Visited the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab the other day. They have the world’s largest and highest energy lasers. Using 192 giant laser beams focused on a tiny target filled with hydrogen fuel, the plan is to fuse the hydrogen atoms’ nuclei and produce net energy gain. Although the target is the size of a pencil’s eraser, it is contained in a huge target chamber. We took the following picture in front of the chamber.
