GAO uncovers more cost overruns and delays at National Ignition Facility

Weak management of the National Ignition Facility is being blamed for more cost overruns and delays to experiments at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory project, according to a recently released report by congressional auditors. The cost of NIF’s experimental program has already grown by 25%, or $400 million, to an estimated $2 billion through fiscal year 2012, and the scheduled completion of ignition experiments has been pushed back by a year, to September 2012, says the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The 192-laser NIF was officially completed more than a year ago, at a cost of $3.5 billion—$1.4 billion above the estimate when construction began in 1997. But GAO said that LLNL had been allowed to put off “major aspects of NIF’s safety infrastructure,” including installation of concrete doors and other target-area shielding to protect personnel from neutron radiation. Funding for those safety items, totaling around $50 million, has had to come from the National Ignition Campaign, and NIF’s preliminary experimental program, which includes “nonignition” experiments producing temperatures and pressures below the ignition threshold, had to be suspended for several months while their installation was completed. That stoppage could delay attainment of NIF’s experimental objective—ignition, the point at which the energy from fusion exceeds the energy needed to initiate the reaction—beyond the already postponed 2012 deadline.

At the same time, the report said, NIC’s mission and scope have been expanded significantly through revisions that were never formally approved by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Where the original goal for NIF was to achieve ignition once by 2012, the machine is now supposed to reach ignition repeatedly and reliably, and scientists are expected to understand and be able to control the results of ignition experiments. Further, NIC is now expected to create a reliable “platform” for future ignition and stockpile stewardship experiments at NIF, developing and installing special diagnostic instruments and optics for post-NIC ignition and stockpile stewardship experiments.

Officials at LLNL assured GAO that the delays won’t adversely impact the nuclear weapons program that NIF is designed to serve. The facility, about the size of three football fields, was designed and built to create at laboratory scale the conditions that occur in the secondary stage of nuclear weapons. The results are needed to ensure the continued safety and reliability of the aging nuclear stockpile, in a geopolitical environment where testing is not an option.

The GAO report also recommended that the external review committee, which LLNL assembled last year to provide expert advice on the NIC program, be made to report to NNSA, instead of the lab. Because its members were appointed by the LLNL director, GAO reasoned, the committee might be incapable of providing the objective analysis and the “candid judgment” that the program needs.

NNSA management said it agreed with all the recommendations from GAO. But in its comments on the report, NNSA fretted that some of the report language could be misconstrued to mean that existing stockpile certification methods are inadequate to ensure continued safety and reliability. Since underground tests ended in 1992, managers of the weapons complex have walked a fine line between providing annual assurances that the stockpile is problem-free and warning of the inevitability of aging-related problems—which can be uncovered only through an expensive science-based program that includes NIF, other experimental devices, and ever more powerful computational capabilities.

“NNSA’s own documents state that, as the stockpile continues to age and weapons are refurbished, existing stockpile assessment methods, without NIF—and, hence, without the capability to reliably and repeatedly demonstrate ignition—may become inadequate,” the GAO report replied.