Livermore Lab Ignition Facility's woes

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | August 18, 2012 | David Perlman

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Scientists who have worked for more than a decade on a multibillion-dollar project to mimic the energy of the hydrogen bomb in experiments at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have encountered so many difficulties, they have already missed their deadline and are unlikely to achieve success soon, government experts warn.

The lab's National Ignition Facility was designed to be a substitute for underground tests of nuclear weapons, which had become a political impossibility by the early 1990s. Without testing, the nation has no way to determine the safety and reliability of its aging arsenal of atomic weapons.

The National Ignition Facility opened at Livermore to great fanfare in 1995, and two years later its leaders said they would solve the staggering scientific problems involved in controlled thermonuclear fusion by 2010 or 2011. When those deadlines came and went, facility leaders set a new goal for the end of 2012.

But a new report by the U.S. Department of Energy, which oversees the Livermore lab, now concludes that the probability that National Ignition Facility leaders can meet this deadline is "extremely low."

The report, summarizing the views of more than a dozen outside experts with access to classified insider data, says facility scientists have made progress in resolving some technical problems in replicating the effects of a hydrogen bomb blast. But other crucial and difficult experiments, the government experts say, are only half to one-third complete.

......Its purpose is to understand the complex physics of thermonuclear weapons so completely that the safety and reliability of America's weapons stockpile can be assured, without returning to the era of underground nuclear testing that ended 20 years ago.....

[Wildbill22]

Great. Obama’s answer to this will be just to eliminate all the weapons.

There problem solved.

Unilateral nuclear disarmament here we come!

Better brush up on your Russian, and Mandarin, and Arabic because if that happens we are going to be someone’s Bi!*#.

[edboock]

Iran is offering a ready solution to this pressing problem.

[bunkerhill7]

No problem-We can test them on Mars.

Curiosity is nuclear powered anyway so what`s the difference?

[SuperLuminal]

"When the project began in 1995, its estimated cost was $1.1 billion, with completion set for 2002 . The price tag later rose to $2.8 billion and then to $3.5 billion by the time the facility's building was completed in 2009."

Then they were going to solve the problems associated with controlled thermonuclear reactions by 2011???

Thank the Lord these lying-through-their-disarmament-teeth government-school-educated scientist-morons weren't around for the Manhattan Project.

We'd have finally bombed the Japs in the early 70's....Or another million American casualties would have been required to end the war.

[AFPhys]

The dopes who were supremely confident that computer simulations would be capable of “proving” the integrity of something as complex and non-linear as a nuclear weapon ought to be publicly identified and put in stocks on the DC mall for a month of public ridicule.

Ridiculous expectation to bet the security of our country on.