Sandia National Laboratories participation in the National Ignition Facility project

The National Ignition Facility is a $1.1B DOE Defense Programs Inertial Confinement Fusion facility supporting the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program. The goal of the facility is to achieve fusion ignition and modest gain in the laboratory. The NIF project is responsible for the design and construction of the 192 beam, 1.8 MJ laser necessary to meet that goal. - The project is a National project with participation by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Sandia National Laboratory (SNL), the University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics (URLLE) and numerous industrial partners. The project is centered at LLNL which has extensive expertise in large solid state lasers. The other partners in the project have negotiated their participation based on the specific expertise they can bring to the project. In some cases, this negotiation resulted in the overall responsibility for a WBS element; in other cases, the participating laboratories have placed individuals in the project in areas that need their individual expertise. The main areas of Sandia's participation are in the management of the conventional facility design and construction, the design of the power conditioning system, the target chamber system, target diagnostic instruments, data acquisition system and several smaller efforts in the areas of system integration and engineering analysis. Sandia is also contributing to the technology development necessary to support the project by developing the power conditioning system and several target diagnostics, exploring alternate target designs, and by conducting target experiments involving the ''foot'' region of the NIF power pulse. The project has just passed the mid-point of the Title I (preliminary) design phase. This paper will summarize Sandia's role in supporting the National Ignition Facility and discuss the areas in which Sandia is contributing. 3 figs