NIF is the normal name given to the National Ignition Facility, a nuclear fusion research reactor being constructed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
NIF will use inertial confinement to enable scientists to study nuclear fusion and other processes involving extremely dense plasmas. The NIF's implementation of the concept uses 192 high-powered lasers to compress a deuterium-tritium (D+T) fuel pellet to densities of up to 1000 grams per cubic centimeter, over 6 times the density of the centre of the Sun. The lasers will fire beams totaling 500 terawatts of power for a few billionths of a second in order to achieve the desired effect. As of March 2004, four of the lasers have been completed.
This is predicted to achieve self-sustaining nuclear fusion reactions, or ignition. NIF is expected to be completed by the mid-2010s. Current estimates put the ultimate cost at between 3.4 and 5 billion dollars.
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