But Friedman was impressed, especially with the enormous facility:

I began my tour there with the N.I.F. director, Edward Moses. He was holding up a tiny gold can the size of a Tylenol tablet, and inside it was plastic pellet, the size of a single peppercorn, that would be filled with frozen hydrogen.

The way the N.I.F. works is that all 192 lasers pour their energy into a target chamber, which looks like a giant, spherical, steel bathysphere that you would normally use for deep-sea exploration. At the center of this target chamber is that gold can with its frozen hydrogen pellet. Once one of those pellets is heated and compressed by the lasers, it reaches temperatures over 800 million degrees Fahrenheit, “far greater than exists at the center of our sun,” said Moses.

More importantly, each crushed pellet gives off a burst of energy that can then be harnessed to heat up liquid salt and produce massive amounts of steam to drive a turbine and create electricity for your home — just like coal does today. Only this energy would be carbon-free, globally available, safe and secure and could be integrated seamlessly into our current electric grid.

The facility powered up for the first time a few weeks back. Over the next year, it will continue to ramp up the laser for a test ignition run in 2010. If, and that’s a BIG IF, ignition proves successful…the transition to a game changer in energy will pick up speed. A pilot plant for fusion power is estimated to cost around $10 billion, close to the cost of a new nuclear plant.

Read Thomas’ entire recap of his journey here.

We’ll be starting the discussion tonight with a KQED QUEST video tour of the NIF facility: