Who: Tri-Valley CAREs (Communities Against a Radioactive Environment)
What: NIF Truth Telling Exhibit with 7 ft. x 4 ft. NIF poster and "evidence table" with government and other documents on NIF's weapons applications, plutonium use, technical problems and other key facts not being told at the official NIF ceremony.
When: 9 AM - 2 PM, Friday, May 29, 2009
Where: Lawrence Livermore National Lab, corner of Vasco Rd. & Patterson Pass Rd.
Why: The National Ignition Facility mega-laser is $4 billion over its original budget, construction is 9 years behind schedule, its "firm" date for thermonuclear ignition is once again fading into a more distant horizon, its actual mission to advance nuclear weapons design is being downplayed, and the controversial decision to use weapons-grade plutonium in NIF is being ignored -- as are the myriad still-unresolved technical problems that make NIF "ignition" dubious at best. Moreover, according its fiscal year 2010 budget request, the claim of NIF "completion" may be in the eye of the beholder.
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Marylia Kelley said today: “Tri-Valley CAREs has been tracking the National Ignition Facility since it was proposed in 1992. NIF was conceived and budgeted as a nuclear weapons design project, and it remains so today. In 2005, the Dept. of Energy expanded NIF’s weapons mission with a decision to add plutonium and other fissile materials into NIF experiments. The decision ran counter to DOE’s pledge not to use plutonium in NIF. The DOE has also decided to produce both the fusion and plutonium targets in Livermore, reneging on a separate promise to the community that the deuterium-tritium (radioactive hydrogen) fuel would be loaded at a more remote location due to the emissions. The history of NIF is a history of broken promises and deception. This remains true today regarding NIF’s purpose, radioactive wastes and emissions " and its scientific readiness. Tri-Valley CAREs undertook a detailed analysis of NIF’s technical problems in 2001 " many of them remain unresolved today.” (See www.trivalleycares.org and our evidence table on Friday.)
Dr. Stephen Bodner noted: “Construction projects are generally measured by three variables: time, cost, and ultimate performance. The NIF has failed on all three. The performance failure is easily documented from Livermore's own publications. The question now is, do they get away with it?”
According to Christopher Paine: "This celebration is a travesty and a farce, and I'm sorry to see the Secretary of Energy lend his prestige to this colossal misallocation of DOE's taxpayer [monies]. In reality, the NIF Project remains where it has always been -- a speculative gamble when it comes to the achievement of its primary mission-- fusion ignition"at least seven years behind schedule, obscenely expensive for what it can actually deliver for either energy research or weapons stockpile reliability, and vastly over-budget when numerous hidden and 'off-loaded' ignition program costs are considered. The whole project is an object lesson in how not to do either stockpile stewardship or big science."
Luciana Messina stated: [The fiscal Year 2010 budget request] “sounds like the activity of developing the software for the laser and target diagnostic systems has only just begun. I am most concerned about this [following] statement taken in conjunction with the increase in funding to $72 Million: ‘This subprogram also supports the installation qualification of the cryogenic target system, the assembly and testing of the opposed port shroud remover, the first set of continuous phase plates, user optics, and the installation qualification of both the tritium handling system and personnel and environmental…’
“If by 2010, ‘complete fabrication of cryogenics and diagnostics equipment to support ignition experiments on the NIF’ (p. 219) is to be achieved, the installation qualification (testing) of the target system and the tritium handling system, including hardware and software, should have been completed by now.”
“My conclusion is: With one year remaining, there is only time left to resolve the issues generated by the formal reviews of the qualification (acceptance) testing. The budget increase would indicate a large number of review findings remain to be resolved and that a significant amount of software design and implementation (and its cost) will be hidden under software "maintenance". Major issues not previously addressed in years of software requirements and design will be characterized as minor software implementation flaws. Software and its costs are the largest component of safety-critical, real time systems on the NIF, the public has seen neither yet.”
Les Miklosy said about NIF control software: “[The 2010 budget request] mentions several components of the integrated computer control system (ICCS) that I worked on. [It] refers to the database that defines the configuration of the NIF system during an experiment. The database was not in good shape in 2003 when Luciana worked with it, and it appears to be incomplete today as well. The diagnostics component and the experimental campaign management software sound like two more elements that were not addressed until very late in this project. I suspect they did not specify these components early on and now they will spend millions more to integrate these three components into the existing ICCS… The purpose of NIF continually changes to justify it's further funding despite not meeting any criteria for success.”
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