National Ignition Facility likely to miss target success date again

San Francisco Chronicle : According to a report released by the Department of Energy, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) will likely miss achieving stable fusion by the end of 2012. That failure would be another black mark for the project, which began construction in 1995 with a $1.1 billion price tag. The original 2002 completion date for the construction was pushed to 2009, and the total cost rose to $3.5 billion by the time the facility was finished. And Congress has approved a $450 million yearly operating budget since then. Located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, NIF uses an array of lasers to start a fusion reaction in pellets of hydrogen. The process is similar to that used to ignite thermonuclear bombs. When this ignition is achieved, it will allow researchers to study and model new bomb designs as well as evaluate the safety of the US’s existing stockpile of weapons.