"The machines look cool"
They certainly do, have a look at the z-machine on good-old APOD:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060313.html
… the Z Machine running at Sandia National Laboratories created a plasma … in excess of two billion Kelvin, making it arguably the hottest human made thing ever in the history of the Earth and, for a brief time, hotter than the interiors of stars. The Z Machine experiment … purposely creates high temperatures by focusing 20 million amps of electricity into a small region further confined by a magnetic field … the Z machine released about 80 times the world's entire electrical power usage for a brief fraction of a second.