Focus all that laser power onto the surface of the capsule.Take a laser that for about 20 billionths of a second can generate 500 trillion watts-the equivalent of five million million 100-watt light bulbs.Fill it with 150 micrograms (less than one-millionth of a pound) of a mixture of deuterium and tritium, the two heavy isotopes of hydrogen.Take a hollow, spherical plastic capsule about two millimeters in diameter (about the size of a small pea).See How ICF Works for a more detailed description of inertial confinement fusion. Physicists have pursued a variety of approaches to achieve nuclear fusion in the laboratory and to harness this potential source of unlimited energy for future power plants. Replicating the extreme conditions that foster the fusion process has been one of the most demanding scientific challenges of the last half-century. The light and warmth that we enjoy from the sun, a star 93 million miles away, are reminders of how well the fusion process works and the immense energy it creates. In a star, strong gravitational pressure sustains the fusion of hydrogen atoms. These conditions currently exist only in the cores of stars and planets and in nuclear weapons. NIF was designed to produce extraordinarily high temperatures and pressures-tens of millions of degrees and pressures many billion times greater than Earth’s atmosphere. A tiny capsule inside the hohlraum contains atoms of deuterium (hydrogen with one neutron) and tritium (hydrogen with two neutrons) that fuel the ignition process. All of the energy of NIF’s 192 beams is directed inside a gold cylinder called a hohlraum, which is about the size of a dime.
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