Livermore’s Hope for Giant Laser Ignites Protests

Ideological and political battles over nuclear weapon research were presumed as dead as the arms race, but bomb designers and arms control advocates are facing off yet again over a massive weapon project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The lab, east of San Francisco, wants to build a laser the size of a football stadium. The multibillion-dollar machine would deliver a wallop of light energy powerful enough to trigger nuclear fusion, generating temperatures five times higher than exist in the core of the sun.

Livermore scientists say the laser, which would be among the biggest defense or energy projects of the next decade, is crucial for maintaining their proficiency in hydrogen bomb physics in an era when the United States will be neither testing nor producing nuclear weapons.

And California politicians like it for an altogether different reason. With an initial price tag of $1 billion and an operating budget of $4 billion over the life of the project, the laser promises to keep federal dollars flowing to Livermore and bolster the California economy.

But opponents say the project, known as the National Ignition Facility, will undermine the current moratorium on nuclear weapon tests, amounting to a form of surrogate testing that no other nation has the technical capability to equal. They also criticize it as a pork-barrel project that will further pollute the environment around Livermore.

“It’s large. It’s controversial,” admits Victor Reese, assistant secretary of energy for nuclear weapons.

The decision on whether to build the laser will be crucial in determining the size and scope of the U.S. nuclear weapon complex, which is undergoing a piecemeal consolidation in the aftermath of the Cold War. And the heated debate over the project mirrors a broad uncertainty over what should be done to maintain the nation’s nuclear capability.

The two camps are maneuvering furiously as Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary weighs whether to go ahead with the project. Approval of the laser was delayed this summer after two key California congressmen--House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ronald V. Dellums (D-Oakland) and Rep. Pete Stark (D-Hayward)--broke with their California colleagues and withdrew their support.

For the nuclear weapon fraternity, the stakes could hardly be higher. Many defense officials and scientists worry that the United States is allowing its nuclear capabilities to erode too quickly, and the laser would be a major engineering tool that could help reverse that trend and keep dozens of bomb designers busy for the next decade.

Proponents say that it is vital to maintaining the safety and reliability of the existing U.S. nuclear weapon stockpile even if another bomb is never built.

Further, the laser could help save Livermore itself as a center for nuclear weapon research. As the Energy Department copes with budget cutbacks, one option under consideration is consolidating all weapon work at one lab--probably Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Currently, both Livermore and Los Alamos conduct research on the nuclear packages for bombs, but Livermore is considered more vulnerable if a decision is made to have just one lab. The Energy Department could decide to build the laser in another state if it chooses to end nuclear weapon work at Livermore.

Livermore claims world leadership in the area of high energy lasers. And without the National Ignition Facility, Livermore scientists say their unparalleled expertise in hydrogen bomb fusion will atrophy.

While acknowledging that the primary justification for the new laser is nuclear weapon work, Mike Campbell, Livermore’s chief for laser programs, says it would also be used for research on fusion as a source of electrical energy and in astrophysics.

“This allows us to keep smart people engaged in relevant physics,” Campbell said. “Some people are opposed to that.”

Campbell contends that large machinery like the new laser is necessary for the United States to continue its leadership in the discipline, since Europe and Japan also have fusion programs.

“It is an important area to be pursuing,” agreed Sidney Drell, an influential physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator. Drell recently completed a study of high energy physics for Energy Secretary O’Leary. “It is good physics, and it is very good people doing it.”

But opponents of the laser--ranging from influential Washington arms-control lobbyists to local environmentalists--regard it as a misguided effort that will be a waste of money and a polluting, destabilizing continuation of the arms race.

Arms control advocates say the facility will allow the United States to comply with the letter but not the spirit of efforts to end all nuclear testing.

“The idea (of the Livermore scientists) is to maintain the same range of nuclear weapons design skills that we had during the Cold War,” said Christopher Payne, a critic at the National Resources Defense Council, a Washington environmental group. “They don’t get it. The Cold War is over. We are negotiating a test ban so we don’t have to do this anymore.”

The United States has agreed to a moratorium on all nuclear weapon tests, and efforts are under way to negotiate a comprehensive ban by next year, when an earlier treaty expires. The rationale underlying a test moratorium is to prevent proliferation of nuclear weapons and promote nuclear disengagement by established powers.

In addition to the laser, the United States is considering whether to conduct underground tests that produce very small explosions, equivalent to less than 100 pounds of TNT. The tests, known as hydro-nuclear tests, are considered important for bomb safety, particularly resistance to accidental detonation.

But both the laser and the hydro-nuclear tests have prompted concern that other nations will perceive that America is using its superior technology and financial capability to conduct a full range of experiments that simulate a nuclear detonation--even though a fully assembled bomb is not tested.

Environmentalists have another set of concerns. A study by Livermore itself disclosed that wines produced from local grapes have three times the level of tritium--a radioactive form of hydrogen--as wines from Napa Valley, said Marylia Kelly, president of Tri-Valley Cares, an environmental group.

Livermore officials don’t dispute that some tritium has escaped over the years and found its way into the environment, but they contend that the wine with elevated tritium meets all federal safety standards for drinking water by a huge margin and that a single airplane trip can expose passengers to a greater radiation dose.

Moreover, the new laser will have better shielding and environmental safeguards than other high-power lasers at the one-square-mile Livermore lab. In addition, Livermore has significantly reduced the amount of tritium stored at the site.

But laser opponents have managed to at least stall a decision. After lobbying by arms-control and environmental advocates, Rep. Dellums tempered his support of the National Ignition Facility, asserting in a letter to O’Leary that the issues require far greater research before launching into the next phase of the program.

Rep. Stark also withdrew his support, saying the laser will be too expensive and will send the wrong message about nuclear weapons to the rest of the world. As a result of the congressional concerns, O’Leary instructed subordinates in July to answer a lengthy set of questions about the uses of the laser and its implications for proliferation.

Defense proponents dispute the idea that efforts to keep the U.S. nuclear stockpile safe and reliable contribute to proliferation.

“People who want to have their own nuclear capability will find excuses,” said former Defense Secretary Harold Brown. “If it isn’t this one, it will be another one.”

Although the Pentagon is reviewing its nuclear weapon strategy, there is no doubt that the weapons will have a significant role in the future U.S. defense posture. Experts estimate that America will retain about 6,000 nuclear bombs over the long term.

Without major new investments in instruments and computers, Livermore scientists say they will not be able to guarantee the safety and reliability of those bombs. But critics, such as Spurgeon Keeny, president of the Arms Control Assn., say the laser is a “Rolls-Royce” approach to the problem.

The laser would have 192 individual beams, amplified by glass lenses in a labyrinth of tubes, aimed into a spherical test chamber made of four-inch-thick aluminum. At the center of all the beams, scientists would mount a tiny target of super-cold deuterium and tritium, heavy forms of hydrogen. Just four 10-millionths of a pound of fuel is used.

The laser beam ignites the fuel indirectly by focusing the beams inside a small gold chamber, called a hohlraum. The hohlraum instantly vaporizes, barraging the fuel with X-rays. The temperature rises to 50 million degrees, and a sustained fusion of atoms occurs that can raise the temperature up to 400 million degrees.

The laser would represent a second approach to controlled fusion, the other being magnetic confinement inside machines called tokamaks. Magnetic fusion has been more lavishly funded, but there is little agreement that it represents the only solution.

The National Ignition Facility would not really confine the fusion. Ignition would occur instantly before the target mass could fly apart and for that reason, the technology is known as inertial confinement fusion.

Unlike past generations of lasers, the fusion in the new laser is intended to produce more energy than it consumes. Campbell said he is confident but not absolutely certain that the laser will meet that objective.

With 1.8 megajoules of power, a measurement of energy used by physicists, it will have a significant margin over the 1 megajoule that Campbell believes is sufficient for ignition.

But scientists at Livermore have been wrong before. The Nova laser at Livermore was expected to achieve ignition when it began operation in the 1980s, but it proved to be underpowered.

Moreover, how the laser would actually help ensure the safety and reliability of hydrogen bombs is disputed. In a thermonuclear warhead, a plutonium sphere is imploded to create a fission reaction, which in turn produces high temperatures and large amounts of X-rays. Those X-rays are reflected by an interior shroud to a second sphere that contains the fusion fuel, producing a much larger explosion.

The design is similar to the hohlraum that would be used in the Livermore laser. Assistant Energy Secretary Reese said the laser would be used to refine top secret computational codes used to design and predict the yield of nuclear weapons.

“It’s a scientific tool that allows you to understand the physics of fusion . . . and really to understand what happens at very high energy and energy density, which allows you to work on the codes,” Reese said.

But critics, such as Payne, say the laser is little more than an expensive toy for physicists.

“I don’t think we will forget how to make nuclear weapons in the next 100 years,” Payne said. “It only took us three years to make them the first time.”

Meanwhile, as California politicians such as Dellums waffle over their support for the laser, officials from Nevada and New Mexico have launched efforts to get the program for their states. The political moves have left Livermore officials clearly worried, not only that they would lose the laser but also that they would lose the lab’s role in bomb research itself.

“The National Ignition Facility,” said one scientist, “is crucial to Livermore.”