Transcript for the Piece Audio version of How to Make Your Own Supernova

MOSES So We?re walking up to the National Ignition Facility here at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the east bay?

Ed Moses directs the massive, $4 billion dollar science experiment known as the National Ignition Facility, or NIF. He?s also one of its most enthusiastic tour guides.

MOSES And this facility houses what will be, in a very short time, less than a year, the world?s most energetic laser. (Ambi: card swipe, door slams (keep up during next track)

If this project inspires superlatives, that?s because its goal is something never before done on Earth: To aim those powerful lasers at a hydrogen-filled capsule, creating, they hope, nuclear fusion, the same kind of reaction that powers our sun and other stars.

Ambi: loud Ring, then elevator fx (

It will happen inside here.

MOSES This is the target chamber!

It looks like something out of an Austin Powers movie, maybe... a time travel machine for Dr. Evil. It?s a gleaming metal ball, the size of a small house. Protruding from it, like porcupine quills, are about fifty metal ducts.

MOSES Instead of air ducts, they?re light ducts, where the laser beams come in. And in each one of those ducts there?s four laser beams.

You know little those laser pen pointers? You?d need a billion billion of them to match the cumulative power of all these lasers. Yes, a billion billion. And when scientists finally flip the switch on those lasers, here?s how long it will last:

MOSES Not a hundredth or a thousand, but a billionth of a second

In that moment, the energy from those lasers will be a thousand times the strength of the entire United States electrical grid. The heat, unimaginable.

MOSES We will raise the temperature of the target to a hundred million degrees, pressures that are a hundred billion atmospheres. That?s hotter than the center of the sun.

Inside that tiny, BB-sized target, the heat and pressure will be so intense that the hydrogen atoms -- scientists hope -- will smash together, with tremendous force.

MOSES And when you do they come so close together on a nuclear level that the nuclei penetrate each other, and make helium and a neutron pops out.

That is nuclear fusion - and it releases more energy than the lasers put in. Supporters hope decades from now this could be a clean energy source. Or it could help us understand how the universe works.

MOSES Instead of using our telescopes and looking at something that happened a thousand and million, a billion years ago, what if you could say ?I would like to have a supernova on march 21st at 2 in the afternoon? and bring all your instruments and snuggle them right up to the target, and do your experiment. And that?s something we?ll be able to do.

Nuclear fusion also powers hydrogen bombs, which explains why the government got involved in NIF in the first place.

Back in 1996, the United States signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which bars member countries from exploding actual nuclear bombs. But if America can?t test its nuclear weapons, how do we know they still work? That, says Moses, is where NIF comes in.

MOSES [cut ?the?] One of its original goals was to create conditions that exist in a nuclear weapon without actually having a nuclear weapon.

Since then, NIF has run years behind schedule and billions over budget. But Moses says the benefits of the project, like the potential for clean energy, are worth it.

Traditional nuclear power plants, use fission - or the separation of atomic particles -- to make energy. But a fusion plant where atoms are smashed together would create no long-term nuclear waste, and runs on water. Moses says it would change the world. Others are less optimistic.

PAINE Well that?s complete nonsense.

Christopher Paine is with the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington DC, and a longtime critic of the NIF project. He says even if NIF scientists achieve fusion - and Paine is deeply skeptical they will, it could take a century to scale that multi-billion dollar technology into an affordable power plant. Given global warming, he says, that?s a luxury we don?t have -- especially when we already have a source of unlimited nuclear fusion power.

PAINE It?s readily known to most people as the sun. And had the billions that been expended on NIF and will be expended on NIF been directed towards our ability to convert solar energy into electricity, the country could be much better off.

Paine believes that, when it comes down to it, the National Ignition Facility isn?t really about electricity. It?s about nuclear weapons.

PAINE There is an application for NIF and that is preserving and even enhancing US capabilities to design a new nuclear weapons, conceivably without nuclear testing.

NIF Director Ed Moses counters out that Congress has debated these points again and again - and it?s continued to fund the project. But, for some, the verdict may rest on what happens a year or so from now: when scientists fire up those lasers and hold their breaths.

For Quest, I?m Amy Standen, KQED Public Radio.

Back