21st December 1999
By JAMES GLANZ, New York Times
(
http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/122199sci-laser-facility.html)
Since late August, an effort to build the world's largest laser
has suffered a series of embarrassments that have tarnished the
project's reputation and undermined its role as leading
justification for a ban on nuclear tests.
Now Energy Secretary Bill Richardson says the entire project and
its management may have to be restructured, amid soaring cost
overruns.
Big cost overruns, a legal question and a resignation dog laser
project and at least one senator has raised questions about
whether tiny nuclear explosions to be triggered by the lasers
would violate the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
In the National Ignition Facility, or N.I.F., as the project is
known, powerful lasers would be used to create conditions similar
to those in nuclear weapons, allowing scientists to study the
reliability of the nation's nuclear stockpile without tests. The
lasers, under construction at the Energy Department's Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in California, would crush and heat
pellets of nuclear fuel with 192 converging beams, generating a
rapid release of fusion energy. That release would create
conditions similar to those created by nuclear weapons, allowing
scientists to study their properties.
Government scientists say that the laser project is a crucial
component of the nation's effort to ensure the safety and
reliability of its aging nuclear stockpile without actually
testing the weapons in nuclear explosions.
Beyond its applications to weapons, moreover, physicists hope
that the project will help them understand the behavior of
materials under extreme conditions and explore the possibility
that nuclear fusion could be used for the peaceful generation of
power.
But N.I.F., originally estimated to cost $1.2 billion, has been
plagued by scheduling delays, technical problems and cost
overruns that could go as high as a third of that figure. Its
former director, E. Michael Campbell, took a leave of absence in
August after questions arose about his academic credentials, and
announced last week that he is resigning from the laboratory.
And even though $800 million has been spent and construction has
been under way since 1997, unhappiness with the overruns in
Congress means the project faces the threat of cancellation.
In the latest blow, a letter to Secretary Richardson in late
October, Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, questioned whether
such experiments themselves might violate the "zero
yield" provision in Article I of the treaty, which would
prohibit any nuclear test of any size. Successful N.I.F.
experiments would release the energy equivalent of about 15
pounds of TNT in an extremely small fraction of a second within a
contained vessel.
"It is troubling that we are planning to ignite
thermonuclear explosions at N.I.F. that may violate the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty's ban on nuclear explosions,"
Senator Harkin said in a statement, citing the administration's
pledge not to test while continuing to seek ratification of the
treaty, which he also supports.
Asked about the letter, officials at the State Department and the
Energy Department said that laser fusion experiments of lower
power have always been granted special exemptions during
negotiations for test ban treaties, including the latest one.
"I think it's a fair question that deserves an answer,"
said John D. Holum, senior adviser to the Secretary of State for
arms control and international security.
Mr. Holum, who helped negotiate the test ban treaty, added that
during negotiations with other parties to the treaty, "we
specifically carved out that activity as something we expected to
continue under a zero yield treaty."
But the brevity of the Senate's debate on the beleaguered treaty,
precluded a full discussion of such points, Mr. Holum said. The
Senate refused to ratify the treaty in October but the Clinton
Administration still supports the treaty. While the treaty has
little chance of passage next year, it is likely to be a campaign
issue.
More serious consequences for the program could emerge from Mr.
Richardson's recent finding that cost overruns may have been
deliberately hidden from him and from upper management at
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
According to Mr. Campbell, whose formal title was associate
director for laser programs at Livermore, the cost overruns
involve the assembly of the project's multitude of delicate,
high-tech parts, a task that turned out to be more challenging
than expected.
In an interview last week, Mr. Richardson said preliminary
investigations have shown that "there may have been an
effort of concealment."
He said Mr. Campbell bore significant responsibility for NIF's
troubles.
Mr. Campbell took a leave of absence in late August after it was
disclosed that he did not have a Ph.D., as he had led people to
believe, and has announced he will leave the laboratory after the
completion of reviews of the project expected to be finished
soon.
For his part, Mr. Campbell said in an interview that the
overruns, whose magnitude is still being estimated, , had
originally been discovered during a review of the project that
had been initiated at his direction.
Mr. Campbell said, there was no delay in reporting the problems
and no effort to conceal them.
"I was the guy in charge," he added, "so I accept
whatever responsibility the secretary chooses to assign to me. I
hope he gets on with the project and encourages the good people
who have worked and are still working so hard to make it
succeed."
Mr. Richardson, the Secretary of Energy, said he had found that
mismanagement of the project went well beyond laboratory
officials. In September, he withheld $2 million of a performance
fee from the University of California, which manages the
laboratory for the Energy Department. And he said that some
responsibility was borne by officials at the Energy Department
who manage the overall program to ensure the safety and
reliability of nuclear weapons without testing, called stockpile
stewardship.
Dr. Victor H. Reis, a former Assistant Secretary of Energy, who
ran the stockpile stewardship program until last July, responded
that strict limits on staffing at the Energy Department had
forced it to rely over the years on assessments of the project by
Livermore and outside organizations, such as the National Academy
of Sciences.
"Every one of those reviews stated specifically that the
program was on track, both in terms of schedule and cost, and
every review reiterated the program's critical importance to the
stockpile stewardship program," Dr. Reis said in a
statement.
The last of those reviews was completed early this year, before
the overruns finally became known.
Dr. John McTague, a former vice president for technical affairs
at Ford Motor Company who is leading one of the Energy
Department's new reviews of the project, said that the size of
the project may have made gauging its ultimate cost and schedule
particularly difficult.
"Even if you look at the physical scale, it's
colossal," Dr. McTague said. "It's bigger than Ben
Hur," he said of the roughly football-stadium-size project.
Dr. McTague agreed that the cost overruns arose mainly because
the project plan had underestimated the difficulty of assembling
the individual parts of such a complex project. In particular, it
turned out to be more difficult than thought to fabricate the
long chambers through which the laser beams must travel before
reaching the target. Those chambers must be kept ultraclean in
order to prevent motes of dust from disrupting the powerful laser
beams.
Longtime critics of the project, including the Natural Resources
Defense Council, an environmental group based in Washington,
disputed that assessment, saying that it suffered from technical
problems as well as mismanagement. Difficulties in producing the
laser's optics and fuel pellets, they say, could prevent it from
ever operating properly. But Dr. George H. Miller, the associate
director for national security at Livermore who now oversees the
facility, maintained that its problems were more managerial than
technical.
"We have shown that the fundamental technical problems are
soluble," Dr. Miller said.
He emphasized that the project is also considered to be crucial
for the future of Livermore, a weapons laboratory that is
struggling to stay afloat after the end of the cold war. Work at
the site would also include unclassified research on the use of
laser fusion to generate energy for peaceful purposes, such as
power plants, he said.
Dr. Miller said that the project was also critical to the success
$4.5 billion stockpile stewardship program, although some
scientists and bomb designers have disagreed.
The task now, said Mr. Richardson, the Secretary of Energy, will
be to restructure the project once a complete report on the cost
overruns becomes available in mid-January. Changes, he said, may
include extending the construction schedule, increasing
managerial accountability and perhaps further personnel moves.
"It's been very, very poorly managed and poorly
implemented," Mr. Richardson said, "but it's a sound
science project."
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