The National Ignition Facility On target, finally A machine for
testing nuclear weapons opens for business WHAT do you get when
you focus 192 lasers onto a pellet the size of a match head and
press the “fire” button? The answer, hope physicists at the
National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, California, is:
the most powerful machine on the planet. The NIF, which is
scheduled to go into operation on May 29th, is designed to
create conditions like those found in stars—and also in the
explosions of hydrogen bombs. To do that requires, for the brief
instants when it is operating at full tilt (a total of three
thousandths of a second a year), that it has a power of 500
trillion watts, about 3,000 times the average electricity
consumption of the whole of planet Earth. The pellets at which
this energy is directed are made of frozen hydrogen. The aim is
to make those pellets undergo nuclear fusion—the process that
causes stars to shine and hydrogen bombs to explode. Although
the justification for building the N