Not a Sophisticated Tanning Booth, Much More
NIF has a number of missions including replacing calamitous nuclear testing with nuclear weapons simulations, producing new forms of energy to replace finite fossil fuels, and running experiments to understand the universe, the formation of stars, planets, supernovas and black holes.
How the Facility Operates
Materials scientists, laser physicists, engineers and designers built the facility that houses 7,500 large metric scale optics, 26,000 small optics, and 60,000 control points. NIF laser pulses travel 1 km from the master oscillator room to a target in 4.5 µs with an accuracy of 50 µ.
