Anonymously contributed:
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The debate about whether or not NIF is an engineering wonder or a physics failure is interesting, but unimportant. No matter how elegant the engineering, if the physics can't be done, the end result is failure and the engineering but a sterile accomplishment.
There is a stunningly accurate historical precedent for NIF, the Spruce Goose. Conceived as an essential wartime tool, built by an exceptional engineer, wildly over cost, delivered late, and wholly irrelevant to the mission by the time it was completed. Moreover, technology passed it by and it was a complete dead end, despite its true elegance.
Interestingly, the characteristics of their leaders are quite similar as well. The Wikipedia summary on the Spruce Goose is recommended as a management case history.
Comments
With nearly $6B invested, whether $450M or $2B more is needed is less important than completing the investigation.
August 22, 2012 11:14 PM
The sad thing is that the flawed and misguided arguments behind these statements fall clearly fall into their own bullet points for a management case study, and that they don't even realize it. And even more sad, this is really Organizational Behavior 101 undergraduate level stuff. One could rattle off atleast a half-dozen biases or effects in play with NIF.
Oh, and don't buy into the line that "ignition is just around the corner."
The right strategy is to double down on ignition and LIFE, and come hell or high water, push for continued and increasing funding for power upgrades, target chamber upgrades, new sources, new materials, everything over next 30 years.
In the future, the commerialization and enrichment prospects for the employees are enormous, and we need to make sure that congress continues funding in order to enable this to happen. The will be in at the ground floor of a whole industry, and so will those people with demonstrated loyalty who have helped NIF with funding. So many NIF managers and employees sacrificed many hours of their life to make this happen, and this is the least we can do for them.
Shutting down the magnetic fusion programs would be a start, as well as the FE program at the Office of Science, and having funding to NIF come directly from congress through conduits like the White House or Commerce, and not through DoE. Any notion of funding to ITER should be made illegal. In addition, laws should be written to force EPRI to fund fusion research at NIF, as they will be one of the beneficiaries of our great work so far.
But ICF doesn't matter for energy production. NIF was sold as a replacement for nuclear testing. In their arrogance, LLNL managers claimed that ignition was essential for maintaining US nuclear deterrence. That claim was ridiculous but NIF would not have been funded without it.
1. You conclude failure of NIF to achieve its scientific missions before they are attempted. Idle speculation.
2. The spruce goose failed. The NIF instrument, however, regularly delivers its complete design specifications to the target and hence, is available for its purpose.
Your continued assertions are getting boring.
Wonder what the wound was?
Care to share your sad story LANL?
With nearly $6B invested, whether $450M or $2B more is needed is less important than completing the investigation.
While Moses is the current face of the effort, his primary role in his present assignment was to complete the build of the already started facility to deliver a desired input according to a certain design. The key architects and proponents of the design came from B Division, and they were the ones claiming output from the facility in the early days. Anastasio, Miller, Mara and to a lesser extent McMillan were in that group of supporters, heavily enabled by Reiss at NNSA. Thus were conceived the concepts of science based stockpile stewardship and the annual certification letters in the absence of weapons testing.
Another key driver, some would claim that it was the overarching motivation, for the project was that LANL had a big, expensive facility in LANSCE and LLNL felt a need to 'keep up or be left behind'. What was lost in this component of the analysis is that DOE had not supported the 'big physics' argument for LANSCE since the Reagan era and for years it survived on earmarks from Congress. When this reality hit LLNL, they were forced to fit NIF entirely inside the weapons program budgets.
This leaves the country with a facility that was satisfactorily constructed to its design and paid for by a mission sponsor that to date has not seen evidence of the utility of the facility with respect to its mission. In the absence of DOE picking up the enduring operating costs in order to conduct 'big physics' experiments, it would appear that a dead end has been reached.
Corrections or clarifications are welcomed from others that were involved in the formative planning.
For the record, I am not a big personal fan of Moses, but do not wish to see him punished for the crimes of others.
To put it kindly, NIF was a "con job." Unfortunately, that's not a surprise to anyone. Even employees in LLNL have known that fact.
But hey, this is about the "ends justifying the means." We all know that there is no huge lab-wide consequence for lying. Those lies paid the salary for lots and lots of employees and contractors and construction and component vendors. There was a huge positive benefit to lying. The lab should keep getting away with this as much as it possibly can! Its like a tax loophole: you would be stupid not to use it for whatever moral BS reason. Because of these lies, we do have a demonstrated ability to build such a larger laser that someday may achieve ignition.
Sure, make someone pay. Find a scapegoat. Extract a pound of flesh. So what. They will land on his feet. Alot of good came out of the deception.
I am being realistic to doubt that the politicians will do anything to prevent this abuse from occuring again. While more oversight would help, we will probably end up seeing less.
And no, not everyone "plays this game of lies and deception" in government budgeting process. That is the kind of excuse that criminals use to reinforce and justify their own behavior to themselves.
1) NIF Gift Shop and charge say $10 for tickets to take the tour. Reduce costs further by setting up a self-guided tour.
2) Bring back Old Rad Lab (tm) moonshine. Cheap outsourced production like Kirkland Costco branded whiskey that is rebranded as Old Rad Lab. Marketing tie-in with NIF. Build up marketing associated with the lore of the old LLNL glory days and party nights.
3) Let go expensive staff employees, then hire them back as contractors at lower salaries through consulting firms such as SAIC.
4) Designation of NIF as a national monument, and receive funds for preserving such, then misappropriating them towards operational costs. (hey what's a little bit of misappropriations here and there? it's nothing new at NIF)
5) Designation of NIF as critical infrastructure, and receiving DHS funds for securing them, then misappropriating them towards operating costs.
6) Advertising revenue - all images, presentations and documents associated with NIF will have advertising logos, photos, taglines, etc. Annual naming rights for the facility can be given to an organization.
7) Partner with a large telecommunications carrier to use some extra space to build in a telecommunications hub for fiber network backbone in this area. Tax internet traffic that passes through the hub. Use funds to pay for operations.
8) Fill the capacitor banks of NIF to the brim during the night time hours when electricity is cheapest. Empty the capacitor banks and feed it back into the grid during the daytime when prices are the highest. Use the proceeds to help fund operations.
10) Remove all lawn-based landscaping, and replace with landscaping that requires no maintenance. Focussed application of lab-wide cost savings to NIF.
11) Charge employees for the use of the beach volley-ball court on the premise. Also charge employees for using the gardening space that is on the premise. Apply fees towards operations.
12) Toll collection at all points along the inner loop. Install fastrak infrastructure and require all employees and visitors to have fastrak, otherwise incur a fine.
13) Accept donations for employees and friends of the lab. Create a 501(c)6 non-profit to serve as a conduit for funds to support operations.
September 1, 2012 4:45 AM
Can't call it Fusion Winery. Has to be called "Near-Fusion Winery or Sub-Fusion Winery".
...Ongoing efforts
toward ignition (if not achieved in FY 2012), the
development of a reproducible ignition platform, and
advanced ignition concepts will continue at a reduced
pace in the Ignition subprogram as funding for Support of
Other Stockpile Programs resumes. If indirect‐drive
ignition has not been achieved by the end of FY 2012,
development of a detailed physics understanding will be
used to improve the designs in concert with the
development of alternative ignition concepts. This will
allow a discovery rather than schedule driven program
that will provide more opportunities for comparison with
simulations and feedback from them to resolve the
outstanding physics questions.
The ICF
budget provides $271,750,000 for the operations of the
NIF and the ICF program at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory (LLNL) and $60,250,000 for the
operations of the Omega Laser Facility and the ICF
program at the University of Rochester. Depending on
the status of the ignition effort and the physics
understanding at the end of FY 2012, Omega operations
funding may be increased to provide additional data that
may be required.
The outcome of detailed technical review is support for a robust discovery based scientific program.
Game.
Set.
Match.
Time to bow down to worship your superior.
September 4, 2012 10:57 AM
This is a great way to conceal the fact that NIF has been an abysmal failure. Another fleecing of America scheme to fund a bunch of scientists to play with their toys. Someone needs to kill this project.
I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with research related to and supporting ignition. Excellent research from NIF and it's partners have been produced over the past decade. Science policy perhaps needs to be revisited, since it should not have been such an ordeal to get NIF funding regardless of how you feel about it's mission relevance or irrelevance. Moving forward, big science projects need some standalone structure that insulates it from both the political battles as well as prevent the potential abuses and misappropriations as seen in the recent past perpetrated by the national labs. Putting them under the management of national labs provides numerous avenues for things to go wrong, funds to be diverted and overhead rates to be skewed and unbalanced.
Personally I think that NIF funding should be scaled down, but not eliminated. Science should take its time and be done well and should not require breakneck urgency to answer to potential challenges in terms of justification for funding. NASA has a reasonable success rate (acknowledging its myriad problems as well) in science and discovery and we can look to them as a kind of model in which NIF might be able to thrive in.
All of the posturing and bluster hides the fact that it is a highly fragmented national science strategy that has put us in the situation that we are in today. Arguing about what is wrong with the players or the projects misses the point, since they are all products of this fragmented policy. It is almost like the old DoD stovepipe problem, only much more complicated and with many more stakeholders.
While this is my own personal opinion, I accept the possibility that I am wrong and uninformed about many things about the national labs and NNSA, and am open to any corrections or contrary points of view.
http://www.lle.rochester.edu/omega_facility/omega_ep/
which clearly has the look and feel of a user facility. I'm assuming that NIF will have the same kind of user facility approach based on their website. I understand how NIF has more power, and is therefore more likely to be closer to ignition. Is there a reason based on capability demand or uniqueness of capability as to why we have both and not one?
September 5, 2012 1:01 AM"
Yeah, why use tax dollars to fund stodgy old nuclear weapons and plutonium facilities in New Mexico when we can use them here to support our brilliant artificial star, the NIF.
September 6, 2012 9:45 AM
Is that you Bret Knapp?
September 4, 2012 10:57 AM
Yeah that's it! Get rid of the target chamber and redirect the lasers into the sky targeting pigeons. New name with a clear mission that LLNL can finally succeed at: National Laser Targeting Birds Program (NLTBP).
Those that live in glass houses should be careful when they throw rocks. Seems like only last year LANL was pushing model results that had oil slicks washing up on the coast of the British Isles as a consequence of the BP oil fire in the Gulf of Mexico. The experiment has now been run, and the LANL model was only off by many, many orders of magnitude.
NIF >> CMRR/MPF