New York Times questions fusion facility’s continuation

New York Times : Following news about “mounting concerns that the technical challenges” at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) may be “too great to be mastered on a tight time schedule,” a Times editorial proposes a hard congressional look “at whether the project should be continued, or scrapped or slowed.” The editors observe that technical reviews “have made it clear” that scientists “do not fully understand how the process is working and may not be able to achieve ignition quickly.” Given the $5 billion facility’s $290 million annual operating budget, the editors report a “sharp split among experts” on whether NIF is “worth the money.” Alluding to NIF’s twin missions of nuclear weapon stockpile stewardship and fusion power demonstration, they suggest that if “the main goal is to achieve a power source that could replace fossil fuels,” they “suspect the money would be better spent on renewable sources of energy that are likely to be cheaper and quicker to put into wide use.”