The National Ignition Facility (NIF), a cutting-edge facility that houses 192 of the world’s largest lasers, is responsible for research into nuclear weapons, which allows it to ensure the integrity of nuclear weapons without having to actually test them.

Another major role that the NIF has is its research into fusion energy. Using lasers, the NIF blasts a fuel pellet of hydrogen atoms in a technique called “Inertial Confinement Fusion.” The idea is to use enormous heat and pressure to crush the fuel pellet, forcing the hydrogen atoms to fuse together, and release massive amounts of energy.

ASP has followed the NIF’s work closely, and you can see a fact sheet that we have on their fusion research here.

The Director of the NIF, Ed Moses, spoke back in October at The Big Science Summit hosted by The Atlantic, about their work on fusion energy (I know it’s a bit old, but just got my hands on it). He gave a background on the facility and the promise of fusion energy – clean, safe, secure and abundant energy that is virtually endless. He spoke about how great ideas can lead to huge innovations, but that there needs to be scientific infrastructure to support them, “You have to have an infrastructure around these guys to take advantage of them, and if you don’t then, you know, a lot of these things just die on the vine. But, it’s our goal to look for people, young people, with great ideas and nurture them.”

There are two videos below. The first is a short, 2 1/2 min video showing the highlights of his talk. The second is the full-length video, which runs about 33 minutes.

And below is the full length version:

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