How's this for star power?

by Frank James

Today marks the official certification as ready for use of the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

No, it has nothing to do with the Obama Administration's takeover of GM.

The NIF is actually a $3.5 billion scientific tool featuring a large array of lasers to be used by scientists to several ends -- to "test" nation's nuclear stockpile without actually exploding bombs, to learn if laser-powered nuclear fusion reactions can be used to generate electricity and for pure science.

The NIF will produce crazy amounts of energy using a similar fusion process to that which powers the Sun and other stars.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman recently wrote about the project. An excerpt:

The government-funded N.I.F. consists of 192 giant lasers -- which can deliver 50 times more energy than any previous fusion laser system. They're all housed in a 10-story building the size of three football fields -- the rather dull cover to a vast internal steel forest of laser beams that must be what the engine room of Star Trek's U.S.S. Enterprise space ship looked like.

I began my tour there with the N.I.F. director, Edward Moses. He was holding up a tiny gold can the size of a Tylenol tablet, and inside it was plastic pellet, the size of a single peppercorn, that would be filled with frozen hydrogen.

The way the N.I.F. works is that all 192 lasers pour their energy into a target chamber, which looks like a giant, spherical, steel bathysphere that you would normally use for deep-sea exploration. At the center of this target chamber is that gold can with its frozen hydrogen pellet. Once one of those pellets is heated and compressed by the lasers, it reaches temperatures over 800 million degrees Fahrenheit, "far greater than exists at the center of our sun," said Moses.

More importantly, each crushed pellet gives off a burst of energy that can then be harnessed to heat up liquid salt and produce massive amounts of steam to drive a turbine and create electricity for your home -- just like coal does today. Only this energy would be carbon-free, globally available, safe and secure and could be integrated seamlessly into our current electric grid.

This obviously would be great if it works. But even if it doesn't pan out as a great new source of energy to generate electricity, it's still a fairly mind-blowing project.

The facility took more than 15 years to build and was controversial because people in the nuclear non-proliferation community thought its mission in simulating weapons in the U.S. nuclear stockpile for testing purposes could give other nations an excuse, albeit flimsy, to build nuclear weapons.

It was also seen as a way to save LLNL. During the 1980s the lab had plunged into research for President Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" program hoping that would be its salvation.

But when that program mostly was discontinued, the lab went searching for a new program to justify itself. The NIF largely became its reason for being.

Early on when the hole was being dug for the facility's foundation, the discovery of mammoth bones at the site, a one-time softball field for lab workers, briefly stopped the project until paleontologists could remove the 10,000-year old creature's earthly remains. This prompted some news stories as to how ancient bones were getting in the way of the most modern of scientific endeavors.

That was well before some other fossils, this time members of the U.S. Senate, voted to kill the project because it had reached $2.8 billion.But Congress eventually funded it.

Now we await the first firing of the lasers at the pellet with hydrogen which should take place next year.