Report targets Livermore Lab laser complex

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, May 31, 2007 | by Ian Hoffman

The giant lasers, X-ray machines and supercomputers called essential a decade ago for the upkeep of U.S. nuclear weapons have fallen behind schedule, yet even with those crippled or delayed capabilities, the weapons themselves are faring well, with little sign of falling apart.

The Federation of American Scientists, a group formed by Manhattan Project scientists to advocate for arms control, argued in a report Wednesday that Congress needs to rethink some of the multibillion-dollar instruments promised to bomb scientists at the end of nuclear testing.

Topping the federation's target list is a stadium-size laser complex called the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Livermore Lab scientists and federal nuclear-weapons managers have argued since the early 1990s that the NIF and its reach for thermonuclear fusion with 192 laser beams are critical to the operation of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

But Ivan Oelrich, a Princeton-trained chemist who heads the federation's strategic security project, said those arguments have lost their power as scientists have learned more about the reliability of existing weapons -- the Cold War-vintage bombs and warheads that were designed without big lasers, supercomputers or machines capable of making X-ray movies in two dimensions.

"The things we were worried about -- the decline of (bomb) reliability without testing -- have not come to pass. Yet these enormously expensive programs persist," he said.

The big fusion laser at Livermore originally was priced at less than $400 million but had risen to $1 billion by the time Congress agreed to build it. Livermore officials were forced to admit in 1999 that the laser was over budget and would not be completed by 2002 as promised. The General Accountability Office projects its cost at about $4 billion, with completion next year.

"NIF should have been operating years and a billion dollars ago, and it's fair to ask whether we should go forward with this machine when the whole context around it has changed," said the federation's Oelrich. "We need to re-evaluate, and yet we haven't done that."

Energy Department officials said they had not seen the federation's report but took issue with the observations about billion-dollar cost overruns and schedule breakdowns. Julianne Smith, spokeswoman for the department's National Nuclear Security Administration, said "it is important to keep in mind that all three of these facilities are unique, one-of-a-kind -- some that have never before been built in the world."

Oelrich doesn't expect the department or Congress to kill off the big laser, which Smith says is 90 percent complete. At that point, he said, lawmakers are more prone to throw more money into dubious projects than to kill them.

"I live in the real world, and I admit it's very, very hard to kill these types of programs," he said.

Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com or (510) 208- 6458.