The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory comprises 192 lasers that will use inertial confinement to conduct nuclear weapons and fusion experiments. The project is the largest facility ever constructed at Livermore.
For the technically inclined, three scientists from Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and the University of Rochester have written a paper describing the facility . For the rest of us, the Wikipedia does a serviceable job.
Originally estimated to cost about $400 million, GAO estimates NIF will now cost about $3.9 billion (yes, with a B) by the 2008 start—and that estimate is already five years old.
Not surprisingly, some Senators (read: Domenici) have noticed that $ 3.9 billion (or what’s left—2.8 B has already been spent) could fund a lot of science in states that aren’t California.
Defenders of the NIF have a new argument. If the project isn’t fully funded, our nuclear weapons will stop working:
George Miller, a veteran nuclear weapons designer at Livermore, said the laser’s absence would lead to an erosion in the confidence that the weapons are reliable and safe.
“There are very serious implications to canceling this project,” said Miller, the associate director of the Bay Area lab. “You have to seriously question the commitment to maintain nuclear weapons.”
Cue the dramatic music.
Ian Hoffman in the Oakland Tribune (via John Fleck) finds some folks who disagree with Miller:
Livermore’s most prolific weapons designer, retired physicist Seymour Sack, calls NIF “worse than useless” because it draws money and attention from the less-glamorous examination of weapons for signs of degradation and replacement of the parts that break down.
“There’s a lot of nonsense” in claims that without NIF, the nation won’t have confidence in its weapons, Sack said. “It’s not a purely useless boondoggle but in terms of any critical element of understanding of the stockpile, my answer is no.”
Retired Sandia weapons manager Bob Peurifoy said the big laser makes “an interesting scientific playpen.” Its beams will create 100 million-degree temperatures,crushing pressures and an incredible density of energy, taking scientists on a tour inside a miniature sun.
“I understand that some scientists just wet their pants to use this thing. NIF is fun science,” Peurifoy said. But “NIF has little if anything to do with the present and future health of the enduring stockpile.”
The Natural Resources Defense Council has been waging a legal battle against the NIF and has a helpful resources page. I hope Chris Paine will give us an update.
It’s long past due the time that we change the terms of the debate on “confidence” in the nuclear arsenal.
From the way many nuclear weapons scientists describe it, we can never ever be confident that our weapons will go off – the only bomb you know will go off is one that has already exploded. Scientists working in the employ of the nuclear weapons labs said as much to David Samuels in last month’s Harper’s – despite the explosion of more than a thousand weapons in live nuclear testing, we still don’t know how plutonium really works. It really just appears that we’re lucky when it does.
Ergo, we can never be “confident” in the functioning of our arsenal.
The confidence test needs to be based on the following assessments:
1. The adversaries we are seeking to deter with our nuclear arms need to be confident that our weapons will not go off if we launch, and feel secure that our use of our arsenal will not end their regimes, not to mention their nations.
2. Subsequently, confident that American weapons will not detonate, the adversaries we seek to deter will choose to deploy their own nuclear weapons due to confidence that we cannot strike back, or even strike first.
That seems like the honest confidence test to me.
Here are some excerpts from the Harper’s story. If anyone wants the full text, let me know:
Somewhere in that same Harper’s article is an amazing statement, by the author, saying something like “Does anyone doubt that we will need to resume nuclear testing within five years to maintain the arsenal?”
Well, for one, the National Academy of Sciences does. See:
http://books.nap.edu/catalog/10471.html
But, hey, why take the Academy’s word when some yahoo says different.
“we still know far less than we need to about the properties of plutonium.”
Apparently so. During the mid-1990s, the JASONs were involved in studies of stockpile maintenance; some of the resulting reports are available online.
During that time, I had an interesting lunch at the American Cafe in Tysons Corner with one of the involved JASONs, who said that the long-term problems with plutonium metallurgy/chemistry were still so worrisome that many of them were strongly in favor of moving to all-uranium primaries. That would mean an accompanying penalty in clunkiness, but with a lot fewer worries about whether the primary would yield sufficient yield after twenty years on the shelf. How to deal with tritium decay was a separate question.
NIF IS INDISPENSABLE FOR THE
SCIENCE OF FUSION.
PLEASE, DON`T STOP IT.
ONLY NIF CAN ACHIVE NUCLEAR
IGNITION AND EVENTUALY CONTRIBUTE
TO THE POWER PLANTS OF TOMMOROW.
EVERYWHERE IN THE USA MUST
FIGHT FOR NIF!!!
BEST WISHES.
PROF. MARTIGNONI FERDINAND
(SWITZERLAND)