Compiled by leaders of groups from communities located in the shadows of U.S. nuclear weapons sites. The report card grades looks to the future and lays out an agenda for the next administration.
2008 Radioactive Report Card Grade Book
Press Release
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World's largest fusion facility today celebrates long, difficult road to
official opening
Contra Costa Times | Bay Area News Group
By Suzanne Bohan
Posted: 05/28/2009 Updated: 05/29/2009
The challenging pursuit of fusion is nothing new to Lawrence Livermore
Laboratory scientists. In the lab's early days in the 1950s, weapons
designers successfully developed the fearsome hydrogen - or fusion - bomb,
many times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in World
War II. In 1952, the lab joined a program called Project Sherwood that
attempted to control the force of fusion to create a virtually unlimited
source of electrical energy.
Today, the lab enters the newest chapter in its fusion quest with the
official opening of the multipurpose National Ignition Facility, 15
contentious years after the project's approval. The massive, dark building
on the eastern edge of Livermore - not far from hillsides dotted with
grazing cows - covers the footprint of three football stadiums. With 192
lasers, it ranks as the world's largest laser fusion facility.
The opening ceremony of the facility, called NIF, is expected to draw 3,500
and scheduled speakers include Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, Sen. Dianne
Feinstein and scores of other dignitaries.
"The dedication of NIF marks a new era," said Ed Moses, principal associate
director of NIF. "Through NIF we have a path to fusion ignition, the same
force that powers our sun and the stars. NIF will play a key role in
ensuring our national security, opening new frontiers in basic science and
possibly providing the pathway to fusion energy."
"I think it's wonderful," said Richard Muller, a UC Berkeley physics
professor and member of a NIF advisory panel. "What other reaction could
there be?"
On the northwest corner of national weapon lab, however, longtime opponents
of the project intend to gather throughout the day. They'll have "an
'evidence table' with documents demonstrating that NIF is related to
nuclear weapons design," said Marylia Kelley, executive director of
Tri-Valley CAREs, a watchdog group that monitors the lab, which is the
birthplace of numerous types of nuclear weapons over the decades.
The lab insists no new weapons design work is under way. Instead, Moses
said a critical NIF mission entails testing the reliability of the nation's
5,000 nuclear warheads, to ensure they serve as a credible deterrent
against attack.
Much of the public acclaim for NIF, however, focuses on its potential to
provide the research for ultimately creating fusion power plants. For six
decades, scientists have chased the dream of fusion power, as theoretically
it could provide an inexhaustible source of energy using seawater as fuel,
freeing countries from reliance on imported energy sources or
environmentally-damaging fuel extraction methods. Now fusion's potential
for generating power without releasing greenhouse gases burnishes its
appeal.
As the name implies, fusion ignition is NIF's mission. Ignition means that
a fusion reaction - the fusing of two hydrogen atoms - generates enough
energy to sustain fusion reactions in surrounding fuel. So far, fusion
reactions have been fleeting - and driven by external sources.
The challenges sound straightforward, but are exceedingly complex: Heat the
hydrogen fuel to millions of degrees, propagate the reaction, and confine
the reacting material in a stable state. Plasma physics is a field devoted
to this endeavor.
"There's always been one problem with fusion, and that's that Mother Nature
has not been totally cooperative," said Moses. "That's why it's taken a
protracted effort to sort it out. That's why we had to build the NIF to
finally do it."
The project cost $3.5 billion, Moses said. Kelley and others dispute that
figure, however, saying that figure accounts for the building, not other
costs. She puts the price at more than $5 billion. It's also opening six
years behind schedule, and quadruple its original projected cost. The
facility now employs 1,000.
NIF follows two other "inertial confinement fusion programs" at the
Livermore lab, starting with the Shiva project in 1977 and followed by the
NOVA facility in 1984. The latter was marred by a calculation error that
rendered it technically impossible to achieve ignition, and its scope was
scaled back. NIF replaces NOVA, and it builds on the knowledge gained from
previous projects.
But doubters say NIF takes too big a technical leap from its predecessor,
and that lab officials pushed it through despite a lack of rigorous peer
review and after stacking scientific assessment panels in its favor.
For example, a successful 1997 lawsuit by the Natural Resources Defense
Council, Tri-Valley CAREs and another plaintiff against the Department of
Energy, which funds the lab, banned the agency from relying upon or
disseminating data from a National Academies of Science committee studying
NIF's likelihood of achieving ignition. A U.S. District Court issued the
ruling on the grounds that the agency violated a federal law requiring
balanced representation in committees that federal agencies rely upon for
advice, and open access to the committees' meetings and documents.
And a 2005 review by an independent scientific advisory group called JASON
concluded that ignition at NIF in 2010 was "unlikely," although the group
added advice for providing "a reasonable road map for progress toward
ignition after the initial attempts." Quoting that report's findings,
former Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., vented his frustrations with the NIF
project during a 2006 Senate committee hearing with the Energy Department
agency that runs the Livermore Lab.
"I stand by watching and waiting and hoping that it works," Domenici said
at the hearing. "It is one of the biggest gambles I've ever voted for."
"JASON said it was unlikely, they didn't say it was impossible," responded
Thomas D'Agostino, administrator of the National Nuclear Security
Administration. "We think the first credible ignition experiment will be
done in 2010," he said Thursday.
But Stephen Bodner, head of the laser fusion program at the Naval Research
Laboratory from 1975 to 1999, counts himself among the doubters. Bodner
also worked at the Livermore Lab from 1964 to 1974 in its fusion programs.
"Everything would have to work according to optimistic scaling laws, and
that seems unlikely," he said.
What galls Kelley, with Tri-Valley CAREs, is the new focus on fusion energy
as a critical aim of NIF, when nuclear weapons work was the reason Congress
approved the project.
"I've seen NIF marketed three different ways through three different
administrations," Kelley said. "But the laser itself hasn't changed."
"Suddenly with Obama and global warming, it's somehow going to solve the
energy crisis," she said.
D'Agostino said that NIF won't be designed to produce new nuclear weapons,
that it's a question of "semantics" in that debate. Kelley said the
facility will be used to add upgrades to the existing weapons - a form of
new weapons work, in her view. But D'Agostino said that's a critical step
for ensuring the reliability of the warheads.
The simulated nuclear warheads testing program that NIF will conduct
provides a critical means of reducing the number of nuclear weapons, said
Muller, with UC Berkeley. U.S. presidents face tremendous pressure to
resume nuclear testing, he said. The nation hadn't conducted an underground
nuclear test since 1992.
"This is a way of reducing them in reality by assuring that the few nuclear
weapons we have left will be reliable, and by eliminating the need for
(underground) testing," he said.
But Bodner, who says that the lasers have never met their original design
specifications, wonders whether NIF can provide reliable simulated weapons
testing.
"The bigger question is, if the lab cannot face up to NIF's failure to meet
necessary specifications, then how can they be entrusted to maintain our
enduring nuclear weapons stockpile?" Bodner asked.
D'Agostino, though, said the enthusiasm over NIF's opening among scientists
is palpable. "It's hard to contain the excitement among the scientists.
They never thought they'd get to this day."
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