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I can’t speak to NIF but back in undergrad I got to tour a similar facility at the University of Rochester[0] called the laser energetics lab. It’s a similar e

by avs733 5y ago

I can’t speak to NIF but back in undergrad I got to tour a similar facility at the University of Rochester[0] called the laser energetics lab. It’s a similar enormous laser. If I remember, and it’s surely not exactly the same thing, a lot of the issue is around pumping down vacuum spaces. Targets at the lab were suspended from handgrown spider silk (the lab employed a resident spider raiser/silk puller). And they tried to keep the large laser cavity pumped to vacuum constantly because pumping things to ultra low vacuum with things like veto pumps just takes forever. Stuff outgasses and creates militorr of pressure for annoying periods of time. The same issue shows up post maintenance in semiconductor manufacturing. Prep and recovery for maintenance can take 10x the time of the actual maintenance action itself. The facility itself was fascinating. Banks upon banks of capacitors in the basement that apparently sound like a gunshot going off when it’s fired. Giggawatts of power for picoseconds. [0] https://www.lle.rochester.edu/ https://www.lle.rochester.edu/

technothrasher 5y ago
When I was in school at the U of R, I lived with a woman who worked at the LLE. It was fascinating to hear her stories. She showed me a storage building there that had stacks and stacks of Unix workstations piled up collecting dust, because they had had classified info on them and so weren't allowed to be sold or thrown away even though they'd had all their storage removed. That was painful, all I wanted was one. Nobody would notice. She said no. :( But I did manage to get remote access to their Cray-2 by agreeing to do some free sysadmin work for them. U of R has some pretty sketchy nuclear past history though, as the hospital ran some tests in the 1940's of injecting some unwitting patients with plutonium, uranium, and polonium to see what would happen. There's an almost abandoned tunnel (actually, it may well be abandoned at this point) that goes underneath Elmwood Ave between the medical center annex and the hospital proper which has a very old, very locked door labelled "isotope storage chamber". Creepy.

by avs733 5y ago

technothrasher 5y ago

When I was in school at the U of R, I lived with a woman who worked at the LLE. It was fascinating to hear her stories. She showed me a storage building there that had stacks and stacks of Unix workstations piled up collecting dust, because they had had classified info on them and so weren't allowed to be sold or thrown away even though they'd had all their storage removed. That was painful, all I wanted was one. Nobody would notice. She said no. :( But I did manage to get remote access to their Cray-2 by agreeing to do some free sysadmin work for them. U of R has some pretty sketchy nuclear past history though, as the hospital ran some tests in the 1940's of injecting some unwitting patients with plutonium, uranium, and polonium to see what would happen. There's an almost abandoned tunnel (actually, it may well be abandoned at this point) that goes underneath Elmwood Ave between the medical center annex and the hospital proper which has a very old, very locked door labelled "isotope storage chamber". Creepy.