January 9th, 2014 -- The National Ignition Facility
 

The Atlantic's usually-awesome In Focus photoblog has a particularly stunning set of photos up today: 25 pics (spanning two decades) showing the construction of a piece of lab equipment to explore nuclear fusion.

The scale of the project is mind-blowing. A spherical chamber, 33 feet in diameter, houses lasers that, in total, can shoot up to a trillion watts at a target that is 2 millimeters in diameter. Doing this creates "[...t]emperatures of 100 million degrees and pressures extreme enough to compress the target to densities up to 100 times the density of lead."

Seriously, just go look at the whole set. The captions are full of mind-blowing details about a project I never really even knew existed.

http://cellar.org/2014/nif1.jpg

Inside the 33-foot target chamber.

http://cellar.org/2014/nif2.jpg

The 2mm target.

http://cellar.org/2014/nif3.jpg

At the end of the pencil-like arm on the right is that 2mm sphere of hydrogen.

Seems like a lot of trouble and expense to destroy a 2mm sphere of hydrogen, couldn't they hide it in an old Marlboro pack and shove down to the bottom of the trash? :lol2:

Great IoTD gvidas!

I interviewed there right out'ta school. Got the whole tour.

Living around there though...sucks. Hot, dusty, -1000 appeal.

the big pencil
 

How do they sharpen that pencil in the bottom pic?

Ditto:
:lol2:

frickin' lasers!!!!

What's really nutz is trying to find out what's happening there NOW. Seems the place went black.