World's largest laser completed

Published in Scientific American:

http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=worlds-largest-laser-nif-2009-04-01&sc=DD_20090402

• The US Department of Energy has announced that the world's biggest laser is ready to start blasting away after 12 years in the making. 
• The $3.5 billion stadium size National Ignition Facility housed at Lawrence Livermore California consist of 192 separate beams, each of which stands as the most energetic ever built.
  
• The beams will focus on a single point to unleash their full, joint potential. The target : a BB size pellet of frozen hydrogen in the center of a 33 foot(10 meter) diameter chamber. The ultraviolet lasers should heat the pellet to hundreds of millions of degrees, forcing nuclear fusion to occur-the same super high heat and pressure atomic reaction that fuels the stars.
• Scientists have long hailed fusion as the ultimate clean energy source- hydrogen is abundant, though producing and storing it remains economically unattractive.
• A fusion reaction requires an immense amount of energy to get going, robbing its potential power output and harvesting and storing that energy is another task altogether.
• Beyond gunning for fusion, NIF could also one day focus its lasers on burning up some of the spent nuclear fuel from power plants that now sits in on-site pools or cement casks.
• Other NIF missions include updating supercomputer simulations of the nation's aging nuclear stockpile, which cannot be tested due to a 1992 moratorium.