An Aug. 8 experiment at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility that dazzled scientists, weapons-focused and otherwise, has the National Nuclear Security Administration rethinking plans to focus the facility more strictly on nuclear-weapons work.
The experiment did not create a sustained nuclear fusion reaction, but it did set a new record for energy output at the vaunted laser research center, right around the time that Congress was proposing a bigger-than-requested budget to spare the facility from austerity proposed by the semi-autonomous Department of Energy nuclear-weapons steward.
That result had yet to be repeated or improved upon as of Monday, but it “has changed our thinking a little bit,” Mark Anderson, the National Security Administration’s (NNSA) assistant deputy administrator for research development, test, and evaluation, said in a virtual panel presentation on Monday.
“[B]ut how to get the money there to do [more fusion research] is still a big problem,” Anderson said, because the agency still believes the National Ignition Facility as constructed will not achieve the breakthrough, sustained nuclear-fusion reaction the facility was designed to produce.
In its fiscal year 2022 budget request, the NNSA said it performed an internal review of its inertial confinement fusion program that determined the National Ignition Facility, one of the program’s three primary research centers, was unlikely to achieve nuclear fusion and that experiments in that discipline should be curtailed in favor of a narrower focus on nuclear-weapons and materials research.
“Right now, we’re competing with priorities across the board for the stockpile and modernization programs,” Anderson said in Monday’s virtual meeting, hosted by the Washington-based Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance non-government group.
Besides Anderson, leading figures in the NNSA’s inertial confinement fusion program joined the call. These included:
- Michael Campbell, director of the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester.
- Mark Herrmann, deputy program director for fundamental weapons physics, and program director for integration of the National Ignition Facility and the Weapons and Complex Integration at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
- Kimberly Scott, program director of the office of experimental sciences at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
- Daniel Sinars, director of the pulsed power sciences center at the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.
In combination with supercomputers, high energy density physics experiments and the inertial confinement fusion facilities that enable them help weapons designers and stockpile stewards observe weapons components and materials under conditions similar to a thermonuclear explosion.
The Joe Biden administration proposed $530 million for the entire NNSA fusion portfolio in 2022, which would have been a cut of $5 million from fiscal year 2021. Under the request, the program would have used funds left over from last year to pay for experiments this year.
But the full House and the Senate Appropriations Committee, in unreconciled 2022 appropriations bills passed earlier this year, decided to raise the agency’s inertial confinement fusion budget by $5 million year-over-year, to $580 million. Meanwhile, the government is running on a continuing resolution that extended 2021 budgets through Feb. 18.
