Home Page
[Livermore Laboratory will get $199 million next year for nuclear weapons research, despite delays and management problems]
Congress agreed this week to almost triple funding for a controversial laser fusion project at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to partially offset $1 billion in cost overruns at the experimental nuclear weapons effort.
The agreement to increase funding for the National Ignition Facility (NIF) next year to $199 million came despite opposition from several members of Congress who are angry over delays, technical troubles and management gaffes at the $4-billion project.
Sixty times more powerful than any laser ever built, the NIF laser is designed to focus 192 beams on a single tiny target in the hope of igniting fusion--thus allowing scientists to experiment with the forces in a nuclear explosion without ever detonating a bomb. The laser project is the keystone of an effort to maintain the safety and reliability of the aging U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.
Part of the newly appropriated money--$69 million--will be withheld until the Department of Energy certifies to Congress that the program can be completed on time and on budget. At least $25 million is to be diverted from other nuclear weapons work at the Livermore Laboratory.
"We're very pleased that Congress has recommended additional funding for the National Ignition Facility and that the project should move forward," said Livermore director Bruce Tarter.
"This action validates the extensive peer reviews of NIF that the Department of Energy has spearheaded over this past year--all of which have been quite positive."
Those reviews were prompted by public disclosure last year of serious problems at the controversial facility. Federal auditors at the U.S. General Accounting Office later concluded the laser project was more than $1 billion over budget and could be up to six years late, with no guarantee that it would ever work as promised.
The auditors reported that officials at the Energy Department and Livermore knowingly downplayed NIF's growing technical problems, even altering an outside contractor's evaluation to give the laser project glowing reviews last year. Project manager Michael Campbell, an influential laser physicist, resigned when it was discovered that he had never completed his doctorate.
"This [funding] decision sends the message that if you lie about the success of your project or you mismanage taxpayer money, Congress will punish you by increasing your funding," said Keith Ashdown, communications director at a private Washington-based watchdog group called Taxpayers for Common Sense, which has been tracking the project's problems.
Project opponents in the Senate tried and failed to cap construction funding. They also failed to force an independent review of the project by the National Academy of Sciences. The funding is part of an energy and water bill, approved by the House and Senate, that now awaits President Clinton's signature.
"This is too much money to spend on a project that is out of control," said Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who sought to limit the laser's funding. "This is the time to slow down, conduct some independent studies, reconsider how we can best maintain the nuclear weapons stockpile and whether this risky program is really critical to that effort.
"Instead," Harkin said, "we are saying 'full steam ahead.' "
A mammoth laser project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will apparently not have to be halted, as proponents had feared, after Congress this week nearly tripled its original budget for the 2001 fiscal year to cover large cost overruns and construction delays. "Frankly, it was nothing short of a miracle," Representative Ellen O. Tauscher, a California Democrat whose district includes the laboratory, said of the sharp increase that she supported.
She said the increase had to overcome opposition from members of Congress who said that project officials had not been forthcoming on the likely costs of the project and that the move would not have been possible without the nation's budget surplus this year.
Called the National Ignition Facility, the project is designed to train 192 converging laser beams on pellets of nuclear fuel like hydrogen, crushing and heating them in order to set off tiny thermonuclear explosions. Officials at the laboratory and the Department of Energy, which runs it, hope that those experiments will help them study nuclear weapons without testing them in much larger explosions.
But the projected cost of the laser has ballooned to $4 billion, nearly $1 billion more than originally expected, after laboratory officials greatly underestimated the complexity of the project and then did not report growing problems to the Energy Department and Congress.
The officials have said the overruns grew out of management problems that have been corrected, while critics maintain that the laser still has technical difficulties.
The officials said the Clinton administration's original request for the project in 2001, $74 million, would have forced it to shut down.
In votes on Thursday and Monday, the House and Senate approved an increase to $199 million. The money is part of an energy and water bill that still is subject to approval by President Clinton. The bill faces a veto threat because of an unrelated environmental dispute, but Congressional aides say the laser financing will almost certainly remain intact in any agreement.
Clay Sell, a staff member on the energy and water subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said $60 million of the increase amounted to new financing, while the rest came from other weapons programs at Livermore.
The increase had strings attached, including heightened oversight of the project and a study to determine whether the project could be replaced by a smaller version with fewer laser beams, or a cheaper alternative based on different technology.
Madelyn Creedon, the deputy administrator for defense programs at the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration, said she believed the full-scale project was "essential for keeping our nuclear weapons reliable and safe."
Ms. Tauscher said that while the management of the project had been "terribly bungled" she believed that those problems had now been fixed and that the science behind the laser was sound.
Home Page