Laser Project Is Delayed and Over Budget

August 19, 2000

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Report Highlights Troubles at Nuclear Weapons Testing Project

By JAMES GLANZ

giant laser being built at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will cost nearly $2 billion more than the laboratory originally announced, and will be delayed by at least six years, according to a report released on Thursday by the General Accounting Office.

The project, the National Ignition Facility, or N.I.F., had been expected to cost $2.2 billion and to be finished by 2003 or 2004. By heating and compressing pellets of nuclear fuel with 192 converging laser beams, the project is designed to help in the study of nuclear weapons without exploding them.

So many technical questions surround the project, the report found, that "the cost of N.I.F. could grow even higher and completion of the project could take even longer" than the revised estimates suggest.

The report by the accounting office, the investigative arm of Congress, also found that the former director of the project withheld information about the problems from the laboratory at Livermore, Calif., and from the Energy Department, which runs it.

The project forms part of the nation's program to ensure the safety and reliability of its nuclear stockpile. Because other parts of this "stockpile stewardship" program may have to absorb cost overruns at the ignition facility, its political support has eroded.

Senator Pete V. Domenici, the New Mexico Republican who heads the energy subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which recommends funding levels for the project, said that the accounting office's numbers were "not out of the estimating ballpark from what we expected."

But Senator Domenici said that despite its importance as an element of stockpile stewardship, "N.I.F. is a very controversial one now because of these very excessive, these huge overruns."

Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has pledged to cover the overruns largely using money from Livermore's part of the stockpile stewardship budget. On June 1, he sent a letter to Senator Domenici asking that the project's construction allocation for the fiscal year 2001 be increased by $95 million, more than doubling the Clinton administration's original request. The money "will come from other Stockpile Stewardship Program activities," Mr. Richardson wrote.

The proposal is likely to meet with resistance, partly because some of the money would probably come from other laboratories' stewardship budgets. Senator Domenici said he did not favor the change and predicted that the effort would fail.

"My own assessment would be that that G.A.O. report will haunt it," the senator said.

He added that he would press the Energy Department to study alternative versions of the project that would use a smaller number of laser beams and cost less to build.

Madelyn Creedon, deputy administrator for defense programs at the Energy Department, said in an interview that money for the overruns could be found within the stewardship program without damaging it.

The department "is in the business of maintaining the stockpile," Ms. Creedon said. "It's not in our best interests to skew the balance of the program."

The report also found that the ignition facility's director until last year, E. Michael Campbell, deliberately failed to report the problems to senior management at Livermore and at the Energy Department. That decision led to a major embarrassment for Mr. Richardson, who in June 1999 gave a speech hailing the project as on time and within its budget shortly before learning of the problems.

Mr. Campbell left the laboratory in August 1999 when it was disclosed that he never completed a doctorate from Princeton that he had allowed the laboratory to believe he held. The overruns and delays became public at about the same time.

"Whatever things were going through his mind, he convinced himself and his senior people that everything was O.K.," said Gary Boss, the assistant director at the accounting office who oversaw the report.

Mr. Campbell, now a vice president at General Atomics, a privately held government contractor, objected to the findings. He said that in any project as large and complex as the ignition facility there was bound to be a range of opinion about how to proceed and when to report shortcomings.

"I'll be accused of enthusiasm and commitment to the project and excitement about it, but that's it," Mr. Campbell said yesterday. "I can't apologize for that."

The conclusions on Mr. Campbell's responsibility were in line with findings earlier this year by Mr. Richardson. But in a sharp contrast to a report by a panel appointed by the secretary, the accounting office investigation largely exonerated Dr. Victor H. Reis, a former assistant secretary of energy who was the principal architect of the stockpile stewardship program.

Dr. Reis had been insulated from the problems by lower-level Energy Department officials who "should have been more aggressive in acting on their suspicions," Mr. Boss said.

But the report found numerous shortcomings in the fiscal management of the project. Aside from over $1 billion in overruns on the construction, more than $600 million for fabricating the nuclear fuel pellets, or targets, for the laser should have been included in the original construction estimates, but were not, the report said.

While conceding the construction overruns, Ms. Creedon said the money for target fabrication had always been in the laser's operating budget, though not in the announced construction costs.

"It's not that this is not known to Congress or that this is an overrun," she said. "It just sort of depends on how you rack, stack and package it."