Livermore, California

Tarter: will be NIF's 'public spokesman'. Credit: LLNL

Bruce Tarter, the director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, will this week announce a major reorganization of the laboratory aimed at countering criticism that it has mismanaged the construction of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a huge laser facility being built there.

When major problems with the project first emerged last September (see Nature 401, 101; 1999), cost overruns on the NIF's original construction budget of $1.2 billion were unofficially estimated at $300 million. Sources close to the project now put the overrun at $500 million.

Tarter will split Livermore's laser division, which accounts for more than a quarter of the laboratory's annual $1.2 billion budget, and appoint an associate director directly responsible for the project's completion. He has also pledged to provide more direct leadership for the NIF. “I expect to be a public spokesman. This project is a major priority for the institution — perhaps my top priority — and I expect others at the laboratory to reflect that.”

Costly: but NIF construction is proceeding steadily. Credit: LLNL

The Secretary of Energy's Advisory Board (SEAB) is examining the project but has not publicly estimated its eventual cost. However, Ed Moses, NIF project manager at Livermore, says SEAB expects overruns of around $500 million. Hermann Grunder, director of the Thomas Jefferson Accelerator Facility in Virginia, says the original $1.2 billion budget was unrealistic. Grunder, a member of the NIF Council, an outside advisory body also examining the project, says that the NIF “always was a $1.7 billion project”.

External scientists who are examining the project's progress believe that its final construction cost could be as high as $2 billion. They believe, however, that the NIF will be completed to specification, and that technical problems highlighted in a recent SEAB report will be overcome.

Government officials in Washington believe that, at this level, the NIF will run into major difficulties, delaying its 2003 completion date by several years. In President Clinton's budget proposal for 2001, to be released next Monday, the project's budget allocation is expected to fall sharply from this year's, in line with the original construction schedule.

Rather than obtaining more money from the administration to cover overruns, Livermore is preparing a new cost estimate, and will look to Congress for extra money to prevent the project from falling too far behind schedule.

However, the nuclear weapons budget is already tight, with lay-offs likely at many weapons research and production facilities, and some observers doubt that extra money will be found for the NIF. Two House committees have asked the General Accounting Office to investigate the project, and may hold hearings on its progress in early March.

Under its new project plan, Livermore will appoint an outside engineering contractor to oversee the assembly of the NIF lasers, a task originally allocated to the laboratory itself. Tarter says the laboratory will only be able to estimate the project's full cost when it has taken bids from contractors for the assembly job.

The problem of assembling the NIF's 192 giant lasers in the necessary clean conditions is compounded by the fact that they are to be packed tightly inside the NIF building, like well-aligned matches in a full box. “The assembly is something we did not do a good job of forecasting,” concedes Tarter.

Moses: upbeat. Credit: LLNL

According to NIF project director Moses, the complexity of the task was overlooked during the design, which sought to keep costs down by making the building as compact as possible, ignoring the difficulties of assembly. Construction of the NIF is proceeding as planned, with a massive concrete structure ready to accommodate the 24 bundles of eight football-field-length lasers. These lasers will fire 1.8 megajoules of energy into a tiny deuterium–tritium target when the facility is in operation (see below ).

The NIF's target chamber is also now in place, with land set aside next to it for a second chamber which may be built by Britain's Atomic Weapons Establishment.

Published reports on the NIF and interviews with officials involved in the project reveal a catalogue of errors that have taken the project over its budget. These include:

  • External reviewers knew that the project couldn't be built for $1.2 billion, but declined to say so in public. According to Grunder, who served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that reviewed the NIF proposal in 1997, the panel believed that the project would cost $1.7 billion to complete, but didn't put the figure in its published report.

  • In an effort to control costs, the NIF's 192 lasers are packed tightly together. Previous laser designs, such as Livermore's Nova facility, have been spread out on the ground, allowing technicians easy access during assembly. Clean assembly of NIF's lasers will therefore be very difficult, although independent assessors say it can be done. “We did it so that the NIF could go in a realistically sized building,” says Tarter. “We didn't appreciate the fact that if you packed the lasers closely together, lab technicians couldn't go in” and work on them during assembly.

  • Research efforts, such as the Beamlet laser and a laser amplifier called Amplab, which were to have run in parallel with NIF construction and to answer questions critical to its success, were discarded early because of budgetary constraints. Tarter says Beamlet — a full-sized prototype of a NIF laser — should have been kept running as a test bed for NIF technologies, instead of being shut down once it was established that it worked.

  • Other research efforts required to complete the project successfully, including investigation of the target 'hohlraums' for the facility and several issues related to the durability of its optical components, are short of resources. “The programme is in deep trouble in terms of the money it needs in very many areas,” says one well-informed administration official in Washington.

On the plus side, the optical components identified by SEAB as falling furthest short of the necessary technical specification will be installed near the target chamber, and won't have to be slotted in until late in the construction schedule, giving researchers more time to improve their specification.

As part of a nuclear weapons programme unaccustomed to public scrutiny during the Cold War, the NIF received little outside supervision — or even supervision by Tarter — until last summer, by which time the project was in deep trouble. Government officials and scientists from outside the weapons labs believe the NIF lacked the accountability now expected of publicly funded projects. As Grunder puts it: “Times had changed, but the people [in the weapons programme] hadn't”.

A potential candidate for associate director after the reorganization is Moses. He currently reports to George Miller, Livermore's associate director for national security, who took on supervision of the NIF when the director of the project, Michael Campbell, resigned last September.

Strolling along the smooth concrete floor of the facility, which he describes as “the largest optical table in the world”, Moses expresses confidence that a new contractor will solve the assembly problem. “We'll be working with people who built pharmaceutical and semiconductor plants,” he says.

Moses, an electrical engineer with a background in project management, is strongly upbeat about the NIF construction, but won't speculate on how much it will eventually cost. “We're working through it as accurately as we can,” he says.