Livermore’s High Hope : Billion-dollar laser project in the works?
Imagine the power: A laser beam is hurtled through a series of glass filters and amplifiers that take up the space of nearly two football fields. It reaches such incredible power that it hits a pellet of hydrogen isotopes smaller than a grain of sand with a force equal to more than 1,000 times the electric-generating capacity of all the power stations in the United States--for a few billionths of a second. The result is fusion, a process that releases more energy than it consumes--and that otherwise occurs only in stars and in thermonuclear explosions.
This is what the Department of Energy proposes to build at Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California. It would be the world’s largest laser, be called the National Ignition Facility (NIF) and cost more than $1 billion to build, never mind operate after construction.
What good is it? The answer to that question is complex. On one level, it would keep together the team of Livermore nuclear weapons designers whose job futures have been thrown into uncertainty by the end of the Cold War and it would preserve 1,500 high-paying jobs in California. On that level the laser is welcome, but there has to be more to it than job preservation. And there is.
The nation cannot afford to lose the skills of Livermore, despite the welcome end to the nuclear arms race. The United States must both maintain the security of remaining nuclear stockpiles and keep abreast of nuclear technology should world conditions change. NIF serves both purposes, allowing research into thermonuclear processes without underground nuclear tests, rightly renounced by the U.S. government.
Critics, however, fear that such lasers will contribute to nuclear proliferation, allowing countries to design weapons, circumventing the international comprehensive test ban treaty or helping smaller powers to graduate from fission to fusion weapons. After initially offering unqualified backing to NIF, Rep. Ronald V. Dellums (D-Oakland), chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, now makes continued support contingent on the Administration satisfying proliferation and environmental concerns.
NIF is also enmeshed in politics. The timing of last Friday’s announcement of the NIF project by Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary suggests the Administration wanted to help some California Democrats in tough races. Moreover, O’Leary has been under internal attack from the Defense Department as being soft regarding weapons work and there have been suggestions that nuclear weapons research should be transferred to Defense. The laser presumably proves her moxie. And biting questions have been asked in Congress about the quality of the University of California’s management of Livermore.
For their part, backers of NIF tout it not just as a weapons-experiment facility but also as a boon to basic scientific research in astrophysics (to simulate stellar processes), in optics and in possible development of electrical energy from fusion. But the prospects should not be oversold. The design of this laser is such that it would be able to fire only about four times a day, far less than needed for sustained controlled fusion for electric power. NIF is just a first step toward such fusion, which would require a different demonstration project by the year 2025. Moreover, we are concerned that secrecy at Livermore will inhibit basic research, although O’Leary promises that 80% of NIF work would be unclassified.
Many other questions remain: Why is this project moving ahead before a promised comprehensive plan for shrinking and coordinating the national labs is issued? Is it worth it, considering that its backers argue that it cannot be used to design new weapons? Is it really needed to assure the safety and reliability of existing weapons? Our fear is that NIF could suffer the same ignominious fate as the last big-science project, the super collider in Texas, canceled by Congress after construction began; the space station too hangs in the balance.
The laser is promising, but in these times of fiscal austerity it should not get the final OK until all these doubts are resolved. We hope they will be.
