When it reaches full operation in 2009, the National Ignition Facil-ity (NIF) beamline will put other, piffling lab lasers to shame. The NIF system will be 60 times as energetic as Nova (which generated 16 trillion watts), NIF´s predecessor at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the previous record holder. But achieving such intensity won´t come easy. The hardware and electronics that power the NIF laser require a space bigger than a football stadium.
Now, for the numbers that make