A Short Fuse For Fusion As Ignition Misses Deadline

The National Ignition Facility in Livermore, Calif., has been called a modern-day moonshot, a project of “revolutionary science,” and “the mother of all boondoggles.”

NIF, as it’s called, is a $5 billion, taxpayer-funded superlaser project whose goal is to create nuclear fusion — basically a tiny star inside a laboratory. But so far, that hasn’t happened.

At first glance, NIF sounds like something out of a comic book from the 1950s. But NIF director Ed Moses disagrees slightly, saying in 2008: “I think we’re working on something far more far out, and far cooler than anything in science fiction or fantasy.”