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 tes

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.