National Ignition Facility

File:NIF target chamber.jpg

A construction worker inside NIF's 10 meter target chamber. Almost all of the engineering on the NIF laser is on an enormous scale.

The flashlamps used on the National Ignition Facility laser are truly massive, the largest ever in commercial production.

The National Ignition Facility, or NIF, is an ultra-high power laser research device currently under construction at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Livermore, California.

The NIF will be used for multiple exercises. However, the device's main roles will be nuclear weapons testing for the United States [1] and fusion power experiments.

The device will use inertial confinement fusion to enable scientists to study nuclear fusion and other processes involving extremely dense plasmas. The NIF's implementation of the concept uses 192 high-powered lasers, each traveling 1,000 feet (305 meters), to compress a beryllium covered deuterium-tritium (D+T) fuel pellet the size of a BB to densities of up to 1000 grams per cubic centimeter, over 6 times the density of the centre of the Sun. The lasers will fire beams totaling 500 terawatts of power (1,000 times the electric generating power of the United States in 2004) for a few billionths of a second, in order to achieve the desired effect. As of October 2005, eight of the lasers have been completed.

The process is predicted to achieve self-sustaining nuclear fusion reactions, or ignition. Construction of the NIF is expected to be completed in 2009 with the first fusion ignition tests planned for 2010. When first proposed in the early 1990s, the cost for a "super laser" was estimated at less than $700 million. Current estimates put the ultimate cost between $3.5 and $6 billion.

Criticisms

Critics argue that the most promising electricity-generating fusion technology is that of magnetic confinement, and as such money could arguably be better spent on facilities such as ITER. Proponents point to the long and unsuccesful history of magnetic fusion experiments in terms of generating net electrical output, and the many decades which will have to pass before viable commercial energy is predicted to flow from ITER and its successors (the first commercial fusion power plant from ITER is not expected before 2050).

Critics also point out that it appears that the primary basis for the construction of NIF is to help with the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program (in particular the secondary - or fusion - stage of hydrogen bombs), and since this second stage is extremely resilient, it appears there is no need for testing the second stage in the manner that NIF would. Additionally, if problems with the fusion component of bombs did develop in the future, there is much doubt as to how much the information learned from NIF would be of aid in maintaining the stockpile.

To some, it appears that any further expenditures in ensuring the capabilities of nuclear weapons is an egregious waste of money and step away from an ultimate goal of nuclear disarmament.

External links

References

"Building the world's most powerful laser". CNN. Retrieved Jun. 17, 2005.