Livermore Lab Ignition Facility's woes Livermore lab very likely to miss another deadline

Scientists who have worked for more than a decade on a multibillion-dollar project to mimic the energy of the hydrogen bomb in experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have encountered so many difficulties, they have already missed their deadline and are unlikely to achieve success soon, government experts warn.

The lab's National Ignition Facility was designed to be a substitute for underground tests of nuclear weapons, which had become a political impossibility by the early 1990s. Without testing, the nation has no way to determine the safety and reliability of its aging arsenal of atomic weapons.

The National Ignition Facility opened at Livermore to great fanfare in 1995, and two years later its leaders said they would solve the staggering scientific problems involved in controlled thermonuclear fusion by 2010 or 2011. When those deadlines came and went, facility leaders set a new goal for the end of 2012.

But a new report by the U.S. Department of Energy, which oversees the Livermore lab, now concludes that the probability that National Ignition Facility leaders can meet this deadline is "extremely low."

The report, summarizing the views of more than a dozen outside experts with access to classified insider data, says facility scientists have made progress in resolving some technical problems in replicating the effects of a hydrogen bomb blast. But other crucial and difficult experiments, the government experts say, are only half to one-third complete.

Deadline 'unrealistic'

A second report from the National Ignition Facility's own technical review committee warns that deadlines for such complex experimental efforts are "unrealistic" because the project is working in a realm filled with many scientific unknowns.

The facility's goal is to achieve what's called ignition - re-creating the exploding heart of an H-bomb in the contained and self-sustaining explosion of a single tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel hidden inside a capsule no bigger than a BB shot.

That miniature blast would be ignited by the Livermore facility's array of 192 high-energy laser beams, all focused with a precision never achieved anywhere in the world. In effect, it would re-create the blazing energy of the sun and stars inside a laboratory.

Replacing testing

Its purpose is to understand the complex physics of thermonuclear weapons so completely that the safety and reliability of America's weapons stockpile can be assured, without returning to the era of underground nuclear testing that ended 20 years ago.

The Department of Energy study, led by David Crandall, the agency's adviser on national security, noted that computer codes based in part on past nuclear weapons tests are "critical tools" for guiding National Ignition Facility scientists toward more experiments needed before they can achieve ignition. But so far those codes have proved to be only "of limited utility," the experts warn.

The committee proposed a number of highly technical steps to improve the chances of the Livermore facility's eventual success, and said several members of the group "expressed optimism about achieving ignition within a few years."

Panel sees progress

The technical review committee for the National Ignition Facility, headed by physicist Alvin Trivelpiece, retired director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, said the Livermore scientists had indeed made progress since the panel's most recent review in February 2011.

"The NIF is operating in a stable, reliable, predictable and controllable manner," the committee said, and has made "extraordinary progress toward challenging goals."

But the Livermore scientists won't reach the "milestone" of achieving ignition this fiscal year, the experts said, and added: "The committee is concerned that this milestone ... may not be the best way to manage this program.

"A deadline imposed on an experimental discovery science program to achieve a particular result by a particular time at a particular cost is often unrealistic," the report said.

And the National Ignition Facility is indeed costly: When the project began in 1995, its estimated cost was $1.1 billion, with completion set for 2002 . The price tag later rose to $2.8 billion and then to $3.5 billion by the time the facility's building was completed in 2009.

Since then, Congress has appropriated more than $450 million a year for the effort's experiments, and some estimates predict that the costs could eventually reach more than $8 billion.

'Grand challenge'

Ed Moses, longtime director of the Livermore project, has been enthusiastic about the project from the start. "It's a grand challenge, and I'm confident of getting ignition," he said five years ago, "and whether it's 2010 or 2011, I'm sure we'll achieve it."

A Livermore lab spokesman said Moses and other facility leaders were unavailable this week to respond to the latest reports. But the spokesman e-mailed The Chronicle an unsigned statement that could be "attributed" to Moses, which said the facility "continues to make extraordinary progress toward its goal. ... The capabilities needed to achieve ignition are in place."

It added, "In the last year of precision experiments, NIF has successfully resolved most of the major physics concerns necessary to achieve ignition. The current campaign is working to resolve the remaining few and integrate all the pieces together."