September 26, 2000

A Great Hope of Physics Falls on Hard Times

By JAMES GLANZ

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times Dr. C. Bruce Tarter of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Related Articles • Physics • Science/Health Animated Diagram • Creating a Fusion Reaction Forum • Join a Discussion on Science in the News Peter DaSilva for The New York Times Dr. C. Bruce Tarter. Peter DaSilva for The New York Times Plans to thread the cavernous National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with powerful lasers are threatened by budget overruns.

IVERMORE, Calif. — Two years ago at a scientific conference in Madison, Wis., a physicist named E. Michael Campbell gave a triumphant progress report on a project to build a stadium-size laser at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Somehow the big laser, which would be the most powerful ever built, had won Congressional approval despite a construction cost of $1.2 billion and another $1 billion for research and development.

The key to this remarkable success, the physicist said, could be found in its threefold attraction to science and society. When the project was completed in 2004, its 192 individual laser beams would converge on a tiny fuel pellet, crushing and heating it until fusion reactions among its atoms began spewing out nuclear energy.

Those experiments would allow bomb makers to study the physics of nuclear weapons without exploding them, helping to assure the reliability of the nation's nuclear stockpile. They would also let engineers explore the possibility of commercial power plants based on this type of "laser fusion," and they would offer scientists the chance to probe matter under conditions never before created in a laboratory.

After using those advantages to help score a victory for the project, called the National Ignition Facility, or N.I.F., the scientist directing the project told the conference, "I see how hard it is to get a billion dollars."

Participants listened with a mixture of envy and admiration to the man they knew as Dr. Campbell. Many were deeply dispirited by recent revelations of sky-high costs, technical questions and an overoptimistic sales message that would soon bring Congressional wrath, and its budget ax, down on another titanic fusion project, this one based on powerful magnetic fields and called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.

Now, after a series of plot twists, the fabulous laser could face a similar fate. Events since that conference have damaged Livermore's credibility, derailed scientists' careers and perhaps threatened the nation's ability to safeguard its nuclear stockpile. Mr. Campbell even turned out not to have the Princeton Ph.D. that his peers assumed he had.

Moreover, in an ominous echo of his words in Madison, N.I.F. will cost at least $1 billion more than originally expected. If the project survives, it may have reached its nadir on Sept. 7, when project officials were denounced on the floor of the United States Senate.

As negotiations between the House and Senate for the fiscal 2001 budget conclude, lawmakers must now decide whether to move about $135 million to N.I.F. construction. The reallocation, which has been requested by the Energy Department, would nearly triple the Clinton administration's original request for the project and save it for the time being.

Saying that its scientists simply underestimated the complexity of building the laser, laboratory officials dismiss all accusations that technical problems were intentionally covered up. Still, the plunge in the project's political stock has been breathtaking.

"It looked as if they had all the answers, and they were moving on the project," said Dr. Dale M. Meade, head of advanced fusion concepts at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, who attended the Madison meeting and who specializes in the sort of fusion that the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor might have produced. "And since that time, the roof has fallen in on them."

Even so, Dr. George H. Miller, a former nuclear weapons designer, who is now associate director for National Ignition Facility programs at Livermore, argues that the laser is the only vehicle for scientists to study the high temperatures and densities of matter that occur in an exploding nuclear weapon — except, of course, in actual nuclear tests, which the nation has not conducted since declaring a moratorium on them in 1992.

"N.I.F. is one of the major experimental facilities that we were lacking when we ended nuclear testing," Dr. Miller said. The purpose of the laser, he said, is to "allow us to maintain our nuclear deterrent, and to maintain it in a condition that is safe and reliable — but do it without nuclear testing."

The American program to achieve that goal, called science-based stockpile stewardship, would eventually rely on data from the laser, lower- energy experiments involving high explosives, and information from nuclear explosions before the moratorium. Powerful computers would weave together all of that data as a substitute for actual tests.

Dr. Miller said it was crucial that fuel pellets crushed by the laser beams become hot and dense enough to achieve a condition called ignition, in which fusion reactions are pouring out relatively large amounts of energy, just as a bomb does. If the pellets do not ignite, he said, "it will call into question whether or not the whole stockpile stewardship paradigm will work."

Physicists have an imperfect understanding of the physics of ignition, and Dr. Miller concedes that that issue was controversial even when it was assumed that the laser could be built exactly as planned. It still is not known, for example, whether the precisely spherical implosion of the pellets needed for ignition can be achieved, since even tiny irregularities can cause energy to squirt out sideways and quench the process.

Dr. Gerald A. Navratil, an applied physicist at Columbia University, said that because numerous scientific review panels gave the laser project a passing grade, its ballooning costs and technical problems raised still more troubling questions.

"Even as an insider, you have to say that it causes you to question the way the system works today," Dr. Navratil said. "I think it would benefit science if we learn from this and make sure it doesn't happen again."

A commentary published in the Sept. 14 issue of the journal Nature by Dr. Stephen Bodner, former head of laser fusion at the United States Naval Research Laboratory, and Christopher Paine, a senior researcher at the Natural Resources Defense Council, titled "When Peer Review Fails," came to similar conclusions on the project's history. "The advocates became captives to their own rhetoric, and dissenting voices were ignored," those authors wrote.

Ground was broken for the National Ignition Facility in 1997. Late the next year after the Madison conference, in the first hint that something was seriously wrong, an internal Livermore review led by Dr. Edward I. Moses, an engineer familiar with large projects, determined that constructing the laser would cost far more than physicists on the project had estimated, in part because the physicists in charge had not considered the difficulty involved in putting together the individual high-tech pieces.

But as construction continued, officials at Livermore, including Dr. C. Bruce Tarter, the laboratory's director, failed to pass that information along to Energy Secretary Bill Richardson before he gave a speech in June of last year hailing the project as on time and within its budget.

"Each person would be told that there was a potential — because that is the way it was phrased for a long time — a potential serious issue," said Dr. Tarter. "The reaction was, `How can that be?' And can't possibly be right."

Dr. Moses' work turned out to be solid. A few months after the disastrous speech by Mr. Richardson, anonymous faxes to Livermore revealed that Mr. Campbell did not actually have the doctorate that he had allowed the laboratory to believe he had. Mr. Campbell eventually resigned. At about the same time, Mr. Richardson, having learned of the overruns, angrily announced a management shake-up at the project, a large fine for the University of California, which manages the lab under contract with the Energy Department, and other measures intended to put the project back on track.

Finally, the General Accounting Office, the Congressional auditing agency, reported last month that the true costs of the project would be at least $4 billion and that it would not be finished before 2008. The agency also confirmed that the laboratory and low-level Energy Department officials had failed to disclose the problems once they knew of them.

"They lied to us," Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said during budget deliberations on Sept. 7. "They simply lied to us."

Mr. Richardson has moved to save the project from collapse by asking that Congress reallocate $135 million from other programs to N.I.F. construction in the fiscal year 2001, nearly tripling the Clinton administration's original request. Of that effort, Senator Pete V. Domenici, the New Mexico Republican who heads the energy subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said he believed that the "G.A.O. report will haunt it."

The project's immediate fate rests with end-of-year budget negotiations in Congress. For their part, project officials say that the overruns amount to $1 billion, and that the other costs found by G.A.O. had already been in the laser's operating budget and were not a surprise.

These officials also point out that it was an internal review at Livermore that turned up the problems in the first place after numerous external reviews missed them, and they say that there had never been intentional deception about the overruns — simply a particularly ill-timed period of disbelief and confusion leading up to Mr. Richardson's speech.

Last week, walking through the cavernous N.I.F. building, which is mostly complete although no laser components have yet been installed, Dr. Moses said that the project's budget was now realistic and that all remaining engineering problems could be overcome.

"The only thing that'll stop us is people not giving us the money," said Dr. Moses, who is now the laser's project manager, as he looked down from a walkway onto a complex of huge concrete braces, reminiscent of an indoor Stonehenge, but painted in pastels and designed to hold laser optics and long "beam tubes" through which the light would travel.

Dr. Moses compares the earlier management problems to those that arise when technology visionaries in private industry form companies but lack practical and organizational expertise. He said that a large part of the cost increases came about because project officials simply did not think about how the laser parts would actually be put together.

For example, he said, the beam tubes must remain free of dust that could drift onto optics and heat up, burning the optical surfaces when the powerful laser light flashed upon them. But while the tubes are constructed in special factory clean rooms, they must be joined together in the N.I.F. building, which would ordinarily contain dust. Project officials had not thought about those things.

"When you started thinking about those, which any project manager does, you realize there was a hole in the organization — there was a hole in the plan," Dr. Moses said.

Project critics maintain that the final set of optics that will focus the intense beams onto the target will be susceptible to damage no matter how clean they are. But Dr. Moses said that at worst, the problem could be dealt with by changing those optics occasionally, and he hinted that the laboratory was close to a technical solution involving a treatment, called annealing, of the surfaces.

Still, the project faces other doubts.

At one point, physicists believed that a much smaller laser at Livermore, called Nova, would ignite its pellets. Nova never came close, but Dr. Miller says that scientists understand the process much better now and that he thinks the odds are good for N.I.F. The project's other credibility problems, however, have caused this otherwise obscure chapter of science history to be much discussed recently.

The immense price tag for N.I.F., even if it works perfectly and ignites, has also eroded hopes that anything resembling this kind of laser technology can ever be used economically to create commercial power.

Even basic scientists, who once could not wait to tether their wagons to a machine they could never afford on their own, are having second thoughts. That possibility once seemed "pretty exciting" to some scientists, said Dr. Michael E. Mauel, a physicist at Columbia University. Now, he said, the idea sounds "not very cost effective."

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company