Washington

Time to come clean: critics say that the NIF's troubles go beyond clean-room difficulties.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California has changed the top three managers of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a $1.2 billion laser project under construction there, and is reviewing the project to determine the full extent of its difficulties.

The US Department of Energy (DoE), which owns the lab, has said that one issue — the need for clean-room conditions in the laser assembly area — accounts for most of the cost overruns on the project, which it admitted this month ran to hundreds of millions of dollars (see Nature 401, 101; 1999).

But some observers say that the project is dogged with other, harder technical problems, including difficulties in manufacturing several thousand large, precision optical components for its 192 laser beams.

Last week, Livermore officials were unavailable to discuss the optics or the clean-room issues. But they are expected to do so after an initial project review by the new management team.

The clean-room issue came to light after Ed Moses, then head of another laser project at the laboratory, began an internal study of the laser assembly plans in January. By April he had concluded that the existing plan would not provide a clean enough environment.

Since then, project officials have been arguing about what to do, with Moses consulting outside experts, including engineers from Intel, the microchip manufacturer.

As this argument raged in June, both Bruce Tarter, the laboratory's director, and Bill Richardson, the energy secretary, were stating in public that the project was on time and within budget. The argument only became public after Mike Campbell, the laboratory's associate director for lasers, resigned on 27 August, ostensibly because he had not told the lab that he never completed his PhD.

As Campbell quit, Tri Valley Care, a laboratory watchdog group, told reporters and senior government officials in Washington that the NIF was up to $300 million over budget. Richardson confirmed this within days, blaming the lab, and announced that an outside contractor would be brought in to ensure clean-room conditions during NIF assembly. Two other top NIF managers were replaced, and Moses took over as NIF project manager.

But Tri Valley Care claims that Campbell's resignation and the clean-room issue are a smokescreen that masks deeper problems. The watchdog group says its information comes from Livermore scientists worried about how the problems with the NIF are eating into other research budgets.

“The cleanliness problem is by no means the only problem,” says Marylia Kelley, president of Tri Valley Care. “Some lab staff are derisive about that being the only problem.”

Kelley says the optics — especially the potassium dihydrogen phosphate crystals used to generate the lasers — cannot be produced to sufficient quality and have been failing under test. The NIF specification required rapid-growth crystallization, ten times faster than that used in previous laser projects, to produce these components at the right cost.

One senior NIF scientist, speaking in Washington last week, was optimistic that the optics will be working in time. But the Livermore lab refuses to discuss the issue, and the DoE's denials of these problems are less than complete. “All of my information is that it is the complexity of the laser infrastructure, and not the optics“ that have caused the cost overruns, says an official who has been speaking for Richardson on the issue.

The House of Representatives Science Committee will probably ask the General Accounting Office to investigate the NIF. The new management team and a panel of outside experts to be assembled by Richardson will determine where the project goes next.

The DoE says that the problems will have no impact on planned NIF collaborations in weapons research with the United Kingdom and France, except insofar as they delay the project's completion.

But non-weapons scientists fear that the overruns will move the NIF towards weapons research at the expense of experiments into obtaining energy from inertial confinement fusion. "It has gradually been happening anyway," says Steve Dean of Fusion Power Associates, a fusion-energy lobby group.

Observers say that the new managers are primarily weapons people. Also, a reduced-specification NIF that fails to achieve ignition — a prospect which Livermore officials privately acknowledge — will be more useful to weapons scientists than to fusion-energy researchers, who need ignition to prove the potential worth of inertial confinement fusion as an energy source.