Warren and I toured the National Ignition Facility (nuclear fusion testbed) nestled in the Lawrence Livermore National Labs today, the origin of the hydrogen bomb and some serious spook activity these days. I had to leave all electronics behind and get weighed before entering — strangely disarming. The guards were festooned with body gear that I had never seen before, all in black.

On the left is <a href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/222792" rel="nofollow">Ed Moses</a>, the mastermind of this massive project to save the Earth. He is confident that they will achieve ignition and net energy gain in 2010. The long-term goal is a 100-300x fusion energy multiple on laser energy input.

The sights put sci-fi movies to shame. 192 lasers 100x as powerful as any predecessor converge to ignite a pellet of solid hydrogen, which collapses to helium, as in the sun, releasing a massive amount of energy (neutrons and x-rays)… with a nod to E=MC^2.

For 20 nanoseconds, the lasers deliver 500x the power of the entire U.S. power grid. The pellet reaches 3 million degrees Celsius.

They even rely on perfect crystals – grown to the size of oil barrels – for non-linear optics (harmonic frequency shifting from infrared). The rectangular lenses are huge, and atomically smooth on the surface, and precisely thick to 1/100th the wavelength of light.

Oh, and to watch it, they built an x-ray camera clicking at an impressive 50 billion fps.

Each of the 48 quad-pack lasers looks like scaled up versions of the fiber optic transceivers used in telecom networks. It was like a Lost in Space episode where we were shrunk to circuit-size midgets left to marvel at the world we had created.

The DOD requested a large door on the side of the target chamber so they can test their satellites for exothermic events (e.g., if North Korea set off a nuke in space, it could have dramatic effect).