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LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is under construction at LLNL. It will eventually operate as a 24/7 user facility.

NIF encompasses three interconnected buildings, the Optics Assembly Building, the Laser and Target Area Building, and the Diagnostics Building. The Laser and Target Area Building is a ten-story-building the size of three football fields. It houses the 192 laser beams in two identical, 400-foot long rooms designated Laser Bays, which are each subdivided into two sets of 48 beams called clusters. When completed, it will be the world’s largest and highest-energy laser with 192 laser beams. The beam, which operates from the Master Oscillator Room (MOR), will be focused on a millimeter-sized target of hydrogen fuel, causing the hydrogen atom’s nuclei to ignite and fuse. The goal is to achieve self-sustaining nuclear fusion and energy gain. The laser can create temperatures of over 100 million degrees and pressure 100 billion times that of Earth’s atmosphere, equivalent to the conditions found in stars, the cores of giant planets, and nuclear weapons. Besides fusion ignition experiments, NRF will be used in other non-ignition research in hydrodynamics, radiography, and material properties under extreme conditions.

It has three primary missions: national security, understanding the universe, and energy for the future.

In 1992, President George H.W. Bush issued a nuclear testing moratorium. Then in September 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Without the ability to conduct underground tests to assess the reliability of the existing weapons as they age, the U.S. relies on supercomputer simulations to maintain its nuclear weapons stockpile as a deterrent against foreign aggression. The DOE National Nuclear Security Administration’s Stockpile Stewardship Program oversees the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Because the NIF can replicate the conditions in a thermonuclear weapon, it will provide data for such simulations.

The NIF’s has the ability to create extreme temperatures and pressures, replicating the conditions found in stars, supernovae, and giant planets. This capability will allow it to be used in the study of high-energy-density (HED) physics in accordance with its second-stated mission. Because it is designed to show the feasibility of inertial confinement fusion, the NIF is expected to lay the groundwork for fusion ignition as a clean, potentially unlimited energy source, thus fulfilling its final-stated mission.

The DOE officially approved construction of the NIF at LLNL in its Record of Decision for the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Program, which was issued on December 19, 1996. The record was based on information analysis from the Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for Stockpile Stewardship and Management. PEIS investigated the potential human health consequences and environmental ramifications of the proposed change to the DOE complex.

Construction officially began May 27, 1997 when the ground was broken at the site after Congress had approved it for the Stockpile Stewardship Program. On September 28, 2001 the NIF conventional facility, including all buildings and support facilities such as the Optics Assembly Building, laser foundations, and the target area building envelope, was completed. In December 2002 the first four laser beams were commissioned and fired. In August 2003, NIF became an experimental facility even as construction continued. In May 2004 the first multi-laboratory collaboration between LLNL and Los Alamos National Laboratories began on a series of hydrodynamic experiments at NIF. Laser Bay 2, the first of two 96-beam bays, was commissioned on July 31, 2007. Target experimental campaigns are scheduled to start at the end of 2008. As of January 3, 2008 NIF was 90% complete. Over 3,200 of the 6,200 total line replaceable units had been installed. Construction of the project is scheduled for completion in March 2009 and the first full-scale fusion ignition experiments are set to begin in 2010.

The National Ignition Campaign (NIC) will head the first experimental campaign and manage the NIF transition following project completion to routine operations as an HED science facility by 2013. NIC, a partnership between LLNL, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, the Laboratory for Laser Energetics, and General Atomics, will manage the first credible attempt at ignition. Its ICF experiments will benefit research in astrophysics, nuclear physicals, radiation transport, materials dynamics, and hydrodynamics. Between FY 2008 and FY 2012, NIC will develop and implement protocols for the use of NIF as a shared national resource. The facility will be open to users beyond DOE researchers, including academia.

In April 2007 the Federation of American Scientists issued a report, “The Stockpile Stewardship Program: Fifteen Years On,” about NIF, criticizing the project for being behind schedule, over budget, and non-essential. The National Research Council of the National Academies defended the worth of NIF to the Stockpile Stewardship Program in its own report, “Plasma Science: Advancing Knowledge in the National Interest,” published later that year. Operation of the facility was expected to start at the beginning of FY 2003, but has since been pushed back to 2010.