The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is a $4 billion US Dollar (USD) structure being built at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, with funds provided by the US Department of Energy. The National Ignition Facility is an experiment in inertial confinement fusion (ICF), which is the same process that generates the Sun’s light and heat and is one possible route to fusion energy. Fusion combines light nuclei (such as hydrogen, deuterium, or tritium) to form heavier nuclei, releasing energy from the bonds between particles in the nucleus and producing a surplus of energy.
It’s not easy to start a fusion reaction. In fact, creating a self-sustaining fusion reaction, also known as “ignition,” necessitates extremely high temperatures (tens of millions of degrees) and/or pressures, and has never been done in a controlled manner. Only the uncontrolled explosion of a hydrogen bomb, the most powerful nuclear weapon, has resulted in ignition. Instead of using fusion energy for weapons, the National Ignition Facility aims to use powerful lasers to ignite a small fuel pellet. Some of its findings will also be used for nuclear weapons research, which has sparked outrage.
The National Ignition Facility has been in the works since 1997, but due to a series of setbacks, it will not be completed until 2009. Its target date for ignition is 2010. This will be accomplished by focusing a 500 terawatt laser beam onto a 2 mm wide fuel pellet made of deuterium-tritium ice that has been cooled to 18 degrees above absolute zero. The 500 terawatts of power will be delivered in picoseconds (billionths of a second), roughly 25,000 times faster than the world’s largest power plant (the Three Gorges Dam hydroelectric plant). The yield will range from 2 to 20 GJ (gigajoules).
Scientists at the National Ignition Facility hope to achieve ignition and show that inertial confinement fusion can be used as a power source. Even if all of the facility’s tests are successful, it will not be able to serve as a commercial fusion power plant. It would be more of a training and research base. Magnetic confinement fusion, which is carried out in experimental tokamak reactors, is the main competitor to inertial confinement fusion. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) is a tokamak reactor being built in Cadarache, France, at a cost of $9.3 billion USD. It is scheduled to be completed in 2018.