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              NUCLEAR WEAPONS CONTENTS  NIF SPECIAL
 
 1  NIF: 'It will work'                        
 2  'NIF won't do it'                     
 3  Former Livermore scientist says NIF is a lemon                        
 4  Local company Ktech Corp. vies for huge NIF power contract                    
 5  NIF: Need for objectivity                          
 6  Watchdog group: NIF is a blunder; Livermore should be green lab                       
 7  NIF: Meet the opposition                   
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                     NUCLEAR WEAPONS ARTICLES
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 1 NIF: 'It will work'                        

Albuquerque Tribune Online

TAGS BETWEEN PARAGRAPHS AS SHOWN --> Associate Livermore 
Laboratory Director George Miller is confident the lab's massive 
fusion energy laser will overcome its obstacles and perform as 
promised

 By  [lspohn@abqtrib.com] Tribune Reporter

 LIVERMORE, Calif. - It may have lost some of its luster, but the 
controversial National Ignition Facility fusion energy laser 
still is the star at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

  Laser-charged feud

 The $4.2 billion National Ignition Facility is a complex machine 
that scientists hope to use to produce tiny blasts of fusion 
energy, the power source of the sun, stars and nuclear bombs.

 What: Fundamentally, the NIF is an enormous laser that uses 
special chemically-doped glass and unique crystals to generate 
powerful beams of light energy.

 How: That energy is to be focused by 192 individual laser beams 
into a target chamber and onto a BB-sized pellet containing 
radioactive hydrogen, which, when super-compressed and heated, is 
supposed to ignite, yielding fusion energy.

 Where: NIF is being built at California's Lawrence Livermore 
National Laboratory, with assistance from New Mexico's Sandia and 
Los Alamos national laboratories. They are the nation's three 
nuclear weapons laboratories operated by the Department of 
Energy.

 Why: Government officials say NIF is the core instrument of the 
nation's multi-billion-dollar nuclear-science-based Stockpile 
Stewardship and Maintenance Program. Program scientists aim to 
maintain the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear 
arsenal without nuclear testing, using the advanced experimental 
tools of nuclear blast simulators such as NIF and supercomputer 
simulations of bomb blasts based on past real bomb test data and 
the new simulations.

 Issue: Various critics, including scientists in New Mexico, say 
NIF is too costly, won't work as promised and can't achieve 
ignition.
 
NIF, which is supposed to generate real but very tiny "stars" in 
the laboratory, is "the biggest single project we have ever done 
here," says the project's overseer, George Miller, a Livermore 
Lab associate director who assumed control of the project after 
it was rattled by severe cost overruns and delays.

 The Tribune in a series of interviews - in person, by phone and 
via e-mail over several months - invited Miller to address 
questions raised about NIF, including the latest report by 
government investigators that predicts the project will cost at 
least double what Congress originally budgeted for it and be six 
years late. NIF was supposed to open next year at an original 
budgeted cost of $1.2 billion. Now the Department of Energy, 
which owns and operates Livermore Lab, estimates NIF will cost 
$3.5 billion and be completed by 2008. Other estimates, including 
government investigators', are much higher, even assuming no 
further fiscal complications or delays.

 None are anticipated, says Miller. He is enthusiastic about 
finally completing construction of the building that will house 
NIF and the installation inside of the first series of platforms 
that will hold NIF's special glass and optical components.

 The $275 million building dwarfs the rest of the lab, which, 
except for its tall fences and strict security, resembles a 
college campus.

 Miller insists enthusiastically that the building is virtually 
complete and that construction now is concentrating on assembling 
the laser's skeleton, the metal pedestals, boxes and other 
infrastructure that will support thousands of optical elements, 
from laser glass to turning mirrors.

 "This will show we can do it cleanly, with precision alignment 
of these clean structures," he says, emphasizing the lab has 
resolved how to maintain critical cleanliness for the sensitive 
laser.

 While critics continue to hammer NIF as out of control and 
likely to fail, Miller says he is confident it not only will work 
as advertised but will achieve its goals - including igniting a 
small, hydrogen-filled sphere to produce fusion energy. NIF's 
primary purpose is create, in the laboratory, the conditions of a 
nuclear bomb explosion on a very small scale, so that scientists 
can better understand the process without actually blowing up 
test bombs.

 Livermore and DOE say NIF is critical to maintaining the 
reliability and safety of the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal 
despite critics who say it is not and ultimately will fail.

 Miller says a host of problems - from producing costly, 
defect-free laser glass to maintaining a clean environment to 
protect laser optical components - have largely been resolved and 
that the lab deserves credit for some remarkable technical 
achievements.

 The project already has in hand about half of the optical glass 
of "fused silica" and about 75 percent of the laser glass in 
hand, he reports.

 Most of it is being stored in a Fremont, Calif., warehouse, he 
says, from which it will be shipped for "finishing and polishing 
to very tight tolerances."

 NIF's building, essentially completed this fall, now is occupied 
with crews assembling optical platforms and benches.

 Miller says "there were major structural issues which the 
project has managed and organized." The big solution: "Execute 
the classic aerospace project management technique" and go 
outside the lab for management expertise, hiring Jacobs 
Engineering to put the NIF ship back on a even keel and prevent 
further listing.

 "It's big, it's complex," Miller says. He points out that it is 
a huge experimental laboratory like other DOE projects that have 
"failed because of management," not because of technical 
problems.

 "We're a research lab, and things this big, the lab can't do 
itself," he explains, calling it a tough but well-learned lesson. 
"But we brought the technical talents to bear on the technical 
issues that were inherent in this project."

 And, he says, contrary to others' claims, Livermore scientists 
have largely resolved them. He disputes critics' claims the 
problem was fast-tracking the project "on the fly" before 
technical hurdles were resolved.

 "It was the lack of (our) appreciation for the engineering 
problems in a project of this size," he says. "It was like trying 
to solve Rubic's Cube.

 "The conceptual design was quite good. The step that was missed 
was how exceedingly difficult it was going to be to put all of 
this together, to integrate," he says.

 Miller acknowledges "there are still remaining technical issues 
that have not been completely resolved."

 Among them, he says, is the damage the laser could do to 
expensive optical elements "right at the target chamber" as the 
light is being converted from NIF's main infrared energy to the 
ultraviolet light needed at the target to ignite it into a fusion 
energy burst - a tiny thermonuclear blast.

 He says the laboratory is working diligently on the problem and 
believes it has demonstrated a solution in a one-inch-square test 
glass. The lab plans - between now and the laser's initial 
operational deadline, in about four years - to do further 
experiments.

 But he says he doesn't worry much about it working, though he is 
concerned that failure will mean further worries "about what the 
operational costs will be."

 Ultimately, he says, the damage threshold may not be fixable. It 
may turn out to be an "operational cost issue," meaning the 
sensitive optics may simply need to be replaced when damaged, but 
that won't keep NIF from fulfilling its mission.

 The cost of each piece at risk, he explains, is "about $10,000, 
and you need 192 of those."

 So he calculates that, in the context of NIF's current 
operational and management budget projection of $150 million per 
year, "if we have to change more frequently than we assumed, it 
costs about $7 million more. That's real money, so we are 
concerned," he says.

 "I have very high confidence we will solve this problem," he 
says firmly. "This is not something that keeps me up at night."

 "The glass impurities (which had caused most of the damage in 
the past) are out," Miller says. "The raw glass meets - in fact, 
exceeds - the specifications that we wrote."

 Regarding claims that NIF could cost as much as $5 billion or 
more to build, Miller says, "I totally reject that. That's not a 
true figure."

 He says Congress has authorized a new budget of $2.2 billion for 
the project and that there are roughly $1.2 billion in associated 
costs, pegging the lab's and DOE's total cost estimate at about 
$3.5 billion. Investigators for the Government Accounting Office, 
however, says NIF will cost at least $4.2 billion.
 
NIF or `Blatz'

 Miller questions whether it's fair to attribute all associated 
costs to NIF, arguing that, even if NIF didn't exist, DOE would 
be incurring those costs for some other nuclear weapons blast 
machine based on a technology other than NIF.

 The critics, he contends, "assume that effort will go away if 
NIF goes away. It won't.

 "The stockpile stewardship program (to maintain the nation's 
nuclear warheads) has a set of requirements to certify the 
stockpile without testing (nuclear bombs)," he explains. "NIF is 
a tool to do that. Take it away, and you still have to do it a 
different way.

 "You still need (fusion) targets for the `Blatz' machine, or 
whatever. You still have to get ignition somehow to certify and 
warrant the stockpile, whether you like it or not," he says.

 In response to suggestions - including at Livermore's sibling 
labs, Los Alamos and Sandia - that NIF be scaled down and fully 
tested first, Miller says the technology is proven, and scaling 
the project down ultimately would just be more costly.

 Suggestions range from reducing NIF from its planned and 
approved 192 beams to 96 beams, 48 beams or even a single 
eight-beam line demonstration project to prove the technology 
works before proceeding. Livermore says this not only would be 
more expensive but also would delay important nuclear stockpile 
stewardship experiments.

 "There is no question it (NIF) will work," Miller says. "We've 
already showed it will. We did that on Beamlet."

 Beamlet was a small, prototype NIF laser on which Livermore 
conducted experiments to assess potential NIF performance and 
problems. When Livermore finished with Beamlet, it was 
disassembled and shipped to Sandia Labs, where it was rebuilt and 
currently is being used in conjunction with Sandia's 
much-heralded Z fusion accelerator - considered by some to be a 
NIF challenger.

 Many external critics - including Steve Bodner, a retired Naval 
Research Laboratory fusion laser expert, and Leo Mascheroni, a 
Los Alamos fusion physicist - contend that Livermore failed to 
conduct complete and thorough NIF testing on Beamlet, which would 
have revealed NIF's fundamental problems and its probabilities 
for failure.

 Miller insists Beamlet testing was complete and that, in any 
event, building only a fraction of NIF would cause a three- to 
five-year delay and add in the neighborhood of "$500 million to 
the cost."
 
The need for NIF

 While even some of Livermore's own nuclear weapons scientists 
have dismissed NIF as unnecessary, Miller argues that "NIF 
actually is a subset of the requirements" for maintaining the 
nation's nuclear arsenal in DOE's Stockpile Stewardship and 
Maintenance Program at Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia labs.

 In that program, considered the alternative to maintaining the 
nuclear arsenal by blowing up test bombs, scientists at the three 
labs are trying to use nuclear blast simulators and the fastest 
supercomputers in the world to assess or predict problems with 
weapons in the arsenal.

 Critics argue, however, that much of this program, including 
NIF, has little relevance to existing weaponry and really is 
designed to attract young scientists to design the next 
generation of weapons.

 "Some say you don't need it for stockpile stewardship; others 
say you can only do it with nuclear testing (actually detonating 
nuclear bombs)," Miller says.

"There is a range of opinions, and it's a matter of judgment. We 
won't actually know the answer until you do the work." 

 [http://www.abqtrib.com/print/index.cfm] 

© The Albuquerque Tribune. 
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 2  'NIF won't do it'                     

Albuquerque Tribune Online
 
TAGS BETWEEN PARAGRAPHS AS SHOWN --> Some nuclear weapons 
scientists say NIF might be a good idea, but it will not - can 
not - be actualized, and the Department of Energy needs to move 
on to something more dependable and less costly

 By Lawrence Spohn Tribune Reporter

 LOS ALAMOS - For more than three decades, physicists have 
dreamed of using a powerful laser to instantaneously superheat 
and compress hydrogen to ignite it into miniature stars on Earth.

 In the $4.2 billion National Ignition Facility, a glass laser 
under construction at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 
some expect to see that dream finally come true, with NIF 
creating controlled thermonuclear burns and fusion energy in the 
lab.

 Los Alamos' Leo Mascheroni is not among them.

 In fact, NIF is a dream-shatterer for the fusion physicist, who 
predicts the project will fail, even as it diverts scarce funds 
from a far more promising research path with staggering global 
energy implications.

 "Taxpayers are being absolutely robbed by a band of crooks," 
says Mascheroni, "who are also robbing science and the future, 
your children and my children, of a path to energy security."

 It's a righteous position, but warranted, he says, because the 
stakes are very high and the deception extreme.

 "One of the reasons I came here in the beginning and why I still 
am fighting is the dream," he explains. "It's a beautiful dream 
of clean, abundant fusion energy for all mankind. But NIF won't 
do it."

 An independent Los Alamos scientist, Mascheroni is far from 
alone in criticizing NIF, Livermore Lab or the Department of 
Energy, which owns both.

 NIF is the country's biggest science project and the nation's 
premier nuclear weapons blast simulator. It has been a lightning 
rod for DOE's nuclear weapons Stockpile Stewardship and 
Maintenance Program, in which scientists are attempting to use 
simulators and supercomputers in place of nuclear bomb tests. But 
even weaponeers at DOE's three nuclear weapons labs have had 
little good to say about the giant laser.

 Controversial since its start, it was scientifically assailed by 
weaponeers on the eve of its groundbreaking in 1997. And it has 
struggled since 1999 with at least $1 billion in cost overruns 
and a six-year delay.

 Scientists familiar with NIF say the laser is:

 Underpowered and has little to no chance of reaching fusion 
energy ignition - its major technical goal. Stephen Bodner, a 
retired Naval Research Laboratory laser physicist, chides that it 
should be renamed "The National Illumination Facility" and if 
allowed to proceed should do so on a basic science mission, not 
under the ruse of fusion energy ignition for nuclear weapons 
research.

 A highly questionable defense investment, with little, if any, 
direct benefit to nuclear weapons stewardship - its primary 
mission. Retired Livermore Lab laser physicist Ray Kidder, Bob 
Peurifoy, a retired vice president of Sandia National 
Laboratories in Albuquerque, and Los Alamos National Laboratory 
physicists Chuck Cranfill and George York say NIF is not 
necessary to maintain the U.S. nuclear arsenal. "Safety sells," 
says Peurifoy, who accuses DOE of using scare tactics to sway 
Congress. "The stockpile is safe, as safe as it's going to be. 
These expensive toys will not affect safety and reliability of 
the enduring nuclear weapon stockpile."

 Still prone to cost escalations based on the suspicion that 
Livermore "low-balled" its costs and still has not resolved 
costly technical issues. Robert Civiak, a physicist and retired 
analyst for the Office of Management and Budget, cites potential 
laser-energy induced damage to NIF's special glass and optics as 
a huge potential problem.

 A civilian fusion-energy technology dead-end, because a glass 
laser is subject to damaging itself and cannot be fired fast 
enough (the so-called "rep-rate") to generate electrical power.

 Mascheroni believes a hydrogen fluoride laser is the only 
alternative; scientists at Sandia and elsewhere see Sandia's Z 
accelerator as the most promising NIF challenger.

 Six years after NIF was proposed, four years after nuclear 
weaponeers challenged it and three years after its cost overruns 
and delays were revealed, Christopher Paine asks "the fundamental 
question: How did we get here?"

 Paine, a senior nuclear weapons analyst at the Natural Resources 
Defense Council in Washington, D.C., says Congress, the White 
House and taxpayers should want to know how NIF could "be more 
than double its budgeted cost, 10 times its initial cost estimate 
and still never have been subjected to an independent scientific 
review."

 And the bargain is getting worse, he charges, because NIF's 
costs and delays have risen and its overseers have been quietly 
reducing its requirements. In the simplest terms, he says 
taxpayers are spending "more money but get less performance."

 Mascheroni has been making that case, or versions of it, for 
more than a decade. NIF's most enduring critic, he snipes 
scientifically at the giant laser every chance he gets in front 
of: NIF or laser fusion review panels; DOE officials who will 
listen; a secretary of Energy; members of the New Mexico 
Congressional delegation; staff members of key congressional 
committees; and, of course, the media.

 He shares the anti-NIF spotlight now with a vocal, independent 
and diverse band of scientists and analysts who question the 
laser's value, its scientific mission and a void of 
accountability for it.

 Livermore and government officials responsible for NIF say the 
critics are all wrong, that NIF is the right train, and it's back 
on track after a two-year cascade of mismanagement, budget 
overruns, delays, investigations and reforms.

 In contrast, Mascheroni and company are predicting a train wreck 
with taxpayers holding the only ticket.

 Collectively, they see NIF as:

 At best a daydream providing some interesting science but at 
worst a nightmare, failing its "vital" nuclear weapons mission.

 Consuming taxpayer dollars by the billions as an exotic nuclear 
weapons tool looking for a job.

 Threatening funding for far more fundamental nuclear weapons 
stewardship research at Livermore and sibling nuclear weapons 
labs, Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories in New Mexico.

 Undermining the future of the nuclear test moratorium and the 
nuclear Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

 Compromising future fusion energy research, if not science's own 
hard-won political credibility.

 As NIF has ballooned to more than a billion dollars over budget 
and a six-year delay, Mascheroni has felt vindicated but 
unfulfilled. The NIF train, he says, is still rolling.

 He and other critics believe that only a full, public, 
congressional investigation using subpoena powers and a 
comprehensive, independent scientific review can fully expose 
NIF. Otherwise, Mascheroni predicts, it will be one of the 
costliest, most heralded scientific duds in history.

 "The politicians are not hearing the truth," he says. "The guys 
who know - the weaponeers - haven't been included and aren't 
allowed to talk. That's because they know that the NIF is not 
going to work and isn't going to help with these stockpile 
problems."

 If the issues were not so grave, the Argentine-born scientist 
says, NIF would be "a laughing movie, a costly comedy of errors."

 Livermore Lab Associate Director George Miller, fending off 
critics from California to North Carolina, isn't amused.

 He says Mascheroni's hydrogen fluoride laser was considered by 
experts and dismissed. NIF won, he says, and hydrogen fluoride 
lost.

 "Mascheroni certainly has his opinions, but the vast community 
(of scientists in this field) disagrees with him," says Miller, a 
nuclear weaponeer who directs the NIF project.

 Miller says Mascheroni, as well as Bodner, are at odds not only 
with Livermore's own NIF analysis and predictions but also with 
several NIF reviews done over the last decade for DOE.

 He cites reviews by the National Academy of Sciences, the DOE 
Interial Confinement (fusion) Advisory Committee and the 
Department of Defense's JASONs panel as supporting "NIF because 
of its importance to the weapons program."
 
Science on the firing line

 DOE owns and operates all three nuclear weapon labs, all of 
which are contributing to NIF and all of which have received some 
NIF funding.

 But critics in and out of the government say DOE not only has 
done a miserable job of overseeing the project or honestly 
evaluating it but has compromised scientific integrity by 
repressing serious peer review of NIF among the three labs.

 Peurifoy slams the lab directors for failing in their duty to be 
honest about NIF, but he lays most of the blame on DOE.

 "Look, people need to know DOE can't spell `peer review'; they 
have no clue; they couldn't tell night from day," says Peurifoy.

 Efforts to obtain DOE comment on NIF over several weeks were 
unsuccessful. Officials have told Congress that experts believe 
the project reforms are succeeding and they expect NIF to meet 
its milestones.

 But a federal District Court judge earlier this year prohibited 
DOE from forwarding to Congress the latest in the series of 
official and positive NIF reviews.

 The judge, responding to a petition by environmental and 
anti-nuclear groups, echoed a previous federal court ruling in 
which another NIF review was similarly blocked. The courts 
concluded that DOE produced the assessments in violation of 
federal laws that govern the fairness and openness of 
governmental advisory groups.

 "And now even the GAO says NIF has never had an independent 
scientific analysis," says Mascheroni, referring to two critical 
Government Accounting Office investigations ordered by Congress 
on the heels of NIF mismanagement revelations.

 In two reports, GAO details serious NIF concerns and 
shortcomings, including a lack of NIF project consensus among 
scientists at Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia Labs. The reports 
warn of DOE's failure - even after NIF cost overruns, delays and 
continuing scientific criticism - to conduct truly independent 
reviews of the project.

 "Persistent DOE oversight problems continue to place the NIF 
project at risk," the GAO tells Congress. And NIF's caretakers, 
it charges, are "the same people (who) have performed oversight 
since 1999 when NIF's cost and schedule grew unnoticed." 

Mascheroni is disappointed that Congress has virtually ignored 
the GAO reports, which he says represent the first official 
government recognition of his contentions in over a decade.
 
Peer review reviewed

 Officials at New Mexico's two labs, which previously have raised 
concerns about NIF, declined interviews about the project, saying 
through media officers that they fear DOE retribution.

 Fusion program scientists, even some now outside the program but 
still subject to DOE, declined comment for fear they would face 
punitive measures, including loss of their security clearances - 
a tactic used against Mascheroni, according to a DOE security 
investigation.

 An article in the British science journal Nature last fall by 
NIF critics Bodner and Paine suggested that NIF's problems aren't 
just a reflection of poor DOE or Livermore management but of a 
failed scientific process at the national labs.

 The article, "When Peer Review Fails," details how Livermore 
complaints to DOE, about the only negative DOE review of NIF, 
resulted in the wholesale dismissal of that committee. DOE then 
obtained a NIF-sympathetic National Academy of Sciences review 
panel, they write.

 Eleven of its 16 members, according to the article, "had either 
previously stated positions supporting NIF and/or were 
consultants or advisers to Livermore or even the NIF program 
itself." And overall, it charges, "14 members had a personal or 
institutional connection with the very agency whose program was 
supposedly undergoing independent review."

 While NIF has been endorsed in a so-called "white paper" by all 
three nuclear weapons lab directors - often cited by NIF 
proponents and sympathetic politicians, insiders say that 
document is a farce. They say it had to be substantially watered 
down before Sandia President Paul Robinson and Los Alamos 
Director John Browne would sign it, along with Livermore Director 
C. Bruce Tarter.

 In 1997, Robinson addressed swirling rumors that his vocal 
concerns about NIF had put his job in jeopardy. He denied he had 
any direct evidence they were true. And the allegations were 
denied directly by then-DOE Defense Programs Chief Vic Reis, a 
staunch NIF supporter and the acknowledged architect of the DOE's 
Stockpile Stewardship Program.

 But a former Sandia fusion scientist says Robinson was ordered 
to fire him, but the Sandia leader refused.

 Last year, the NIF lid blew off when Sandia's own internal NIF 
analysis - favoring a significant reduction in NIF's size and 
funding - became public. The lab was immediately denounced 
publicly by then-Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, who within 
hours of the news report issued a formal statement criticizing 
Sandia, saying its NIF opinions were not conducive to inter-lab 
cooperation and would be ignored.

 The next day, Robinson apologized for allowing the internal 
analysis to become public, but he stood by it technically.

 In an earlier appearance at a nuclear weapons research 
conference, Robinson was asked why Sandia was not pressing 
Congress to fund his lab's highly successful Z accelerator, a 
technology now considered to be far cheaper than NIF and a direct 
NIF competitor.

 Robinson responded bluntly: "Congress would never believe the 
second liar."

 Mascheroni, Bodner and Paine applaud Robinson's candor - as have 
other NIF critics. But they say Congress and the public have 
received an overwhelming and grossly distorted view of NIF from 
DOE, Livermore and the otherwise silent New Mexico labs.

 They charge that an inter-lab NIF alliance, forged and enforced 
by DOE officials, gives each lab a lucrative piece of the 
stockpile stewardship program, masks serious scientific 
disagreements over NIF's potential for success and stifles 
criticism over NIF's role in weapons stewardship.

 Mascheroni sees it as basic intimidation, with which he says he 
has first-hand experience. He says he lost his Los Alamos Lab job 
after criticizing the lab's and DOE's laser fusion program and 
the underlying "short wavelength" laser beam science that favors 
the NIF path - based largely on experiments performed on NIF's 
predecessor, the Nova glass laser.

 He has argued then and since that trying to create fusion 
energy, whether for nuclear weapons simulators or for fusion 
energy potential, would require a much more potent instrument, a 
brute hydrogen-fluoride laser that produces a long wavelength 
beam.

 He points to an internal Los Alamos review, known as the Canavan 
Panel, that carefully scrutinized his research and theory, 
intensely questioned him, and evaluated what then was considered 
his doomed approach. It was headed by Greg Canavan, the former 
director of DOE's military fusion program and a close research 
associate of hydrogen bomb developer and retired Livermore Lab 
leader Edward Teller.

 Staffed with other skeptics who, like Canavan, favored 
Livermore's short wavelength approach, the Canavan Panel 
ultimately reversed course. It endorsed the potential validity of 
Mascheroni's theories. Not only that, it called for more research 
to evaluate them and actually recommended funding his ideas as an 
alternative mode.

 In a controversial decision by Los Alamos Lab Director Browne - 
then an associate director responsible for military fusion 
research - the Canavan Panel's recommendations were dismissed.

 At the same time, the lab destroyed its Antares fusion laser, a 
long wavelength laser which other scientists had used in 
independent experiments that suggested Mascheroni could be right.

 Mascheroni says it was part of a Los Alamos lab effort to focus 
its research on a short wavelength competitor to Livermore's Nova 
glass laser. Ultimately, Los Alamos was forced to abandon that 
research because of unfavorable scientific progress and negative 
scientific reviews.

 Mascheroni contends that many scientists at Los Alamos who 
tactfully tried to side with him suffered intimidation and 
eventually gave up, some feeling their jobs were on the line in 
behind-the-scenes conflict.

 Officially, Los Alamos Lab says Mascheroni was laid off as part 
of a labwide reduction in force and lost his job by the rules, 
not because of his scientific views. A DOE security agent who 
examined internal Los Alamos and DOE records found otherwise.

 William Risley, asked by DOE officials to independently review 
Mascheroni's case, later confirmed Mascheroni's claims in a 
"Special Report to the Inspector General, DOE." He found that 
Mascheroni had been the victim of trumped-up security violations, 
before which he had had a good performance work record.

 Risley took the unusual step in his report of recommending 
Mascheroni's research be revived, because the evidence suggested 
his theories might be right. Mascheroni had been railroaded out 
of the lab, he concluded, because his unconventional fusion 
research views clashed with the mainstream laser fusion research 
path that Los Alamos wanted to follow, to keep pace with 
Livermore's lead.

 DOE and Los Alamos ignored Risley's charges.
 
Secret experiments

 Mascheroni says his case demonstrates the extent to which DOE 
and lab officials were willing to go to sustain the fusion 
research momentum toward NIF, even when it clashed with 
scientific evidence and mounting concerns among weaponeers that 
NIF wouldn't do them much good.

 Mascheroni says they know that, even if NIF works, it might only 
produce a "hot spot" ignition, not the "volume" ignition produced 
in actual nuclear weapons detonations that are of the biggest 
interest and use to weapons scientists.

 Mascheroni contends that Los Alamos weaponeers said as much to 
the GAO investigators, who included the concern in their official 
NIF report to Congress.

 And, he says, NIF reviews have not accounted for actual secret 
underground nuclear bomb experiments that show the NIF laser is 
too puny and will fall far short of fusion energy ignition.

 Driven by his own analysis of a series of classified underground 
nuclear weapons tests at the Nevada Test Site, Mascheroni is 
unequivocally convinced that, despite its massive grandeur, NIF 
is but a nuclear pea-shooter.

 Essentially, in these still classified experiments - known as 
the Halite-Centurion series - Livermore and Los Alamos scientists 
used focused X-rays produced by detonating nuclear bombs 
underground to generate fusion ignition, which actually burned 
small hydrogen-filled targets.

 In these sophisticated experiments - the data from which remain 
secret - several different types and sizes of hydrogen targets 
were used. Some ignited, yielding fusion energy, while others did 
not.

 Scientists agree that the bomb experiments demonstrated that a 
focused, directed energy beam, such as a laser, might be used to 
produce fusion energy ignition in a laboratory setting and 
possibly even, one day, in a fusion power reactor. Less clear, 
however - and downright contentious among some - is what kind of 
laser power, and how big, is needed to drive the fusion reaction.

 Mascheroni says the Halite-Centurion experiments were 
prematurely ended before scientists could answer that question 
clearly. But based on the data collected from experiments that 
yielded fusion energy ignition and those that didn't, he contends 
NIF is doomed.

 He charges that its potential is incorrectly calculated, based 
on the Halite-Centurion data and on a faulty nuclear weapons 
predictive computer code called LASNEX.

 Los Alamos Lab's Chuck Cranfill and George York, intimately 
familiar with the research, agree and actually went to DOE 
headquarters last year to make the case against NIF personally 
and at their own expense.

 They, too, unsuccessfully argued that NIF is another giant, 
risky experiment, York warning that DOE's military fusion program 
is "literally littered with lasers of failed (fusion ignition) 
promise" - that is, which were sold, like NIF, as ignition 
machines.

 Mascheroni says: "The successful (Halite-Centurion) experiment 
showed you need a laser with energy 55 times higher than what NIF 
is designed to reach," referring to NIF's target output of 1.8 
megajoules of energy (about the equivalent of 1.8 million watts).

 Mascheroni charges that NIF's certification to Congress earlier 
this year, by retired Air Force General John Gordon, the new 
director of the National Nuclear Security Administration, is 
based on "nonvalidated LASNEX (computer) code calculations.

 "These calculations have no credibility and are known to be in 
error," he says.

 Livermore's Miller responded, in a prepared statement: "There 
has never been any guarantee given that the NIF or earlier 
systems would achieve ignition.

 "Ignition is a grand scientific and technological challenge that 
requires significant research, development and technology 
evolution over decades. NIF was designed with our best knowledge 
of the requirements for ignition. As an example, that is why NIF 
will have 60 times more energy than the Nova laser.

 "Our current knowledge of ignition requirements is better than 
it has ever been, in part because of the approximately 15,000 
experiments conducted on Nova and the seminal experiments during 
the Halite-Centurion (H/C) series at NTS.

 "The H/C series of experiments was used to study the physics of 
inertial confinement fusion (ICF) capsules. The results from the 
H/C experiments demonstrated excellent performance and put to 
rest fundamental questions about the feasibility of achieving 
high gain in ICF."

 True, says retired Livermore Lab laser physicist Kidder, but 
that doesn't mean NIF will actually ignite a fusion target or 
that Mascheroni is wrong in claiming it can't.

 He worries that the scientific establishment has placed 
unwarranted confidence in the NIF predictions and may have erred 
in refusing to take Mascheroni's analysis seriously.

 Because of Mascheroni's constant criticisms, Kidder says he was 
asked late last decade by then NIF director Mike Campbell to 
reassess the secret underground bomb fusion experiments.

 Kidder says his analysis of the experimental Halite-Centurion 
data was inconclusive: It does not support NIF proponent's 
claims, but neither did it prove them wrong.

 Kidder says that following intense criticisms from Mascheroni 
and other scientists - in particular those aired in a 1997 
Albuquerque Tribune article - Campbell asked him to explore "the 
(target) scaling relationships - that is, between the large ones 
(targets used in underground tests) to small ones (planned for 
use on NIF)."

 Kidder says he looked only at the Livermore experiments to which 
he had direct access, not at Los Alamos', to which he didn't have 
access. And he says that many of the experimental capsules didn't 
work, so, he "was particularly interested in the capsule (target) 
that worked best."

 His conclusion: "You couldn't say that the NIF capsule wouldn't 
work, but you sure couldn't say, either, that it (underground 
experiments) showed that it would.

 "The capsule (used) in Nevada was enormously more likely to 
ignite than the corresponding NIF (designed) capsule . . . 
because there is a scaling of energy here," he says, but gaps in 
the data make it difficult to say accurately if the scale will 
hold true for NIF.

 He says he proposed declassifying the Halite-Centurion data so 
he could publish his analysis in a scientific journal that might 
invite additional analysis of the Halite-Centurion experiments by 
others. But the data and his analysis remain classified.

 "There is a chance that this still might get declassified," says 
Kidder, noting that he recently learned some Livermore scientists 
still are pushing to get the data declassified. But he suspects 
that NIF officials, who remain anxious about NIF funding, might 
be able to prevent that.

 "Look, they shot something (a bomb) in Nevada that was much 
bigger and that delivered much more energy than NIF could ever 
deliver," Kidder says.

 "And then they used that (experiment) to say, hey, we can do 
this with NIF," he says, waving a finger like a magic wand and 
adding, "But, really, it was inconclusive."

 Mascheroni insists the data are far more revealing and that they 
show, in fact, that NIF is too puny to ignite its targets by a 
factor of 100.

 Kidder, a laser expert, says Mascheroni's argument seems 
reasonable to people who grasp the serious limitations of glass 
lasers, such as NIF, and the competing power of chemical lasers, 
such as hydrogen fluoride: "With glass, because of the technical 
problems and the cost of solving them, you need a lot more energy 
than you can pay for. Comparatively, hydrogen fluoride gets you 
more bang for the buck."

 "It may be true that you can't get enough energy out of glass, 
period, to do this job," he says, suggesting that, if so, the 
country is spending billions of dollars to decide an "academic 
issue" that should have been sorted out long ago in routine lab 
experiments.

 "Frankly," he says, with a hearty roll of laughter, "I'm curious 
myself to see if these idiots can make it work."
 
Scientific deception

 Critics such as Mascheroni used to be hard to find.

 But today, NIF's scientific bashers can be found from coast to 
coast, including within the nuclear weapons establishment - some 
even in Livermore's back yard.

 Marion Fulk is an "80-something and counting" physicist who has 
been retired from Livermore for 15 years and has little use for 
NIF.

 Fulk was a weapons system "trouble shooter." Originally, he 
worked - in the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb 
- in the University of Chicago lab of Enrico Fermi, the revered 
Nobel laureate who produced the first nuclear chain reaction.

 Fulk, who now volunteers to help the Livermore Lab watchdog 
group Tri-Valley CAREs, uses barnyard humor to describe how 
useful NIF will be "in solving problems in the primary (the 
initial reaction in a thermonuclear explosion), which is what the 
stockpile program would need.

 Fulk explains what other experts - York, Cranfill, Mascheroni, 
Kidder and Peurifoy - have been saying for years: that NIF 
produces energy regimes that mimic the explosion of the 
secondary, or hydrogen-boost phase, of a thermonuclear explosion. 
But that's the least troublesome part.

 "Secondaries (driven by the explosion of the vexing plutonium 
atomic bomb primary) are pretty passive," Fulk explains. Most 
stockpile issues, he and others say, are in the primary's 
plutonium core, which NIF is not designed to address.

 Looking at NIF in the context of more than 50 years of nuclear 
weapons research, Fulk says, "Then and now . . . the most stupid, 
hair-brained things have gotten support.

 "They just throw money at it," he says, citing as an example the 
defunct Plowshares program, in which DOE's predecessor 
experimented with using nuclear weapons for oil exploration or 
canal excavations. Two of those detonations, Gnome and Gas Buggy, 
were conducted in New Mexico.

 "You know," Fulk says, referring to the Manhattan Project, 
"there was less money spent on that whole project (to develop the 
first atomic bomb) than they're going to spend on the NIF."

 "Now, I think the NIF is very interesting to astrophysicists and 
high-density (energy) physicists, and they could learn a lot from 
it," such as how stars are born, live and die, he says. "But 
they're never going to produce (fusion) ignition on it."

 "And that's what they've sold it to the public and to Congress 
as: the National Ignition Facility," he says. "I just don't think 
they've got enough energy to do it, and I'll bet you right now 
they don't."

 Fulk also says Livermore has a history of scientific 
exaggeration, which he thinks is indefensible, even under the 
mantra of national security.

 "I object to the false selling of any of these devices," he 
says. "This business of lying about these things has become 
standard. But it's wrong."

 He says that Americans are entitled to the truth and that, 
"eventually, taxpayers are going to react," and all science 
research funding might suffer.

 "They need to see some return on their investment, and I don't 
see what they get for NIF," he says.

 Fulk fears the ultimate plans are more sinister, including the 
eventual use of plutonium in NIF experiments and going "back to 
(underground nuclear bomb) testing again" when NIF fails.
 
Serious scrutiny

 The Natural Resources Defense Council's Paine, author of a 
12-page technical bashing of NIF called "Unlovable Laser," 
suggests that NIF is a high-tech nuclear weapons tool with no 
job.

 Worse, he says, DOE has persuaded Congress to "buy before you 
fly," because Livermore has failed to prove it has mastered the 
essential NIF technologies, let alone fully demonstrate them in a 
prototype beam line.

 He contrasts a series of NIF justifications with "reality 
checks" and challenges Livermore's and DOE's contentions that NIF 
is unique and valuable weapons science which, by its very nature, 
will be costly, uncertain and difficult to predict.

 Of all of the "numerous justifications for the project over the 
last decade, none . . . can withstand serious scrutiny," he 
contends.

 Paine says it isn't only NIF's own "uncertain prospects" of 
achieving its goals but also its "tangential and speculative 
relevance to the safety and reliability of nuclear weapons" that 
place it off the chart in terms of its cost-to-benefit ratio. He 
argues that canceling it now would save taxpayers about $11.5 
billion.

 Despite representations by Livermore, DOE and the new National 
Nuclear Security Administration, he contends that "NIF has 
nothing to do with the safety (or reliability) of nuclear 
weapons" and that DOE's "glib presentation of it should be 
labeled for what it is - a deception."

 Paine cites Sandia's Peurifoy and others, who contend the U.S. 
nuclear arsenal is extremely robust and can remain so for decades 
without NIF, whereas the claims that NIF will contribute to 
stockpile stewardship are nebulous at best.

 Agreeing with Mascheroni and others about the Halite-Centurion 
experiments, Paine contends that NIF ignition, if it ever was a 
real possibility, is "now severely in doubt."

 But even if it weren't, he says, it would produce an incomplete 
or spot fusion ignition "not particularly useful to the weapons 
program."

 He charges that "there are not great lessons to be extracted or 
directly inferred about the performance of U.S. nuclear weapons 
from observing NIF ignition experiments."

 And because ignition is increasingly being called into question, 
NIF's basic value should be, as well, he says.

 Paine and his collaborator, Bodner, the retired Naval Lab fusion 
researcher, say DOE within the last year has conveniently 
provided NIF and Livermore with a fall-back position that 
significantly lowers the laser's required performance standard.

 "They've lowered the bar on the acceptance criteria," says 
Paine. "Livermore gets a pass, because the tension is building in 
the program that they just aren't going to be able to achieve the 
original criteria."

 Livermore's Miller says Paine is wrong. He insists that NIF's 
experimental criteria remain stringent and unchanged and that the 
laser has a very good chance - 75 percent, in his judgment - of 
reaching ignition.

 None of the critics agree. Scientists offer a range of NIF 
ignition probabilities from 20 percent to zero. Paine and Bodner 
say if the new NIF criteria stand, the laser has no chance of 
reaching ignition.

 In a table contrasting NIF requirements set in 1994 and those 
established at DOE last fall, Paine contends performance mandates 
have been downgraded between 45 percent and 75 percent in every 
stage of NIF development - from the first "eight-beam performance 
bundle" to its final configuration of "192 beams in 24 laser 
bundles."

 In a series of three graphs showing drastic reductions in DOE 
criteria for NIF energy per beam line, laser pulse duration and 
the percent of energy focused on a tiny (target) spot, Bodner 
says NIF expectations have hit the floor.

 Because critics have contended for years that even the original 
NIF outputs would leave NIF well short of ignition, the revised 
ones suggest the laser "would also be nearly worthless for 
non-ignition experiments."

 Livermore's Miller says that NIF has high value to the physics 
community even if it fails to reach ignition.

 "In spite of Bodner's claims," Miller says, "there are 
experimental demonstrations reviewed and published in reputable 
scientific journals that the basic (NIF) system can achieve all 
three of the critical physics (fusion ignition) parameters 
simultaneously."

 If so, challenge Paine and Bodner, why has DOE felt the need to 
downgrade NIF's specified acceptance criteria for these 
parameters? They say it's a pre-emptive strike that will allow 
Livermore to claim NIF is a success, even if it fails to live up 
to its original billing, including the one used to name it - 
fusion energy ignition.

 Citing the recent review of the government's Foster Panel on 
these issues, Mascheroni says the highly regarded group concluded 
that "NIF without ignition is not worth the investment for 
stockpile stewardship. We believe that ignition should be the 
prime goal."

 With a decade of NIF analysis in his head and in his home 
computers, Mascheroni argues that the reduced NIF criteria should 
be another red flag to Congress that "NIF is a boondoggle, as the 
GAO, I and others have shown."

 He says the laser's construction should be stopped immediately 
and until Congress can see an independent scientific NIF review. 
He believes the review should be comprehensive, including DOE's 
entire military fusion research program, the decisions made in it 
over the last 15 years and, particularly, scientifically 
questionable decisions made against NIF's technical competitors.

 That history, he says, will show NIF is an impostor. 

© The Albuquerque Tribune. 
*****************************************************************
 3  Former Livermore scientist says NIF is a lemon                        

Albuquerque Tribune Online
 
TAGS BETWEEN PARAGRAPHS AS SHOWN --> By Lawrence Spohn Tribune 
Reporter

 PLEASANTON, Calif. - It doesn't take a rocket scientist to 
recognize a lemon, says Ray Kidder, a retired physicist from 
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he fears the 
world's biggest fusion energy lemon may be under construction.

 Kidder's criticism might be dismissed if he hadn't been the one 
to start Livermore's impressive military fusion laser program 
decades ago.

 Aptly named and an atypically irreverent scientist, Kidder waves 
his arms in big circles as he jokes about the troubled $4.2 
billion National Ignition Facility being the "biggest 
everything."

 Livermore Lab officials say NIF not only will be the world's 
biggest laser but also the largest optical instrument ever built 
and the most massive nuclear weapons blast simulator.

 The project is being built in a stadium-sized building in 
Livermore a few miles east of Kidder's house, where he agreed to 
be interviewed.

 On his patio as the sun sets behind Pleasanton's rolling hills, 
Kidder is alternately serious and comedic, suggesting NIF's 
history doesn't instill confidence and can be funny.

 "Just getting the laser to work would be very interesting 
experimentally," he confesses. He hesitates, then adds, "But if 
it really does turn out to be a lemon, then you're nowhere again. 
Lemonade. Not fusion. If they flop on their face with the laser, 
it's curtains. You're stuck with a lot of glass - lavender 
glass."

 The laser's special qualities come from chemically doped, 
colored glass and specially grown crystals that the lab's top 
scientists say will crack the fusion energy ignition barrier.

 Lab Associate Director George Miller says most of NIF's problems 
have been resolved, such as how to keep the sensitive instrument 
clean as it is built in a construction environment. Miller also 
says NIF is on a new timetable, with challenging, but reachable 
milestones and that the lab believes it has technical fixes for 
the remaining problems, the worst being anticipated damage to the 
laser's sensitive optics.

 Kidder buys almost none of that. He doesn't see that Livermore 
Lab did its homework or has been forthcoming on fixes for NIF.

 As an alternative to testing nuclear warheads by actually 
exploding them, NIF is to be the first machine to ignite a 
hydrogen pellet into fusion energy, an achievement which, if 
accomplished, will be laudable, says Kidder.

 But he scoffs at lab and government officials' contentions that 
NIF is critical to the nation's nuclear weapons Stockpile 
Stewardship and Maintenance Program to maintain the safety and 
reliability of the nuclear arsenal. He isn't even sure NIF can 
attract good, young physicists to Livermore.

 "Look, the nuclear weapons scientific problem was solved in 1958 
. . . and demonstrated in 1962," he says. "The job was done, and 
you can't get people interested in a problem that was done 40 
years ago. It's going to be like trying to get the best and 
brightest people to work on improving buggy whips and then, to 
boot, you tell them they can't talk about it to anybody, because 
it's secret."

 "NIF is DOE and Livermore saying: `How do you make lemonade out 
this, because stockpile stewardship is one big lemon?'" he says. 
"I think they didn't know about the difficulty of the program 
they were undertaking or how to resolve the many problems they 
thought they would be able to resolve. So they ran into a 
(technical) minefield. They have a string of difficult things yet 
to solve, and you really need to have those things solved before 
you run ahead and plunge into the big money."

 "They didn't really understand what the technical difficulty of 
those problems were and still don't," he says. Leaning forward, 
as if to confide, he adds, "I don't think they have a solution 
for many of them even today, but they say they do."

 Kidder, who is retired but still works at the lab as a visiting 
scientist, was among nuclear weapons lab scientists at each of 
the three national labs who openly warned in 1997 that the 
project was deeply troubled.

 That was on the eve of NIF's groundbreaking. Two years later, 
Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson boasted at a NIF ceremony 
that the project was on time and on budget, only to have to 
retract those words weeks later, when Livermore acknowledged that 
NIF actually was over budget and behind schedule.

 Kidder laughs today at Livermore and DOE officials who were 
quick in 1997 to criticize Kidder and other scientists for 
speaking out.

 NIF Program Director David H. Crandall, for one, had called 
their appraisals published in The Albuquerque Tribune 
"irresponsible" and damaging to "the future for all us." Crandall 
cited consistently favorable peer reviews by the Inertial 
Confinement Fusion Advisory Committee, the highly regarded 
military JASONs and other groups.

 But Kidder agrees with critics that those reviews were 
engineered by hand-picked, "somewhat arrogant" DOE panels that 
"pontificate" but have not given NIF the honest scientific review 
it should have received.

 Federal courts have invalidated some of the studies, and 
Congress' General Accounting Office officially recommended in 
April that NIF, six years after it was officially proposed and 
four years after it was started, still lacks an independent 
scientific review.

 "This is a big scandal," says Andreas Toupadakis, a nuclear 
chemist who formerly worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 
New Mexico and who resigned from Livermore last year to protest 
its continuing nuclear weapons work under the guise of 
maintaining the nation's warheads.

 He agrees with Kidder about NIF's technicals hurdles and is 
among scientists who fear the worst about NIF has yet to be 
revealed.

 Kidder says the project so far is escaping serious congressional 
or public scrutiny, because Livermore and DOE have played the 
national security card.

 "Hiding behind that, they can bamboozle anyone," Kidder says. 
"If anyone challenges them, they can say, `Well, they don't know 
what they're talking about or they don't know what we're doing.' 
But when you ask them, they say

`Oh, it's all classified.'"

 Retiring from his patio to a well-worn recliner in his den, 
Kidder delivers his assessments into the night like quips of a 
stand-up comedian. He belly laughs and nods as if to ask: Get it?

 On a wall is a framed 1993 letter of thanks from then-Secretary 
of Energy Hazel O'Leary for Kidder's testimony on behalf of the 
"future of nuclear weapons and the Comprehensive Test Ban." He 
explains that it refers to his lab-defying analysis of the 
reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons, based on reams of their own 
data from nuclear weapons testing and predictions.

 His conclusion: "These weapons were damn reliable, very robust." 
In contrast, he says, the lab directors who wanted to return to 
testing "put up an absolutely lousy case" against the nuclear 
test moratorium ordered by President George H.W. Bush and which 
President Bill Clinton and O'Leary later wanted to maintain.

 Among those testifying to the contrary before Congress, Kidder 
says, was Livermore's Miller.

 "He came out second best to me on that one," Kidder muses. "And 
I think if anybody in Congress would listen, he'd come out second 
again on NIF."

 Based on his warhead reliability study, Kidder says bluntly of 
NIF: "You could maintain this stockpile forever without it." But, 
he says, Livermore, DOE and the new National Nuclear Security 
Administration can be expected to fight any effort to scale back 
NIF to test its components before continuing NIF.

 Their worst nightmare, he says, is "being told to build just 
eight beam lines" and run exhaustive experiments. "We may find 
out they're not so good, and then they won't get any more 
funding. As long as they're delayed anyway, they've adopted a 
strategy that drags it out, gets full funding and all the beams 
and then runs them easy to get a few more years out 
experimentally."

 "It's just money," he adds with another hearty laugh. "The 
country can afford it, and, compared to the new stealth bomber, 
it's peanuts."

 But if Congress were really sharp, Kidder contends, it would 
realize that Livermore's "track record is not good. Most of these 
big, high-flying projects they had didn't go anywhere."

 Like retired Naval Research Laboratory fusion laser physicist 
Stephen Bodner, Kidder says that careful examination of 
Livermore's claims on these projects reveals an optimism that 
defies scientific reality and credibility.

 Marylia Kelly, executive director at Tri-Valley CAREs, the 
Livermore-based nuclear watchdog group, cites just one, the $450 
million Mirror Magnet Fusion Machine.

 "Can you believe they held opening and closing ceremonies (for 
it) on the same day?" she asks.

 NIF won't be that bad, Kidder is convinced, explaining that 
there are a number of valuable and basic astrophysics and high 
density energy physics experiments NIF should be capable of 
performing, even in a truncated version of itself.

 He believes there also is some legitimacy to the argument "that 
NIF may attract young kids" to work in the nuclear weapons 
program, because nuclear weaponry has become an increasingly 
boring business.

 "They need something," he says. "Frankly, once the tests went 
underground, it wasn't all that much fun.

 "Seeing the bang and the flash and that cloud," he says, 
beaming, "that was sort of the high time. When the stuff went 
underground, you went from the South Pacific, which was fun, to 
roasting your ass off in the Nevada desert (at the Nevada Test 
Site).

 "Heck, now they don't even have that," he says. "They may need 
NIF - just to get kids in the door." 

© The Albuquerque Tribune. 
*****************************************************************
 4  Local company Ktech Corp. vies for huge NIF power contract                    

Albuquerque Tribune Online
 
TAGS BETWEEN PARAGRAPHS AS SHOWN --> By Lawrence Spohn

 If glass is the heart of what is to be the world's biggest 
laser, power is its lifeblood and Albuquerque is its connection.

 The technical means to condition electrical power for the giant 
National Ignition Facility glass laser was developed in 
Albuquerque at Sandia National Laboratories, which also designed 
NIF's special target chamber and its stadium-sized building.

 Also in Albuquerque, a small company, Ktech Corporation, is 
seizing a "David vs. Goliath" opportunity to compete for a 
projected $50 million NIF power contract.

 "We like our chances," says Steven Downie, Ktech vice president 
for pulse-power operations at the upstart company's south 
Albuquerque office near the airport.

 The contract winner will supply literally tons of special 
electrical equipment - in the form of linked chains of huge, 
steel-encased capacitors in "power conditioning modules" - needed 
to power NIF. Each of NIF's 192 power modules is slightly bigger 
than a typical backyard storage shed.

 Now under construction at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 
east of San Francisco, NIF requires the storage and instantaneous 
release of a vast electrical energy reservoir to power its glass 
laser for each "shot."

 While the laser project has been mired in controversy that 
includes severe cost and schedule overruns, Downie has promised 
his company won't contribute to that legacy.

 "We will deliver on time, on budget," he says.

 Ktech, which has about 130 employees also operates a 
manufacturing plant in the Renaissance Park in north Albuquerque, 
where it is building semiconductor processing equipment and one 
of the first of the 30,500-pound NIF power conditioning modules.

 Until recently, the small, 30-year-old business sold primarily 
technical and operational expertise to the Air Force Research 
Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base and, more importantly, to 
Sandia's world-renowned and extensive pulse-power operations, 
also at Kirtland.

 Among its Sandia clients (pulse power machines) past and 
present: Particle Beam Fusion Accelerators I and II; Hermes III 
and Saturn; and the current world record X-ray producer, the Z 
accelerator. All were or are nuclear weapons blast simulators, 
such as NIF.

 Now Ktech is locked in a small but potentially lucrative NIF 
power demonstration contract with the much larger Raytheon 
Corporation, having already outbid the likes of Lockheed Martin, 
General Atomics and Titan in the initial competition.

 In the final showdown, Raytheon was picked to produce and supply 
eight of NIF's 192 power modules. Ktech also got a $2.8 million 
contract to supply another eight NIF modules. The contracts run 
through next spring, when the Holy Grail of all pulse-power 
contracts will be awarded to one or the other company.

 Whichever does best in the technical performance shootout wins 
what is expected to be at least a $50 million contract to supply 
the remaining 176 power modules.

 The special modules, designed and tested over a three-year 
period at Sandia by engineer J. Michael Wilson, will provide the 
split-second electrical energy pulses needed on each of the beam 
lines of the NIF glass laser. Like NIF's special glass and 
crystals, the pulse-power modules are critical to producing the 
ultimate ultraviolet laser beam that Livermore scientists say 
will instantly convert a tiny sphere of hydrogen into a nuclear 
fusion energy blast.

 Fully aware of the controversies swirling about the project, 
Downie says they're political and for someone else to resolve.

 "It's not about the technology," he insists. "If you're willing 
to spend enough money, they can make it work."

 Why does the Albuquerque small business think it can win a 
showdown with a huge corporation like Raytheon?

 Because, according to Downie, Ktech is a specialist and holds 
the aces. For example, he says, "We have Mike Wilson, who 
originally designed the prototype module system and fully 
developed it and who we hired away from Sandia."

 Wilson now works at Ktech's downtown Livermore office, a short 
distance from the lab and NIF. But he spends every second or 
third week back at the Albuquerque plant where, during a recent 
visit, he suggested the NIF power modules are deceptively clunky.

 Actually, they are highly efficient at producing tremendous 
power. Downie says that, collectively, they will contribute 
nearly 6 million pounds to NIF's mass, but they are not about 
steel, wire or cooling oil.

 "Electrons," he grunts. "A helluva lot of electrons." In 
contrast to similar modules that power Sandia's Z accelerator, 
the NIF modules have "a lot higher energy density," he explains, 
looking at the ceiling and instantly calculating "about five 
times more."

 Downie, who also used to work at Sandia, says Wilson knows the 
small Sandia contingent that has been assigned to NIF in 
Livermore on a first-name basis.

 Downie says it certainly won't hurt Ktech that for three decades 
it also has provided technical and operational support for all 
Sandia's pulse-power machines, including the Z accelerator.

 Then there's Ktech's thoroughly modern, 20,000-square-foot 
Albuquerque manufacturing facility in a converted business supply 
warehouse on Alexander Boulevard Northeast.

 Its "fully automated inventory management system" impressed 
visiting Livermore contract officials, Downie says. "When they 
saw the (NIF) power conditioning module system already fully 
integrated into our system, they were blown away. Raytheon 
couldn't show čem anything like that."

 He says that Ktech used its vast pulse-power system experience 
to tell Livermore "where we thought they were making some bad 
decisions and they bought it."

 "We feel they were impressed overall with what we could do for 
them," he says, stressing in particular that with NIF's myriad of 
problems, Ktech represents "as close to a low-risk supplier as 
possible on a very high-risk project."

 Already, NIF is estimated to be at least $1 billion over budget 
and six years behind schedule. So one of Ktech's contract 
strategies is "to deliver our entire system, all eight PCMs, six 
months ahead of schedule."

 In this and other respects, Downie says, Ktech's proposal "far 
exceeds what Livermore specified, so they turned around and wrote 
those into our contract."

 Ktech, he says, is no Raytheon, but "we are the largest 
pulse-power house in the country," and Ktech intends to win the 
NIF bid - assuming the project continues as advertised and 
survives continuing pressure to pull its plug.

 "It's not just us," says Downie. "This would be good for 
Albuquerque."

 Ktech plant manager Randy McKee says the initial contract will 
produce work for about 20 people, but about 45 will be needed if 
Ktech wins the big NIF contract. Such numbers attract more than 
the Chamber of Commerce's interest.

 In Washington, D.C., U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, an Albuquerque 
Republican, went to bat for Ktech in spite of NIF's reputation.

 Domenici has been critical of the project since its fiscal and 
schedule problems were revealed - problems he says threaten the 
stability of the stockpile program and the DOE budgets for Los 
Alamos and Sandia.

 But last April he wrote a letter on Ktech's behalf to Livermore 
Lab Director Bruce Tarter, saying the company's reputation in 
pulse power is "unmatched" and worthy of the big Livermore 
contract.

 "I encourage your careful review, consistent with all pertinent 
laws, rules and regulations, of the Ktech proposal," wrote 
Domenici, who is the ranking minority member of the powerful 
Senate Budget Committee, which he chaired until Democrats gained 
majority control in late May.

 Although Downie says the letter arrived at Livermore the day 
officials already had selected Ktech, he says Domenici helped 
open Livermore's doors for the little Ktech.

 "He provided significant help," says Downie. "Make sure Pete 
gets credit, because he was instrumental, we feel."

 Downie declines to address other aspects of the controversial 
project - for example, continuing contentions that NIF's optics 
will suffer from routine laser light damage and likely need 
replacement at a cost of from hundreds of thousands of dollars to 
perhaps millions of dollars each time NIF is fired.

 But Downie did confirm that Ktech also has a small research 
contract with Livermore to develop and test an "explosively 
driven optical valve closure" as a solution to optical damage 
threats.

 This technology would allow the laser light to pass through 
sensitive optics at the NIF target chamber, after which 
protective valve doors would be rapidly slammed shut by a small 
precision-timed explosive charge. It would prevent blast 
"blow-back" damage from the target. And it is similar to valves 
that Ktech developed to protect sensitive diagnostic equipment on 
Sandia's Z accelerator.

 "They still need some technical miracles," Downie acknowledges. 
However, he considers NIF "an engineering masterpiece" and is 
"impressed that Livermore can get that many balls into the air, 
juggle them and keep them up there." While critics say Livermore 
has fumbled the NIF ball repeatedly and should be held 
accountable, Downie counters that some failure has to be expected 
when you're "inventing technologies as they go, creating miracles 
as they build it."

 As for NIF's power modules, he promises, they won't be needing 
any refurbishing. Downie says they are good "for 20,000 shots." 
Print this [http://www.abqtrib.com/print/index.cfm] 

© The Albuquerque Tribune. 
*****************************************************************
 5  NIF: Need for objectivity                          

Albuquerque Tribune Online
 
TAGS BETWEEN PARAGRAPHS AS SHOWN --> Government investigators say 
the National Ignition Facility is six years behind schedule, $1.4 
billion over budget and needs independent review

 By  [lspohn@abqtrib.com] Tribune Reporter

 The nation's biggest science project - for which more than $1 
billion tax dollars already have been spent - has never been 
independently reviewed by unbiased scientists, according to 
government investigators.
 
  Laser-charged feud

 The $4.2 billion National Ignition Facility is a complex machine 
that scientists hope to use to produce tiny blasts of fusion 
energy, the power source of the sun, stars and nuclear bombs.

 What: Fundamentally, the NIF is an enormous laser that uses 
special chemically-doped glass and unique crystals to generate 
powerful beams of light energy.

 How: That energy is to be focused by 192 individual laser beams 
into a target chamber and onto a BB-sized pellet containing 
radioactive hydrogen, which, when super-compressed and heated, is 
supposed to ignite, yielding fusion energy.

 Where: NIF is being built at California's Lawrence Livermore 
National Laboratory, with assistance from New Mexico's Sandia and 
Los Alamos national laboratories. They are the nation's three 
nuclear weapons laboratories operated by the Department of 
Energy.

 Why: Government officials say NIF is the core instrument of the 
nation's multi-billion-dollar nuclear-science-based Stockpile 
Stewardship and Maintenance Program. Program scientists aim to 
maintain the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear 
arsenal without nuclear testing, using the advanced experimental 
tools of nuclear blast simulators such as NIF and supercomputer 
simulations of bomb blasts based on past real bomb test data and 
the new simulations.

 Issue: Various critics, including scientists in New Mexico, say 
NIF is too costly, won't work as promised and can't achieve 
ignition.
 
It's an astonishing finding, say critics, considering the 
controversial National Ignition Facility, a giant fusion energy 
laser and nuclear weapons blast simulator, has been under 
construction since 1997 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 
east of San Francisco.

 The project has been subject to review by the Department of 
Energy - a NIF booster - since 1995. And, in concept, the project 
dates to about 1990. It has passed several DOE and external 
reviews arranged by the department.

 At last count, the complex laser was $1.4 billion over budget 
and six years behind schedule, with a projected construction cost 
of $4.2 billion and a completion date of 2008 - 11 years after it 
began.

 The latest NIF figures are estimates of the General Accounting 
Office, the investigative arm of Congress, which twice in two 
years was asked to examine the NIF project.

 "They're off by more than a billion dollars," says GAO's lead 
NIF investigator Gary Boss. "How does that happen?"

 While lab officials plead that NIF is a complex and unique 
experimental project, Boss says that if the lab is not guilty of 
outright deceit, it certainly has exhibited "an element of 
self-deception."

 Besides the concerns about cost, the latest GAO report also 
warns Congress that:

 There is significant scientific disagreement about the promise 
of NIF for a project so far into construction.

 The nation's three nuclear weapons labs - including Sandia and 
Los Alamos national laboratories in New Mexico - remain at odds 
over aspects of the project.

 Its costs still may be escalating, primarily because unresolved 
technical issues could prove expensive to solve.

 The report recommended the government "arrange for an 
independent and outside scientific and technical review of NIF's 
remaining technical challenges as they relate to the project's 
cost and schedule risks."

 So far, GAO has been ignored.

 Associate Lab Director George Miller acknowledges the lab has 
made critical errors, the biggest of which was assuming its own 
scientists were capable of building such a complicated and 
engineer-dependent project.

 But he insists that NIF now is on solid management footing and 
is fiscally and scientifically sound.

 Boss is among those not persuaded. He says NIF's problems are 
too large to be explained by simple carelessness or even its 
technical challenges. He says Livermore made conscious decisions 
to fast-track unproven technology and still is pushing the 
project.

 NIF critics believe the numbers for costs and scheduling 
problems are worse and are worsening - that, ultimately, NIF will 
cost at least $5 billion just to build.

 But even if the numbers hold, says Chris Paine, a nuclear 
weapons analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, $4.2 
billion is a far cry from 1990, when a government panel used 
Livermore's numbers to estimate a cost of $400 million for the 
next fusion energy laser.

 "That's 60 times the energy but only twice the cost of Nova 
(NIF's predecessor at Livermore)," says Los Alamos fusion 
physicist Leo Mascheroni. "How can that be? It never made sense."

 Critics see NIF as a black hole that, among other things, 
threatens to consume the nuclear weapons stewardship program, 
including basic warhead maintenance at Los Alamos and Sandia 
national laboratories.

 So far, those programs have been bolstered by massive infusions 
of hundreds of millions of new dollars in each of the last 
several years - budget increases spearheaded by New Mexico's Sen. 
Pete Domenici, who sits on critical Senate Budget and Energy 
committees.

 Critical of NIF last year and promising that he will not allow 
it to affect budgets at Sandia or Los Alamos, Domenici said he 
deferred on NIF to the judgment of the project's newest player, 
retired Air Force Gen. John Gordon.

 Gordon, the first director of the new National Nuclear Security 
Administration, told Congress last spring that NIF reviews show 
the project is "making significant progress" and remains crucial 
to maintaining U.S. nuclear warheads.

 But the June GAO report reiterates that NIF still "lacks an 
independent external review process" and will play no role in 
current warhead refurbishments.

 The report stresses the value of independent external reviews 
for "measuring cost, schedule and technical success in any large 
and ambitious science project.

 "Yet," investigators report, "no such external independent 
reviews of NIF have been conducted or (are) planned."

 The GAO also reports "it is unclear if the results from prior 
(internal) reviews have been fully addressed" by the Department 
of Energy, which operates all nuclear weapons labs and, like 
Gordon, considers NIF a critical national security project.

 Delivered to Congress without fanfare, the GAO report has had no 
apparent impact on congressional leaders, even though Congress 
asked for it.

 It was presented to the Senate and House Armed Services 
Committees before the 2002 budget appropriations for NIF sailed 
through key congressional committees.

 In fact, the Senate tacked on additional $7 million to the 
original NIF request for $245 million. A congressional conference 
committee in late October settled on a total of $252 million for 
NIF line items, though critics say the figure is larger because 
other military fusion programs are subsidizing NIF research.

 After having been asked twice to assess the project, Boss says 
he's surprised Congress this year did not order a comprehensive 
scientific analysis of NIF.

 "Our feeling was always that they were going to give the lab 
another chance, but the sense I had last year was that they were 
going to require some very stringent things along the way," Boss 
says. "That hasn't happened."

 Boss describes the NIF report as "fairly hard-hitting" by GAO 
standards and says that Congress usually makes a strong response. 
He says NIF cries out for congressional oversight, including 
formal hearings that should start with all three lab directors 
and include weapon designers and other experts.

 In that respect, the GAO reports echo Mascheroni, who for years 
has argued that Congress needs to hear direct testimony, under 
oath, about NIF - not only from Livermore officials but also from 
key nuclear weaponeers representing each of three labs, without 
DOE filters or threats.

 Mascheroni says that official NIF "reviews do not reflect the 
views of the nuclear weapons community that is supposed to use 
the laser. There is a huge disagreement that has been kept from 
Congress between the (laser fusion) scientists (who promote NIF) 
and the real weaponeers who designed the bombs (and have 
expressed little use for NIF)."

 He also charges that DOE-engineered review panels have failed to 
fully examine a substantial body of technical data, including 
secret bomb experiments at the Nevada Test Site and computer-code 
simulations, which challenge NIF's performance premises.

 Livermore's Miller counters NIF has passed a decade of 
exhaustive reviews, evaluations and assessments by highly 
regarded scientists who have the expertise to understand its 
complex components, science and objectives.

 The scientists have had access to all the relevant classified 
data, Miller says, and continue to favor NIF, even after its cost 
overruns and delays.

 Boss says bluntly that those were reviews by NIF's own 
"cheerleaders" - essentially, "nobody who doesn't have some stake 
in the outcome."

 "They're all members of the same club," he says. "All have 
connections to the fusion energy research field, if not to 
Livermore itself."

 He said NIF's serious and numerous problems certainly are no 
tribute to those reviews and he sees DOE and Livermore as 
culpable.

 "I find it very surprising that there were known technical 
problems that DOE was not aware of until so late in the game," 
Boss says.

 Efforts to obtain comment directly from Gordon and NIF program 
directors at DOE headquarters were unsuccessful.

 Paine says Livermore and DOE shun true peer review at all costs, 
because "they know that NIF will fail."

 His Natural Resources Defense Council has successfully 
challenged DOE's NIF panels in court for being loaded with DOE 
and national lab employees or known scientific advocates of the 
project.

 Federal courts invalidated NIF assessments and barred DOE from 
using them, finding that the review committees were selected, or 
acted, in violation of the Federal Advisory Committee Act. The 
act requires a balanced panel and open meetings.

 "It's been a struggle for us to penetrate the cloud," Boss says, 
referring to efforts at damage control.

 Specifically, he says, Gordon rebuffed GAO's formal request to 
attend a NIF-driven High Energy Density Physics research review, 
which Gordon has used to justify NIF to Congress.

 "We were barred from attending," Boss says. "General Gordon said 
we couldn't go. We wanted to go, because we had questions."

 "Nobody we've talked with about NIF is real happy with what's 
happening out there," he says, noting GAO investigators cast a 
wide net that included weaponeers at Sandia and Los Alamos labs.

 Officially, both labs told GAO they favor substantially 
downsizing NIF, at least until Livermore demonstrates that the 
laser actually works as advertised and has achieved specific 
technical milestones.

 But according to GAO, even Livermore has acknowledged that 
"achieving ignition is not guaranteed." And, the GAO reports, 
there remains considerable disagreement among the labs over how 
to proceed with NIF as well as over its real value to nuclear 
warhead stewardship.

 Los Alamos has proposed DOE initially limit NIF to 120 beam 
lines. Sandia is far more restrictive, favoring just 48 to 96. 
Livermore has argued that, while building a smaller NIF would 
save money - $338 million to $540 million - it ultimately would 
result in additional costs of up to $583 million to build the 
abbreviated version, pause for tests and then complete a full, 
192-beam NIF.

 But GAO notes: "Importantly, (these) Livermore Lab estimates 
have not been independently reviewed or carefully studied by DOE. 
They were not independently verified."

 DOE is trying "to reconcile these different views" as well as 
the preferences by scientists at Los Alamos and Sandia to use 
other, existing facilities for aspects of nuclear weapons 
research instead of NIF, GAO reported.

 The report also concludes "NIF will not make any contribution to 
planned stockpile refurbishments" to existing nuclear warheads, 
including lifetime extensions to the W76 and W80 warheads or to 
the B61-Mod 7 and B11 bombs, all crucial efforts. Nor will the 
project contribute to certifying a remanufactured plutonium pit 
for the W88 warhead, the most modern in the U.S. arsenal.

 Given all of this, Boss acknowledges the size, scope and 
objectives of NIF require "a faith-based approach" that many 
skeptical scientists and analysts aren't willing to give it 
anymore, especially given Livermore's "behavior and their 
history."

 The lab has been widely criticized for heavily promoting weapons 
and energy technologies over the last two decades that received 
vast government outlays before being abandoned.

 "Again, with NIF, you're sinking in a couple of hundred million 
(dollars) per year before you know if this thing even works," 
Boss says. He warns that, without intermediate milestones, "you 
wait so long - years in fact - to find out what happens when you 
actually turn the lights on on this thing.

 "That's a lot to swallow," he says. "There are a lot of 
scientific and technical issues that are still ahead of us." The 
report specifically notes NIF's first major performance milestone 
still is three years away.

 Boss acknowledges "we're not scientists; we're cost-and-schedule 
guys." But he said it was clear to his team that "this thing 
needs a true scientific assessment."

 GAO also recommended that DOE not reallocate funds from other 
nuclear weapons programs to cover NIF cost overruns "until DOE 
evaluates the impact of NIF's costs and schedule plan," and 
"certifies that the selected NIF plan will not negatively affect 
the balance of this (nuclear weapons) stockpile stewardship 
program." 

 [http://www.abqtrib.com/print/index.cfm] 

© The Albuquerque Tribune. 
*****************************************************************
 6  Watchdog group: NIF is a blunder; Livermore should be green lab                       

Albuquerque Tribune Online
 
TAGS BETWEEN PARAGRAPHS AS SHOWN --> "NIF has no utility to the 
real question of national security, the real threat of terrorism, 
but Congress has been convinced that it is this vital scientific 
thing for protecting this country." Marylia Kelly, executive 
director of Tri-Valley CAREs

 By Lawrence Spohn Tribune Reporter

 LIVERMORE, Calif. - Think of it as "No-NIF Central."

 Tri-Valley CAREs, one of several U.S. nuclear weapons watchdog 
groups, regards stopping the controversial, $4.2 billion National 
Ignition Facility as its top priority.

 Make no mistake, its roots are anti-nuclear, and its long-term 
aims reflect that. CAREs actually stands for Communities Against 
a Radioactive Environment.

 Organized in 1983 by six Livermore families concerned with 
radiation exposures from Livermore National Laboratory - where 
NIF is being built - Tri-Valley CAREs now has 2,900 members.

 It also keeps a distant eye on the nation's other two nuclear 
weapons labs, Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories in New 
Mexico, as well as contacts with similar watchdog organizations 
in Oakland, Calif., Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Washington.

 Funded through foundation grants and individual contributions, 
Tri-Valley CAREs is located a short distance from the laboratory, 
very near Livermore's town square.

 Occupying the top floor of a commercialized old home, the 
"nongovernmental organization" has modest offices most notable 
for its squeaky wood floors. It is furnished mostly with 
second-hand, donated chairs, desks, tables, computers, shelves 
and a very active copying machine. Newsletters, action alerts and 
news releases are core missions.

 Volunteers perform many of the tasks assigned by Marylia Kelly, 
the soft-spoken but tenacious executive director.

 Her previous experience as a news reporter explains the walls 
lined with shelves holding boxes of documents. They include many 
government reports - from Government Accounting Office 
assessments of NIF to Environmental Protection Agency 
characterizations of Livermore's Superfund hazardous waste site.

 One filing box is labeled "Plutonium," a core component of 
nuclear bombs. Others are cryptically marked "GAO Reports" or 
"FOIA," for Freedom of Information Act requests for lab or DOE 
documents. Several are designated sequentially "National Ignition 
Facility Box 1," "Box 2" and so on.

 On one wall is a handmade poster with big letters: "NIF 
Busters." It has a freehand drawing of the NIF target chamber 
with a circle around it and a slash through the circle.

 No-NIF is the objective, but Kelly says Livermore Lab probably 
will have to stumble again before Congress is moved to pull the 
plug on the troubled monster fusion energy laser.

 As important as that objective is, it would be only one step 
toward Tri-Valley CAREs' ultimate goal.

 "It's simple," says Kelly: "We want to convert Livermore Lab 
from nuclear weapons work to peaceful scientific research. We 
think it would make a great green lab."

 Because the lab's role in nuclear weapons research and 
maintenance has shrunk, Kelly is among critics who believe NIF's 
real purpose is to get federal money pumping through the lab's 
research centers, experimental halls, corridors and offices.

 She says NIF isn't a mission, it's a revenue stream intended to 
keep Livermore Lab focused on nuclear weapons for years to come, 
even as its role in warhead stewardship shrinks.

 After the Soviet Union crumbled last decade, some government 
officials asked if the nation still needed three nuclear weapons 
labs, and a government panel suggested one might be closed and 
its work consolidated at the other two.

 Kelly says Livermore was the target, but DOE officials 
masterminded a convoluted stockpile stewardship strategy to 
persuade Congress that all three nuclear weapons labs still are 
needed.

 She says watchdog groups took some encouragement recently, when 
President Bush suggested that nuclear weapons facilities ought to 
be part of the new military base closure review.

 The organization recently helped publicize the concerns of 
scientists who have fled Livermore Lab.

 Issac Trotts, a computer scientist who resigned a Livermore Lab 
job earlier this year in protest, says understanding NIF's "real 
role" helped convince him to leave.

 "It's not about what they say it is (existing warhead safety and 
reliability)," he says. "They're adding capabilities to these 
weapons and contemplating new designs."

 Likewise, says Andreas Toupadakis, a chemist who left his 
Livermore Lab job last year. He says NIF's purpose is offensive 
and provocative and eventually it will draw foreign fire.

 "The East will react sooner or later," he says, suggesting the 
United States is insisting on being the world's only nuclear 
superpower and is acting like the international aggressors it 
opposed last century during hot and cold wars.

 "Here at places like this," he says of Livermore, "we are 
creating the nuclear gas chambers . . . of tomorrow."

 Referring to his "colleagues" at Livermore and at Los Alamos 
National Lab - where he worked for more than three years - 
Toupadakis says, "They have convinced themselves that all they 
are doing is for peace, but it can't be.

 "The truth is, we want other people (nations) to not have 
nuclear weapons, but we insist we must have them and build things 
like NIF to build new ones. It's hypocrisy."

 Toupadakis says lab officials tried to steer him into the NIF 
project when he raised objections about working in the nuclear 
weapons program itself. Smiling, he says, "I wasn't fooled, but 
you see they even work their deceptions on the inside (on 
scientists)."

 He says when he raised questions about NIF's real costs and the 
unresolved technical problems, he got troubling answers that made 
it clear the functional problems remain and the project's costs 
were deliberately and grossly underestimated to guarantee 
funding.

 "It's lies and deceptions," he says. "It is a government within 
a government, and they have they're own rules to play by, and 
they are using the American people, money and sweat to do all of 
this, saying its for national security.

 "The people in New Mexico need to hear this because they do not 
know what's going on, how bad it really is."

 He predicts that "when NIF fails, everybody here will head to 
Sandia (Labs in Albuquerque)," referring to its expanding Z 
fusion accelerator.

 Some scientists believe that Sandia's technology has better 
prospects for nuclear weapons simulation and as a technical path 
to fusion energy than does NIF.

 "This is the way it works," he says. "They think they create 
jobs for life here. It's not about peace; it's about this," he 
says, rubbing his fingers together to indicate money.

 Kelly argues that even from a pure national security 
perspective, terrorism has emerged as the real threat to the 
United States, and projects like NIF not only do nothing to deter 
it but distract both research attention and money from programs 
that could make the country safer.

 She believes if Americans really knew about and understood NIF, 
they would "go ballistic."

 "NIF has no utility to the real question of national security, 
the real threat of terrorism," she says, "but Congress has been 
convinced that it is this vital scientific thing for protecting 
this country."

 "It's about robbing our future to pay for their present," she 
says of Livermore Lab.

 She hopes that as the entire nation, Congress and the White 
House come to grips with the true dimensions of terrorism and the 
extensive costs of battling it, that projects like NIF will be 
seriously re-evaluated.

 "There really is no benefit from NIF to most Americans," she 
says, suggesting that before the auditors are done the project's 
cost could balloon to $6 billion or even $7 billion.

 "It's all about pork," she says. "The usual pigs at the usual 
troughs." 

© The Albuquerque Tribune. 
*****************************************************************
 7  NIF: Meet the opposition                   

Albuquerque Tribune Online
 
TAGS BETWEEN PARAGRAPHS AS SHOWN --> From nuclear watchdog groups 
to nuclear weapons scientists, NIF certainly has its share of 
adversaries. Naysayers claim the giant project is either a waste 
of time and money or just `a big lie.' By Lawrence Spohn Tribune 
Reporter

 LIVERMORE, Calif. - On a bright day last summer, at a busy 
intersection south of Interstate 580 here, passing motorists were 
startled by a message taking on "the company" in this company 
town.
 
  LIVERMORE LAB FACTS

 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is one of three U.S. 
nuclear weapons laboratories. It:

 Is about 40 miles east of San Francisco in the small community 
of Livermore.

 Was established in 1952 as the third nuclear weapons laboratory 
- with Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico being the 
first and Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque the second.

 Has a 2001 budget of $1.32 billion, with more than a third of 
its nuclear weapons budget devoted to the National Ignition 
Facility fusion laser.

 Employs some 7,300 people, about 2,800 of whom hold scientific, 
engineering or other technical degrees.

 Is owned and operated by the Department of Energy and competes 
with Sandia and Los Alamos for funding.
 
Screaming yellow against a deep, blue sky, a billboard at the 
intersection of Murietta Boulevard and Portola Avenue not only 
questioned nuclear weapons research at Lawrence Livermore 
National Laboratory but also targeted its biggest project ever.

 Shouting, "Your mind is a terrible thing to waste," the 
11-by-24-foot advertisement pictured the target chamber of the 
National Ignition Facility fusion laser.

 Under construction a few miles away at Livermore Lab, NIF is a 
nuclear weapons blast simulator, the 30-year brain child of laser 
fusion energy scientists, Livermore Lab, the Department of Energy 
and New Mexico's Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories.

 Livermore, Los Alamos and Sandia are the nation's three nuclear 
weapons labs, owned and operated by DOE.

 Both New Mexico labs are doing work that supports NIF, even 
while raising their own concerns about the project's impact on 
the nuclear weapons program.

 Sandia and Los Alamos also have been targets of similar 
anti-nuclear roadside rhetoric on billboards near the Albuquerque 
airport and along Interstate 25.

 But the Livermore billboard is the first to strike at NIF - the 
heart of the nuclear weapons stewardship program - to make the 
point that weapon scientists could be doing other 
nationally-important research and to exploit increasingly public 
differences within the nuclear weapons research community over 
NIF's real value.

 While Los Alamos and Sandia have been less enthusiastic NIF 
cheerleaders, DOE and Livermore have told Congress and the White 
House repeatedly that NIF is a must-have for ensuring the safety 
and reliability of U.S. nuclear weapons, if the weapons labs are 
not permitted to test the weapons themselves.

 Opponents, however, see DOE and other proponents as Wizards of 
Oz, hiding the truth about NIF behind a curtain of national 
security and official reports they see as biased and 
self-serving.

 "NIF is a big lie," says Marylia Kelly, director of Tri-Valley 
CAREs, the nuclear weapons watchdog group in Livermore that paid 
for the billboard.

 "NIF is not going to make our existing weapons any safer or more 
reliable," she insists. "It's intended to train the next 
generation of nuclear weapons scientists in advancing nuclear 
weapons designs which we, and the world, don't need."

 Kelly says taking on NIF hasn't been easy, because Livermore Lab 
is the major employer in this town of 74,000 people, where it has 
been an economic engine since the beginnings of the Cold War in 
1952.

 But NIF - to be the world's biggest laser when completed in 2008 
- isn't just an economic boon to the lab or the city of 
Livermore.

 It also happens to be the nation's biggest science project, and 
it has become a lightning rod for a variety of organizations and 
scientists from coast to coast, for a variety of reasons.
 
`Bloated mega-laser'

 Among organizations that have NIF in their cross-hairs are the 
Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, D.C.; the 
Western States Legal Foundation in Oakland, Calif.; the Los 
Alamos Study Group in Santa Fe; the Physicians for Social 
Responsibility in Washington, D.C.; and the Taxpayers for Common 
Sense in Washington, D.C.

 NIF tops Physicians for Social Responsibility's 
"Nuclear/Security" Internet Web page, where the organization has 
encouraged people to call their representatives and senators to 
oppose NIF as "the biggest boondoggle in the U.S. nuclear weapons 
complex."

 The organization argues that NIF is plagued by technical 
problems and is wasting taxpayer dollars; threatens U.S. 
commitments to prevent nuclear proliferation; and, contrary to 
government and weapons lab contentions, "is not needed" to 
maintain the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

 It contends NIF experiments will "have nothing to do with safety 
- preventing accidental explosions or leaks in nuclear weapons - 
and very little to do with how reliably the weapons perform." 
These objectives already are ensured through ongoing, less 
expensive DOE operations, the group claims.

 At Common Sense, an independent advocate for American taxpayers, 
NIF has become a poster-project of government waste.

 This organization doesn't view NIF as a crucial tool of nuclear 
weapons science but rather as a "bloated mega-laser" burning up 
taxpayers' money.

 In the budget surplus era, "It's been gift-wrapped and tied up 
with a beautiful bow," says Common Sense analyst Keith Ashdown, 
who says that in spite of a long, troubled history, NIF has risen 
from what should have been certain death two years ago.

 "Here you have a project that is probably billions of dollars 
over budget, years behind schedule, highly controversial in the 
scientific community, challenged by the weapons scientists it is 
supposed to serve, the subject of a GAO (Government Accounting 
Office) report that said the lab misled Congress and the American 
people - and what does Congress do but throw more money at it," 
Ashdown says.

 "It's indefensible," he says. "And on so many levels."

 While he says critics are frustrated with the political and 
military power that Livermore and its managing contractor, the 
University of California, have wielded in Congress over the past 
several months to sustain NIF, the laser remains a prime target 
for budget cuts.

 Common Sense has joined with the U.S. Public Interest Research 
Group and Friends of the Earth to challenge NIF in the groups' 
collective "Green Scissors Campaign."

 It aims to focus public, Congressional and administration 
attention on government projects that the groups deem 
"environmentally harmful and wasteful spending" and worthy of 
being cut from the federal budget.

 NIF currently is easily the most expensive project on Green 
Scissors' top-10 list, which recommends that NIF "be canceled and 
construction terminated" and that the nuclear weapons labs and 
DOE rely on "existing laboratory capabilities, rather than 
wastefully expensive facilities."

 It describes NIF's value to maintenance of the U.S. nuclear 
arsenal as "dubious at best" and contends that in insisting on 
funding NIF, "DOE is throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at an 
experimental program" that many scientists believe has little or 
no chance of reaching its prime goal of nuclear fusion energy 
ignition.

 Green Scissors estimates that cutting NIF will save taxpayers as 
much as $10 billion. Cutting NIF could save taxpayers much more, 
depending on whose analysis is used and whether it's credible.
 
Full accounting

 "Soaring Cost, Shrinking Performance" is a 64-page documented 
analysis of NIF produced in May by Robert Civiak, a retired 
analyst for the Office of Management and Budget.

 It was funded by Kelly's Livermore-based nuclear watchdog group, 
Tri-Valley CAREs. She said copies were sent to members of 
Congress.

 Civiak sets the tone in the first paragraph, charging that DOE 
"is keeping the full cost" of NIF from Congress and taxpayers.

 He estimates the full, 30-year lifetime cost of NIF "comes to 
$32.4 billion." That is six times what Congress was told by DOE 
in approving the project.

 George Miller, Livermore Lab associate director and NIF 
overseer, calls that figure "ridiculous" and insists NIF is back 
on budget and back on schedule.

 He says that Civiak's figure "would mean we would be spending a 
billion (dollars) a year, and the entire DOE budget for this kind 
of physics is only $500 million (per year)."

 But Civiak defends the estimate, saying that DOE and Livermore 
officially have given NIF a 30-year lifetime, and taxpayers are 
entitled to know the real NIF costs based on the likelihood that 
the project's technical problems continue to bloom.

 He says that even after budget overruns and schedule delays were 
revealed two years ago, "DOE still significantly understates the 
likely cost of construction."

 The Government Accounting Office, the investigative arm of 
Congress, has issued similar warnings that DOE has not had NIF 
costs independently assessed. Indeed, the same investigators have 
twice warned in successive reports that NIF as a complex 
technical and scientific project has not been independently 
reviewed.

 While DOE and Livermore insist the final bill for building the 
laser will be $3.5 billion, Civiak calculates it will be $5 
billion. The General Accounting Office, which prepared two NIF 
reports for Congress, has consistently bumped its estimates 
upwards, finally settling on $4.2 billion.

 These estimates, however, assume "no more problems with NIF." 
But Civiak warns: "On the contrary, there is significant 
potential for future problems and delays" because of a number of 
technical uncertainties that plague the project.

 Civiak also charges that "DOE has dramatically under-estimated 
the operating costs for the NIF" by excluding overhead costs and 
much of the cost of the experiments planned for NIF.

 Worse, he says, NIF's performance objectives have slipped at the 
same time. As a result, DOE in effect is turning the bargain 
Livermore had argued NIF would be into a taxpayer burden.

 He says DOE does not now require NIF to reach even 75 percent of 
its promised key energy and focus requirements on operational 
beam lines by 2006 - three years after the project was supposed 
to be completed and fully two years before new projections say it 
will be finished.

 "We calculate that the output from the NIF laser will be only 
one-ninth the amount per dollar spent that DOE anticipated as 
recently as last year," he writes. "This represents a dramatic 
decline in the projected return on the taxpayers' investment."

 While other analysts have reached similar conclusions, 
Livermore's Miller insists that original NIF objectives remain 
firm and that there has been no slippage in its ultimate 
performance expectations because of cost overruns or nagging 
technical issues.

 But Civiak concludes that the combination and documented pattern 
of "increasing cost and declining performance expectations" for 
NIF are a compelling case, that Congress should stop it now and 
that "every taxpayer . . . should work to cancel" it as soon as 
possible.

 He says NIF should be subjected to an intense scientific review, 
followed by extensive Congressional hearings into its checkered 
history, because he believes the project's record shows it "is no 
longer justified, if in fact it ever was."
 
Livermore shuffle

 But Kelly says it will take substantial congressional education 
and leadership savvy for that to happen anytime soon.

 She says both House and Senate leaders have been "fooled again" 
in appropriating funds for NIF by Livermore's public relations 
machinery and the oft-repeated message from DOE that NIF is vital 
to maintaining the nation's arsenal.

 "Congress never seems to learn," she says, referring to what she 
calls Livermore's knack for "selling" big science projects for 
decades without producing the results to support them.

 Most notable, she says, are the lab's "expensive and exaggerated 
Star Wars weapons programs." Among many failed Livermore projects 
she cites are:

 The X-ray Laser Space-based Weapon, which was to be powered by a 
nuclear weapon to shoot down nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.

 Brilliant Pebbles, another anti-missile project in which small 
"kinetic kill vehicles" were to be used to destroy ballistic 
missiles.

 The Magnet Mirror Fusion Machine, which, like NIF, was supposed 
to lead to a civilian fusion energy power reactor.

 The Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation Program, a high-tech 
process of separating uranium, whose mounting development costs 
and technical problems ultimately sank it.

 And NIF's predecessor, the Nova glass fusion laser, which itself 
was supposed to reach fusion ignition but fell woefully short of 
the mark.

 While consuming billions of federal taxpayers' dollars, none of 
these projects fulfilled their ultimate goals, Kelly contends.

 Livermore and many scientists believe Nova did achieve 
substantial scientific success and made the short wavelength, 
glass laser technology the military fusion research leader.

 Kelly agrees but counters that the $200 million Nova laser could 
have accomplished much more if it had not been scrapped for NIF, 
and, in any event, it "never even came close" to its prime 
mission of fusion ignition, the same mission NIF has.

 Kelly and other critics believe the evidence is overwhelming 
that Livermore - supported by a biased laser fusion energy 
community - prematurely rushed NIF into the appropriations 
pipeline when a myriad of technical problems were unsolved.

 Stephen Bodner, retired laser fusion physicist with the Naval 
Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., says that in scientific 
circles, Livermore's penchant for exaggeration has severely 
tarnished its reputation. But Washington seems oblivious to 
holding it accountable.

 "They get away with it because they are a nuclear weapons 
laboratory," says Bodner, "and the perception is we need them, so 
we put up with it."

 But, he says, NIF is so far outside the realm of reasonable that 
it is now incumbent on Congress to step in and downgrade the 
project to reflect its immature technical merit.

 In their article in Nature last fall, Bodner and Chris Paine, 
nuclear weapons analyst for the Natural Resources Defense 
Council, recommended limiting NIF construction to just eight of 
its 192 laser beam lines until its various technical hurdles are 
overcome.

 "Stop the project, and force them to test it, force them to 
prove that all the technical problems they say have been resolved 
are indeed fixed," he says. He says its time for Livermore "to 
prove it or lose it."

 Marylia Kelly said her organization is suing to get the 
documents she believes will show that Livermore officials knew 
for a long time that NIF was well out of budget bounds and likely 
to be seriously late, perhaps even before the project was 
officially funded by Congress.

 "They slipped the schedule without telling anyone or accounting 
for it," she says.

 "For a government report, we think the GAO was absolutely 
scathing on NIF," she says, though it appears to have had little 
impact on Congress.

 "Not yet," she says. 

© The Albuquerque Tribune. 
    
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