Corning Inc has been awarded a $16m contract to provide high purity fused silica lenses (HPFS) & windows for the US Department of Energy's National Ignition Facility (NIF), one of the nation's largest science projects. The NIF is a stadium-sized, $1.2bn, 192-beam laser complex now under construction at Lawrence Livermore National Labs. Due for completion in 2003, the facility will create, for the first time in a laboratory, brief bursts of self-sustaining fusion reactions similar to those occuring in the sun and stars. Corning will provide approximately 2600 HPFS lenses and windows to be used by NIF. They will transport & focus 192 laser beams onto a capsule of deuterium & tritium - fuel for nuclear fusion. Laser energy will compress the capsule, heating it to several million degrees, causing the fuel inside to ignite & produce a fusion burn.
