US weapons labs determined to retain funding

As the US nuclear weapons budget has plunged over the past decade, the nation’s three weapons laboratories are determined to hold onto a program that they say is now their only source of support dedicated to high-risk research that could have big payoffs. The laboratory-directed research and development program (LDRD) enables the labs to spend 8% of the funding provided by the Department of Energy’s weapons and nonproliferation programs for R&D projects of the individual labs’ choosing.

“LDRD enables us to conduct high-risk, potentially high-value research in areas that are foundational to national security,” said J. Stephen Rottler, vice president for science, technology, and engineering at Sandia National Laboratories , one of the weapons labs. In addition to providing solutions to nuclear weapons and other national security problems, LDRD has helped to prevent technological surprises, Rottler told a Washington, DC, conference on 19 August .

As recently as the early 1990s, DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) included programmatic funding for high-risk basic research in such areas as materials science, Rottler said. But now, the $166 million in LDRD that Sandia will receive in fiscal year 2010 will be the sole source of support NNSA will provide for such basic research.

LDRD projects are competitively selected from proposals submitted by lab staff. Typically, projects involve a few investigators and receive about $450 000 over one to two years. After that, investigators are expected to look to other sponsors for support--whether from NNSA, other DOE programs, or from private industry.

As the labs turn to other federal sponsors to make up for a steady decline in NNSA business, LDRD has become ever more critical in helping the labs attract new scientific talent to their ranks. Unlike NNSA, sponsoring agencies such as the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security pay only for the direct costs of the R&D the labs perform for them; the costs of maintaining the scientific and technical infrastructure fall to NNSA alone. Today, 60% of Sandia’s $2.2 billion operating budget comes from non-NNSA sources, Rottler said; not so long ago, 75% came from the DOE nuclear weapons program.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently asked for help from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in making the case for revitalizing the labs. Until 1998-- Chu told PCAST on 6 August--Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, and Los Alamos national labs had been “on a 10-year glide path” to halving their NNSA-funded research programs (see “Science key to nuclear labs future says Chu ”). While that decline was halted in its eighth year, the NNSA budget hasn’t moved upward. At such low levels, Chu said, the labs are “in a bit of a bind” in their efforts to recruit young scientists to work on interesting science.

David Kramer