energy shortage, a device that once sparked with a relatively small electrical input can produce 290 terawatts of power. That's equivalent to 80 times the world's total power output. Today that power can only be released in a pulse lasting 70 billionths of a second... but it's a start Based at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, it is used to research thermonuclear reactions - for example, what happens at the heart of a hydrogen bomb detonation. Now it has a more productive application: finding a way to fuse heavy water atoms to create fusion power. Fusion is the Holy Grail of the power industry: cheap, clean, safe and unlimited. The downside is, with current technology, the reaction is difficult to control. When the machine fires, 36 cables - each as thick as a horse's torso - spark simultaneously. The cables fire a pulse of 50 trillion watts into a target the size of a cotton reel. Inside the target is a can filled with wires finer than a human hair. The wires vaporise, creating temperatures as high as 3.5 billion degrees C, the highest ever created by man and an X-ray pulse in excess of 290 terawatts. The central vacuum chamber of the Z Machine, above, is 10ft in diameter and 20ft deep, surrounded by banks of capacitors - the enormous 'batteries' used to store the charge that fire the machine. When the wires that are inside the tiny 'target' are vaporised, the tungsten threads are forced to travel inwards at a speed of over 3,000 miles per second, and the result is that enormous sudden release of energy. The powerful fluctuation in the magnetic field when the machine is discharged generates an electric current in all the metallic objects in the chamber - hence the impressive lightning or 'arcs and sparks' seen here. The 36 cables feeding the energy pulse into the Z Machine are insulated by chambers containing two million litres of insulating oil and two million litres of deionised water. While the Z Machine can generate an extraordinary pulse of energy, it only does so for a tiny fraction of a second - the power used is only enough to provide electricity for 100 houses for two minutes, and is supplied by the local electricity company via a wall socket. --------------- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_Machine This article is about the X-ray generator. For the Infocom virtual machine, see Z-machine. The Z machine at Sandia National Laboratory. Due to the extremely high voltage, the power feeding equipment is submerged in concentric chambers of 2 megalitres (2,000 m³) of transformer oil and 2.3 megalitres (2,300 m³) of deionized water, which act as insulators. Nevertheless, the electromagnetic pulse when the machine is discharged causes impressive lightning, referred to as a "flashover", which can be seen around many of the metallic objects in the room.The Z machine is the largest X-ray generator in the world and is designed to test materials in conditions of extreme temperature and pressure. Operated by Sandia National Laboratories, it gathers data to aid in computer modeling of nuclear weapons. The Z machine is located at Sandia's main site in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Contents [hide] 1 Operation overview 2 Prospects 3 Z-Pinch Inertial Fusion Energy program 4 See also 5 References 6 External links [edit] Operation overview The Z machine fires a very powerful electrical discharge (several tens of millions of amperes for less than 100 nanoseconds) into an array of thin, parallel tungsten wires called a liner (pictured here). The high electrical current vaporizes the wires, which are transformed into a cylindrical plasma curtain. Simultaneously, the current density induces a powerful magnetic field and their combination creates Lorentz forces which radially compress the plasma into a z-pinch process. The imploding plasma produces a high temperature and an X-ray pulse which can create a shock wave in a target structure. The target structure is placed in a cavity inside the wires called a hohlraum. The powerful fluctuation in the magnetic field (an "electromagnetic pulse") also generates electric current in all of the metallic objects in the room (see picture at upper right). The vertical cylinder's axis is conventionally termed the z-axis, hence the name "Z machine". Originally designed to supply 50 terawatts of power in one fast pulse, technological advances resulted in an increased output of 290 terawatts, enough to study nuclear fusion. Z releases 80 times the world's electrical power output for about seventy nanoseconds; however, only a moderate amount of energy is consumed in each test (roughly twelve megajoules)—the efficiency from wall current to X-ray output is about 15%.[1][2] Marx generators are slowly charged with energy prior to firing. Sandia announced the fusing of deuterium in the Z machine on April 7, 2003.[3] This application could result in an efficient method to ignite a nuclear fusion reaction starting from a small capsule of deuterium. Unfortunately many technical difficulties—for instance the small quantity of deuterium that can be contained in the hohlraum and the practical impossibility of transferring the compressed capsule to a larger nuclear fuel reservoir—prevent the machine from being used this way for the moment. Besides being used as an X-ray generator, the Z machine propelled small plates at 34 kilometres a second, faster than the 30 kilometres per second that Earth travels in its orbit around the Sun, and three times Earth's escape velocity.[4] It also successfully created a special, hyperdense "hot ice" known as ice VII, by quickly compressing water to pressures of 70,000 to 120,000 atmospheres.[5] At the beginning of 2006, the Z machine produced plasmas with announced temperatures in excess of 2 billion kelvin (2 GK, 2×109 K) or 3.6 billion °F, even reaching a peak at 3.7 GK or 6.6 billion °F.[6][7][8] It was achieved in part by replacing the tungsten wires with thicker steel wires. This temperature, which enables a 10% to 15% efficiency in converting electrical energy to soft x-rays, was much higher than anticipated (3 to 4 times the kinetic energy of the incoming wires on axis). Thus far, it is currently the highest human-made temperature ever achieved according to The Guinness Book Of Records. The origin of this extra energy still remains unexplained, but it has been theorized that small-scale MHD turbulence and viscous damping would convert magnetic energy into thermal energy of the ions, which then would transfer their energy to the electrons through collisions.[7][8] ----------------- http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/extreme_machines/4212225.html Arcs of current from an electromagnetic pulse crisscross metal structures in this New Mexico particle accelerator. The electrical hardware is submerged in oil and deionized water for insulation. (Photograph by Sandia.gov) By Jy Murphy Published in the February 2007 issue. EmailEmail Print RSS 2.0 Buzz up! Buzz up! this story ALSO SEE... * 11 Shocking Home Electrical Safety Tips * Powermat Introduces Inductive-Compatible Batteries for Wireless Charging * Are Green Jobs For Real?: Special Report * Ardica Moschi Personal Power System: Gift Guide * How Centuries-Old Flywheels Can Improve the Electric Grid See more... Section Archive KEYWORDS * electricity * supercomputers Z MACHINE SPECS • The accelerator is 109ft. wide and holds up to 1.1 million gallons of liquid • When it reopens in July, the Z machine will produce up to 26 million amps It lurks in Albuquerque, N.M., a partially submerged particle accelerator built to generate data for supercomputers that simulate nuclear explosions. But in its 10 violent years of life, the Z machine has surprised its creators at Sandia National Laboratories. Using a technique known as the z-pinch — which sends massive current through a target, imploding it — the accelerator has unlocked a range of cosmic mysteries. Last year it produced temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin, hotter than the inside of the sun. And for its final trick before going offline for an eight-month overhaul, the Z machine generated enough pressure to melt a diamond. -------------- http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-z-machine.htm The Z Machine is a gigantic machine used to generate x-rays and extreme temperatures for the testing of hypotheses about nuclear explosions. Using tremendous power feeding apparatus, it runs a current through a tungsten or steel wire, causing it to vaporize into a charged plasma. At the same time, the tremendous current density in the surrounding air creates a magnetic field which causes the charged plasma to be further condensed, a process known as z-pinch, after the vertical axis along which the plasma was compressed in the earliest British machines. The imploding plasma produces temperatures as great as 3.7 billion Kelvin, or 3.6 billion degrees F, and generates an x-ray pulse that can induce a shock wave in a target object. The temperatures and pressures generated in the Z Machine are so immense that the properties of nuclear fusion can be studied using them. In fact, the peak temperature is about 300 times higher than that in the core of the Sun, where nuclear fusion takes place. The power the Z Machine can achieve is so immense, that beyond achieving the "typical" fusion of deuterium and tritium (one of the lower-temperature forms of fusion), the Z Machine can fuse together light nuclei such as hydrogen or lithium atoms, which could theoretically lead to aneutronic fusion. If aneutronic fusion could be developed into a practical power generator, it would avoid many of the biohazard and handling risks associated with fusion where the energy primarily comes from ballistic neutrons, as in deuterium-tritium fusion. Originally designed to supply 50 terawatts of power (enough to power 50 million homes) for a burst less than 100 nanoseconds, the Z Machine was redesigned to supply 290 terawatts of power. The electric discharge created at the instant of the A-pinch is so massive that sparks jump off every metallic object in the room where the Z Machine is located. The effect produced photos that represent some of the most memorable science photography of 2005. The electric discharge still occurs despite the power feeding equipment being submerged in 2,000 cubic meters of transformer oil and an additional 2,300 cubic meters of deionized water. The discharge is known as "arcs and sparks" or just "lightning." --------------------- Visiting Sandia Labs http://www.sandia.gov/about/locations/newmexico/index.html On Kirtland AFB