As big as a football stadium, the National Ignition Facility (NIF), under construction at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is scheduled for completion in 2009. The $3.5 billion undertaking will serve an impressive variety of users. When focused on a millimeter-size capsule filled with tritium and deuterium, NIF’s 192 laser beams will be able to heat and squeeze it with a 2-megajoule, nanosecond pulse of light (see the cover of this issue). As the facility’s name implies, such a pulse is thought to be powerful enough to ignite a thermonuclear burn in the hydrogen-isotope mix.
The NIF project is administered by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the stockpile stewardship program for ensuring the reliability of the nation’s nuclear arsenal in the absence of actual weapons testing. “But to get something as big as NIF through Congress and DOE,” says Livermore deputy associate director Bruce Warner,...
