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NIF will suck research dollars from programs more likely become powerplant platforms. Click-bait wins. Not that it really matters, it will always be 30 years a

• killjoywashere 4y ago
  NIF is not for power plant research. It's an end run around the nuclear test ban treaty. The US signed a treaty promising to not conduct any nuclear weapons tests. So the NIF creates a functional equivalent by smashing energy from 192 high energy lasers into a very small space, the interior of a hohlraum. At the center of the hohlraum is a tiny capsule of deuterium and tritium. And under all that energy, for a brief moment, some of the tritium and deuterium fuse.
  • salawat 4y ago
    ...you realize that has nothing to do with conventional nuclear weapons other than being a neutron source for more complete fission of a fissile primary right? Most of the energy in "fusion" weapon is all fission based. You aren't going to turn a hohlraum into the basis of a bomb.