You know it’s going to be a good day when not one, but two laser stories come across the RSS feed. Better yet, these lasers are designed for good and not evil!
Laser no.1 promises to turn radioactive material into less radioactive isotopes by knocking out a neutron via transmutation. So far, iodine-129 (half life: 15.7 million years) has successfully been transmutated into iodine-128 (half life: 25 minutes.)
The obvious implication is that these lasers can zap the growing global stockpile of radioactive waste into more benign substances and thereby make nuclear power plants “more green”. I can hear a spin cycle whirring somewhere off in the distance…
Meanwhile, what would you say to burning sea water for energy? If you are John Kanzius, you would say “I did it by accident trying to desalinate salt water with radio frequincies in my garage.”
Too bad John, but radio frequencies and hydrogen are old news, because this week, it’s laser time!
Enter Takashi Yabe, a professor of mechanical engineering and science at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, who has been busy combusting the magnesium content of seawater with solar-powered lasers.
According to Yabe:
Magnesium has great potential as an energy source because it has an energy storage density about 10 times higher than that of hydrogen. It is also highly abundant, with about 1.3 grams found in every liter of seawater, or about 1,800 trillion metric tons in our oceans.
This man knows his lasers, too. Not only have Yabe and his colleagues developed a compact laser that offers a threefold improvement in efficiency over previous designs, but Yabe is a bling baller as well, having doped his Nd:YAG crystals with chromium, enabling them to absorb a broader range of light.
Doped-up, chromed-out crystals!? It just gets sillier from there:
The other innovation of Yabe’s laser is the use of a small Fresnel lens instead of large mirror lenses. Fresnel lenses reduce the size and amount of material needed to build a lens by breaking it into concentric rings of lenses. Typically, 10 percent of incident light is focused on the crystal, whereas with the Fresnel, it’s around 80 percent.
“In our case, we used only 1.3 meter squared and achieved 25 watts,” says Yabe. Although this is only a threefold increase, the laser output exponentially increases with the increasing area. “So we are expecting 300 to 400 watts with the four-meter-squared Fresnel lens,” he says.
Did I mention that Yabe is running this rig on sunlight!? TOO HOTT!!
Bottled water? Ridiculous.
Vitamin water? So last year.
Talk to me when you’re rollin’ with Laser water!!!
- Curtiss Martin
