That said, one application of the NIF is as the ultimate incinerator. Using it to literally rip apart hazardous waste (either the nuclear or more mundane variety) into lower atomic number atoms which are not a problem.
In the tour video they show a stream of plasma directed at the 'waste' of interest. This has two effects, one it disassembles any molecular bond reducing complex (and perhaps toxic) substances into their base atomic components, and two it accelerates the decay of unstable nucleotides into stable ones. I suspect that video is up on the NIF web site somewhere.
In the tour video they show a stream of plasma directed at the 'waste' of interest. This has two effects, one it disassembles any molecular bond reducing complex (and perhaps toxic) substances into their base atomic components,
That's real but that's not NIF or anything resembling it. The temperatures to tear apart molecular bonds are less than 10,000 degrees. NIF operates at nuclear fusion temperature s -- 100,000,000 degrees.