Lasers have become an integral piece to mankind's way of life. They allow us to listen to our favorite CD's, watch our favorite DVD's, remove that unwanted back hair, and annoy the hell out of high school math teachers who are trying desperately to find out who's holding the laser pointer that keeps shining in their eye. At the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, however, members of the National Ignition Facility have built a laser you would never want pointed at your bikini line.

At the 7-acre NIF building complex in Livermore, California, 192 laser beams with a peak power of 500 trillion watts fire simultaneously at precisely the same sphere of fuel two millimeters in diameter, which is roughly the size of a BB, to produce nuclear fusion. The fuel then compresses to a speck 50 micrometers across and heats up to three million degrees Celsius, producing 1.8 megajoules of energy in a few billionths of a second, numbers comparable to the energy in stars and our planets sun.

Before this technology, scientists simply set off a nuclear bomb to study energy of this magnitude, but since the ban on nuclear testing in the 1990's, they've had to find other means to sustain confidence in the nuclear weapon stockpile. It also gives scientists the resources to study basic science concerns, such as astrophysical phenomena, materials science and nuclear science. NIF's other major goal is to provide scientists with the physics understanding necessary to create fusion ignition and energy gain for future energy production, which could serve as a proof-of-concept design for a fusion power plant.

To generate the fusion process, the 192 laser beams are generated, amplified and then converted from infrared to ultraviolet light because the interaction of the beams with the fusion target is much easier with an ultraviolet frequency. The conversion is accomplished by passing the laser beams through plates cut from large, rapid growth crystals, which are roughly the size of a 32-inch television set.

 The target is a small gold canister the size of a pencil eraser that contains the fuel, deuterium and tritium, two isotopes of hydrogen. When fired, the hydrogen atoms fuse producing helium and release energy, which should continue to cause fusion reactions until the fuel runs out, all within a few billionths of a second.

While fusion has been created before in the lab, most experiments required more energy than they produced. The Z machine at the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories uses electricity instead of lasers to compress hydrogen isotopes to produce fusion. However, scientists have admitted that a significantly larger Z machine would be needed to generate more energy than it uses. The ITER fusion project in Cadarache, France, which should be operational by 2018, uses magnetic confinement of hot plasma to produce fusion with a more stable continuous stream of energy. While the ITHER may be more suited to generate electricity than the very short bursts the Livermore laser produces, according to Edward Moses, the principle associate director for NIF and Photon Science at LLNL, the Livermore laser is "60 to 100 times more energetic than any other laser system" known to man.

While all this technology seems like it belongs a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, engineers will be the first to admit that you couldn't strap this thing on a space station and blow up Alderaan. Engineers at MIT have stated that an average nuclear power plant generates 12.4 billion kilowatt hours a year, while an average house requires about 1,000 kilowatt-hours per month. Currently the laser burst releases energy equivalent to about five kilowatt-hours of electricity. In order to meet current demand, a power plant would require the NIF lasers to fire 5 to 10 times a second rather than once every couple of days as is it does right now.

While the NIF laser could be a guideline to a future for fusion-generated power, the real mission at hand is the study of the nuclear weapons stockpile. After the United States ceased underground testing in the 90's, the U.S. Department of Energy created the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP) to maintain the reliability and safety of the U.S. nuclear deterrent without the need for full-scale testing. The SSP comprises an ongoing process of surveillance, assessment, refurbishment and reassessment. Currently, NIF provides the only means for scientists to examine thermonuclear burn, which will also help maintain the skills of nuclear weapons scientists so our Military commanders can sleep peacefully at night.

Because the NIF allows scientists to separate the pieces of the physics of a nuclear weapon and examine each piece in isolation, not only will they create controlled thermonuclear burn in a laboratory setting, but NIF beams can also be used to create conditions of extremely high energy density in materials. Understanding how the many different kinds of materials used in nuclear weapons behave - especially as they age beyond their intended lifetimes - under the extreme environments produced in a thermonuclear reaction is key to SSP's mission.

At the moment, the oldest nuclear weapon in the stockpile was added in 1970. Not to many people own a 39-year-old car or refrigerator, and those machines are far less complex than a nuke. NIF will be used to help address planned and proposed Stockpile Life-Extension programs, which are planned refurbishments of weapon systems to ensure their long-term safety and reliability. By keeping our nuclear weapons safe, the people of America will be safe.