December 14, 1999

The Honorable Bill Richardson
Secretary of Energy
1000 Independence Ave., SW
Washington, D.C. 20585

Dear Secretary Richardson:

We are concerned that once again, fundamental weaknesses in the National Ignition Facility (NIF) Project are being ignored in order to salvage professional and institutional reputations by "getting the program back on track." A recent report by the President’s Council of the University of California -- the operating contractor for the DOE national laboratory managing the NIF Project -- is a case in point. This contractor report, posted on the web page of DOE’s Office of Defense Programs, is presented there without any caveat, warning or disclaimer, as though it had the official approval of DOE, and despite the fact that in September you fined the University of California $2,000,000 for Livermore National Laboratory’s poor performance on the NIF project. Unfortunately, as evidenced by its conclusion that "management deficiencies, rather than technical problems, are the root cause of the cost and schedule overruns," this UC report seriously misrepresents the current scientific and technical status of the NIF Project.

We are aware that you have commissioned your own review of the NIF Project under the auspices of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board (SEAB). We have sought wherever possible to assist the SEAB in its review, and we hope the attached rebuttal of the UC President’s Council Report will serve as a useful corrective to the facile view that merely revamping the NIF project’s management will solve the escalating difficulties, or significantly reduce the soaring costs.

In reality, contrary to what you may have heard, after more than half its budget has been expended for construction, the NIF project does not have:

• a working engineering prototype of a NIF beamline (the now dismantled "Beamlet" actually failed to demonstrate many of the crucial performance parameters for the NIF laser);
• a demonstrated capability to operate at greater than about 0.9 megajoules, or half the laser output believed to be minimally required for ignition experiments;
• an engineering prototype of a NIF indirect-drive ignition target, or even an ignition target design that both "ignites" in computer simulations and is potentially producible by known precision manufacturing techniques;
• affordable laser amplifier and optical glass with the endurance characteristics needed to meet the power requirements for ignition experiments at tolerable cost;
• adequate instrumentation for diagnosing and controlling long-pulse ignition and Stockpile Stewardship experiments, which is supposedly going to be funded by outyear operating budgets;
• a scientific and technical consensus justifying confidence in the achievement of ignition in NIF; or
• a scientific and technical consensus supporting NIF’s importance to Stockpile Stewardship, especially in light of the more pressing budget priorities for programs that directly support stockpile refurbishment and remanufacture.

Since 1994, the NIF Project has been pursuing a strategy best summarized as a "rush to failure." The years of scientific effort and billions of ICF program dollars expended have now effectively been reduced to a huge open-ended gamble with public funds. It did not have to happen this way. There is absolutely no compelling need to rush deployment of the NIF in order to enable some critical aspect of Stockpile Stewardship, much less any energy or basic science. application. The Republic has endured for almost two and a quarter centuries without ICF. We’re confident that National Security can be ensured a good while longer without the NIF. In fact, LLNL’s exaggerated claims regarding NIF’s role in Stockpile Stewardship and chances for ignition, followed by the abrupt disclosures of major technical and cost problems and lying to senior officials in Washington, only reinforced Congressional concerns about the ability of the Stockpile Stewardship Program to ensure future stockpile reliability and safety, and helped persuade even moderate GOP senators that "now was not the time" to ratify a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.

We regret that senior officials of one of DOE’s foremost publicly owned laboratories saw fit to misinform and mislead a Cabinet official of the United States government regarding the technical status, cost, and schedule of the NIF Project. This was truly "conduct unbecoming," and just as in the military, the penalties for such conduct should be severe. However, as disinterested outside observers seeking to protect the public interest, we must tell you that the general nature of the disclosures and even some of the specific problems came as no surprise to us. We have been warning the DOE against the likelihood of such problems for the last four years, and even took our case to Federal Court against your predecessor, Federico Pena, in 1997. So regrettably, some of the responsibility for the current debacle lies with the willful self deception of past and present officials within DOE and the U.S. science establishment, who cared more about placating LLNL and other interests potentially hostile to the test ban treaty -- and grabbing their share of the Stewardship gravy train -- than they did about guarding the public’s trust.

We look forward to working with you and Undersecretary Moniz to help fashion a comprehensive "zero-base" review of DOE’s ICF Program, involving the broadest possible cross-section of informed opinion, in order to fashion a new consensus on the most appropriate research and facility strategy for continued exploration of ICF. In the meantime, the current NIF project should either be terminated, or drastically scaled back and redirected toward further engineering development and testing of all the component technologies needed to construct a high-fidelity engineering prototype of a NIF "bundle" of eight beams. The project should not be allowed to proceed further into the construction phase unless and until this full-scale engineering prototype has demonstrated all the required performance and endurance specifications, and the construction of the full-scale facility can proceed with justifiable confidence in its capacity to attain the conditions required for fusion ignition.

With warm regards,

      Ms. Betsy Mullins
      Director, Office of the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board