Lawmakers act to rescue Omega laser facility

House and Senate appropriators have rejected the US Department of Energy’s proposal to close the Omega laser at the University of Rochester as part of a major cutback to the inertial confinement fusion (ICF) program. In an energy and water development bill advanced on 24 May, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved $545 million for ICF, which matches fiscal year 2018 funding. The total includes a $5 million boost in funding for Omega, to $80 million. In the House’s version of the bill, approved on 16 May, the Appropriations Committee provided $509 million for ICF, with $68 million for Omega. The Trump administration’s request of $419 million for ICF included $45 million to begin a three-year phaseout of the Omega program .

Both bills must be approved by their respective chambers before being reconciled in a House–Senate conference committee. But the inclusion of record-high funding for Omega in the Senate bill, combined with language in the House version that explicitly rejects the closure of ICF facilities, virtually ensures Omega’s continued viability.

Omega, along with the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Z pulsed-power machine at Sandia National Laboratories, is supported by DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to aid in nuclear weapons R&D. Through the use of powerful lasers or magnetic fields, each device can mimic at a laboratory scale some of the processes that occur in the fusion stages of weapons. The facilities are also used to examine other phenomena, such as the behavior of materials at extremely high pressures and temperatures, which is relevant to both weapons and non-weapons-related research.

In addition to preserving Omega, the bills reverse the administration’s sizable proposed cut to NIF. The Senate and House would provide $344 million and $330 million, respectively, compared with $326 million appropriated in FY 2018. The administration had requested $287 million for NIF. Language in the House bill report notes that although progress at NIF in achieving ignition—the milestone at which the fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining—has been slow, “the value of maintaining a robust research program in high energy density physics will continue to be recognized and strongly supported.”

Both bills would restore NNSA’s half of an $18 million program, shared with DOE’s Office of Science, that supports academic high-energy-density physics experimentation at Omega and NIF. Cosmologists create plasmas that resemble regimes seen in supernovae, for example, while other researchers try to determine materials’ equations of state under extreme conditions. The administration had proposed to eliminate that program, which helps attract new scientists to the study of ICF.

Tempering the House measure is language that would require university researchers to pay the full cost of their experiments on NIF. University of Chicago astrophysicist Donald Lamb says that NIF operations cost around $1 million per day, which is beyond the reach of most academic researchers. The same provision has been removed by House–Senate negotiators in previous years.

The House bill provides $8 million, the same as the current year, for the DOE-funded ICF program at the Naval Research Laboratory, which explores alternative laser technologies. Senate appropriators didn’t mention the NRL program, which the administration had proposed to zero out. But they did include $27 million that’s not explicitly designated for the three major ICF facilities or for the production of ICF targets.