What is the National Ignition Facility?
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is a $4 billion US Dollar (USD) structure being built using funding by the US Department of Energy at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, in Livermore, California, in the United States. The National Ignition Facility is an experiment in inertial confinement fusion (ICF), one possible route to fusion energy, which is the same process that generates the light and heat of the Sun. Fusion fuses together light nuclei (like hydrogen, deuterium, or tritium) into heavier nuclei, producing a surplus of energy by releasing energy from the bonds between particles in the nucleus. Creating a fusion reaction is not easy. In fact, creating a self-sustaining fusion reaction — “ignition” — requires tremendous temperatures (tens of millions of degrees) and/or pressures, and has never been done in a controlled way before. Ignition has only been achieved in the uncontrolled explosion of a hydrogen bomb, the most powerful nuclear weapon. Instead of using fusio
