NIF: National Ignition Facility

The National Ignition Facility, or NIF, will contain the world's most powerful laser, a research tool allowing scientists a glimpse into the equivalent of the center of the sun. Its abilities cannot be duplicated anywhere else on earth, and the experiments that achieve ignition and gain for the first time in a laboratory will have far- reaching implications for the future of national security, fusion energy, and a host of scientific and technological fields.

The NIF will focus 192 extremely powerful laser beams onto a pea-sized capsule of deuterium and tritium, forcing the two heavy isotopes of hydrogen to combine through compression and heating to 50 million degrees, producing ignition and a self-sustaining fusion reaction. Some of the mass will be converted to large amounts of energy which in a future fusion energy plant could drive a steam turbine.

Two kinds of targets are under study, both of which can be used in the NIF: direct-drive targets, in which a spherical capsule containing deuterium and tritium is struck directly by the laser beams, and indirect-drive, using a capsule inside a small, thin-walled cylindrical container made from high-atomic-number materials such as gold or lead. The container, called a hohlraum, converts the driver beams to X-rays which compress the fuel capsule.

As the largest laser facility in the world, the NIF will be able to achieve more dramatic results in high energy density physics than have been possible with lasers to date. The key physics of certain types of stars, of supernovas, of fluid dynamics and the interior of a nuclear explosion can be revealed, allowing confirmation of computer models and answering questions of nuclear stockpile reliability, fusion energy and astrophysics.

At a final cost of $1.07 billion, the football stadium-sized facility would be the centerpiece of the nation's Inertial Confinement Fusion research community, leading a worldwide effort to understand the challenging world of high-energy density physics and possible fusion- energy production. But leading the world into a nuclear testing-free world is also a vital element of the NIF. Its key role in what is described as Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship responds to a request of President Clinton to seek alternate means of maintaining confidence in our nuclear deterrent without nuclear testing. The NIF and other elements of the stewardship program allow researchers the insight to help maintain the stockpile in a safe and reliable fashion. Safe nuclear dismantlement and support for arms-control treaty negotiations and verification efforts would be aided with this capability as well.

Answers to important energy questions will be possible with the NIF, as one of the key challenges in inertial fusion research is to achieve ignition of the deuterium-tritium fuel capsule, and further, to show a modest gain in the energy produced. Once researchers can show that they produce more energy than the lasers used to create ignition, the inertial confinement community will have vital information on which to base the next step in their fusion energy development.

Inertial fusion and magnetic fusion are the twin approaches to fusion power mandated in the National Energy Policy Act of 1992. Providing the next step to a clean alternative to imported oil is an important goal for this area of inquiry. Groundbreaking research has been underway at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory using the Nova laser and at the University of Rochester with the Omega upgrade laser but the boost in technology achieved by NIF (40 times more energy and 10 times the power of Nova) will offer information on inertial fusion ignition and gain that is critical to the next era of ICF progress. It will determine the minimum drive energy (and cost) necessary to ignite an inertial fusion target, thus allowing evaluation of the viability of inertial fusion as an energy source.

Since the NIF will be able to reproduce conditions that exist in stellar interiors, it will become an important new tool for laboratory astrophysics. It will also allow important experiments in other fundamental sciences.

While the NIF has been recommended by independent scientific research groups and agencies, among them the National Academy of Sciences, the Fusion Policy Advisory Committee, the Inertial Confinement Fusion Advisory Committee and the JASONs panel of academic experts, it is not only science, energy and national security that is affected by the project, but also technology. For the nation's precision optics industry, a project of this scale provides a technological challenge that can result in world prominence. Low- cost, large scale precision optics manufacturing techniques will be advanced by the requirements of the NIF, as will laser and electro- optics technologies, high-speed instrumentation, micro-fabrication and advanced imaging devices.

Spin-off projects extend far beyond the requirements of the NIF project itself. Already, the national ICF program's laboratories have won 24 cooperative research and development agreements with industry totaling more than $160 million. These have been in microelectronics, microphotonics, advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, precision optics, environmental sensors and information storage.

Economic impact to the industrial partners in NIF's construction will be considerable three fourths of the $1.07 billion in total project costs will be spent in industry providing 1,200 jobs directly and two to four times that number indirectly. Construction would occur between 1996 and 2002.