The Big Picture has a great series of pictures of the US National ignition Facility:
"Creating a miniature star on Earth" is the goal of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), home to the world's largest and highest-energy laser in Livermore, California
What amazes me most about it is the sheer amount of time, effort, ambition and long-term planning required to put a project like this together. They started in 1997 and will hopefully reach the expected result (fusion!) in 2012. I guess that's typical of big projects (bridges, skyscrapers, cathedrals), but in addition to this there's the incredible precision with which everything needs to be done - a single misaligned laser can make the whole experiment fail!
From my experience looking at software development processes, I can't even to begin to realize the size of the quality control efforts that must have been instated at every step of the building process...
The full series is located at: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/10/the_national_ignition_facility.html
EDIT: some of the cool comments:
#68: So this is how it ends ... "Scientists at NIF say they hope to achieve fusion by ***2012***."
#73: @64: This is expensive, but not THAT expensive in the context of modern government spending. Fusion energy cannot be developed without heavy public investment because the profits are decades away; no private company can possibly fund it. But getting it to work would be a game changer, providing an abundant, clean, non-radioactive source of energy.
#86: Can I mount this on a sharks head?
#93: Absolutely slack-jawed here at the scale of this endeavor. (this one captures my feelings well)
#128: X-men's Cerebro has been built, now where's Professor Xavier?