site was on May 29, 1997. At the time, the DOE was estimating that the NIF would cost approximately $1.1 billion and another $1 billion for related research, and would be complete as early as 2002. Later in 1997 the DOE approved an additional $100 million in funding and pushed the operational date back to 2004. As late as 1998 LLNL's public documents stated the overall price was $1.2 billion, with the first eight lasers coming online in 2001 and full completion in 2003. The facility's physical scale alone made the construction project challenging. By the time the "conventional facility" (the shell for the laser) was complete in 2001, more than 210,000 cubic yards of soil had been excavated, more than 73,000 cubic yards of concrete had been poured, 7,600 tons of reinforcing steel rebar had been placed, and more than 5,000 tons of structural steel had been erected. To isolate the laser system from vibration, the foundation of each laser bay was made independent of the rest of the structure. Three-foot-thick, 420-foot-long and 80-foot-wide slabs required continuous concrete pours to achieve their specifications. In November 1997, an El Niño storm dumped two inches of rain in two hours, flooding the NIF site with 200,000 gallons of water just three days before the scheduled foundation pour. The earth was so soaked that the framing for the retaining wall sank six inches, forcing the crew to disassemble and reassemble it. Construction was halted in December 1997, when 16,000-year-old mammoth bones were discovered. Paleontologists were called in to remove and preserve the bones, delaying construction by four days. A variety of research and development, technology and engineering challenges arose, such as creating an optics fabrication capability to supply the laser glass for NIF's 7,500 meter-sized optics. State-of-the-art optics measurement, coating and finishing techniques were developed to withstand NIF's high-energy lasers, as were methods for amplifying the laser beams to the needed energy levels. Continuous-pour glass, rapid-growth crystals, innovative optical switches, and deformable mirrors were among NIF's technology innovations developed. Sandia, with extensive experience in pulsed power delivery, designed the capacitor banks used to feed the flashlamps, completing the first unit in October 1998. To everyone's surprise, the Pulsed Power Conditioning Modules (PCMs) suffered capacitor failures that led to explosions. This required a redesign of the module to contain the debris, but since the concrete had already been poured, this left the new