THE NEVADA LIGHTNING LABORATORY

THE MYSTERIES OF LIGHTNING

Natural lightning has intrigued the scientific mind throughout recorded history. Within the last century, scientists have made substantial progress towards revealing the inner workings of lightning, such as charge separation, stepped leaders, return strokes and dart leaders.

Until recently however, these classical models for lightning could not explain how lightning supposedly 'cheats' physics; A typical lightning strike can span the cloud to ground distance using only a small fraction of the voltage required, as predicted by laboratory measurements.

In 1992, Alex Gurevich of the Lebedev Physical Institute proposed the theory of 'Relativistic Runaway Breakdown,' in which lightning strikes are triggered by cosmic rays which ionize atoms, producing an avalanche of relativistic electrons directed through the clouds, ultimately initiating a lightning strike.

The runaway breakdown effect cannot be reproduced using present-day laboratories. The physical scale of the effect occurs over distances greater than 200 feet... small compared to a lightning storm but many times larger than any existing high-voltage testing apparatus available today.

HISTORY - LARGE-SCALE EXPERIMENTS

In 1901, Nikola Tesla began construction of his now legendary Wardenclyffe Tower, a mammoth multi-stage Tesla Coil structure rising to 187 feet in height.  The advertised purpose of this colossal tower was as a radio signalling station, but Tesla had secretly hoped to demonstrate that this facility could transmit power around the globe -- without wires.  However Tesla's principal investor, J.P. Morgan, quickly grew cool to the wireless power concept, upon discovering that there was no practical way to meter the electrical power delivered.  In 1904, Morgan cancelled the funding for Wardenclyffe and the project collapsed.  The project languished until World War I, when the tower was demolished to prevent its use as a landmark for German submarines.

Since the fall of Wardenclyffe, there have been no attempts to duplicate a Wardenclyffe-class Tesla Coil, anywhere in the world.  To date, the largest operating Tesla Coil is the Electrum Project -- a privately owned lightning sculpture capable of producing lightning discharges up to 50 feet in length.  However, detailed engineering studies show that it's possible to achieve strike distances many times greater than this, using a large-scale machine specifically designed to the purpose.

THE LIGHTNING LAB CONCEPT

In 1996, G.E. Leyh organized Lightning On Demand (LOD) with the goal of bringing a large-scale lightning research laboratory to reality.  In 1997, LOD completed the first Conceptual Design [CD1], and tested several of the Lightning Lab design concepts using the 40,000 Watt Experimental Coil at the Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard. The 110ft twin tower Lightning Laboratory from the CD1 is shown below.

Unlike natural lightning which is a singular, fleeting event, this proposed twin Tesla Coil design will be able to produce continuous discharges, in a controlled laboratory setting. The span between the towers and the total generated voltage are tailored towards re-creating actual relativistic runaway breakdown phenomena.

In 1998, LOD designed, constructed and commissioned the Electrum Project, a privately-owned lightning sculpture in New Zealand. Electrum provided a "real world test-bed" for the computer-based design methods needed to approach a large-scale coil design. Electrum's spacious top electrode also allowed a unique opportunity to measure in detail the intricate dynamics of the streamer discharges -- by enclosing a human observer inside the sphere, armed with test equipment.

In 2003, LOD completed the second Conceptual Design [CD2], using the test data and experience gained from the Electrum Project.  The CD2 makes several optimizations to the tower and top electrode geometry, and incorporates recent technological improvements in the primary drive circuitry.  In the CD2 each tower is now 122 feet high and features shielded observation areas for experimenters inside each top electrode.