Hasta La Gadget!

Looks like things are going smashingly well: the world’s most powerful laser, dubbed the National Ignition Facility, was unveiled Friday at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California near San Francisco, according to the Associated Press.

As we reported in April, the NIF consists of 192 separate beams, each one capable of traveling 1,000 feet per thousandth of a second and converging on a single target “the size of a pencil eraser.”

The report said that federal officials plan to use the super laser to maintain aging nuclear weapons without having to test them underground. Other applications will include astrophysics (including simulations of new planet and solar system formations), green energy development, and–here’s the one I always find fun–creating “controlled fusion reactions similar to those found in the sun.”