Rekindling the arms race.

Livermore, CA -- Remember the end of the Cold War? The "Peace Dividend"? The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty? These supposedly were signals that the arms race was a thing of the past, that real nuclear disarmament was underway.

But just when you think it's safe to get out of the bomb shelter, the US Department of Energy (DOE) decides to spend more than $40 billion over the next 10 years on so-called "Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship" (SBSS) -a program of high-priced facilities and advanced supercomputers touted as essential to ensure that US nuclear weapons remain "safe and reliable." (The annual budget for nuclear weapons programs over the next decade is now greater than the annual costs expended during the Cold War years.)

The SBSS complex is an effort to advance nuclear weapons research through the use of "virtual" explosions-though no single SBSS facility offers a complete "substitute" for full-scale nuclear blasts.

The flagship of the SBSS program is the National Ignition Facility (NIF)-a megalaser the size of a football stadium that would create tiny nuclear blasts at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). It is funded through DOE's Inertial Confinement Fusion program, part of the nuclear weapons research division. Weighing in with a projected construction cost of $1.2 billion and about $115 million in annual operational costs, NIF is the 800-pound gorilla of SBSS.

Creating Miniature Nuclear Blasts

While DOE sells the SBSS to the public as a means to keep old nukes "safe and reliable," NIF's 1994 conceptual design plan states that a major part of its mission is "to provide an aboveground experimental capability for maintaining nuclear competence and weapons effects simulations."

Unlike the supercomputers designed to model "virtual" atomic blasts, NIF is designed to produce real nuclear fusion reactions. These reactions are the same type that occur in the "secondary" stage of a nuclear weapon's explosion -- the H-bomb part. NIF would focus about 500 trillion watts of energy (nearly 1,000 fumes the electric capacity of the entire US) and deliver it in about three-billionths of a second.

Fusion reactions bind atoms together, the opposite of fission reactions where an atom is "split." NIF would attempt to create fusion by focusing 192 powerful laser beams through 10,000 precision-ground optical components into a small gold cylinder called a hohlraum (from the German word for "hollow room"). Inside this target chamber, the laser's energy would compress a BB-sized pellet containing deuterium (so-called "heavy water") and tritium (an artificial radioactive isotope).

In theory, the fuel pellet becomes 20 times denser than lead (imagine trying to squeeze a tennis ball to 1/1000th its normal size) and reaches a temperature approaching 180 million degrees Fahrenheit -- hotter than the surface of the sun. At these densities and temperatures, fusion could occur -- creating a miniature nuclear explosion. Each successful deuterium-tritium fusion would produce an alpha particle (an atom of helium-4), an energetic neutron and a good deal of energy.

Unfused tritium and deuterium would be released and some fraction would end up airborne. Tribum, although it has a relatively short half-life of about 12.5 years, is an unwieldy gas that is difficult to contain. It diffuses easily and delivers its radiation very efficiently in biological systems.

LLNL is already a Superfund cleanup site, plagued with tribum-laced ground-water. DOE documents warn that one drop of pure tritium could render more than 2 billion gallons of water undrinkable under current EPA health standards. Tribum in Livermore's rainfall has been measured at seven times the EPA standard for safe drinking water, and wines from the Livermore valley contain four fumes the tritium levels of other California wines.

A Nuclear Porkbarrel

The SBSS program is essentially the result of post-Cold War politics. When the Clinton administration committed the US to achieving a global ban on nuclear testing, the White House decided to placate the weaponeers, so it handed the labs big science projects that maintained -- and even increased -- their annual weapons budgets.

While Aid to Families with Dependent Children was being bashed in Congress last year, a program of "Aid to Laboratories with Dependent Physicists" was being successfully advanced by the labs' lobbyists. Ironically, LLNL's own documents reveal that NIF would create only 230 longterm jobs at the lab-fewer secure jobs than almost any conceivable civilian project of comparable cost.

DOE insists that it needs NIF to address "safety and reliability" issues and adds urgency to this claim by stating that our nuclear weapons stockpile is "aging." (A "safe" nuclear weapons will not blow up accidentally; a "reliable" one will perform with specific power and accuracy.)

The truth is that our warheads are neither crumbling nor decaying. But, even if they were, this is not a problem that NIF could address.

DOE's own data shows that most safety and reliability problems have been the result of design flaws, not old age. In the handful of cases where age was tagged as the cause of the problem, the glitch never occurred in the part of the system that NIF's blasts would mimic. Weapons design experts and government officials (including Harold Smith, former assistant secretary of defense for atomic energy) have declared that US nuclear weapons are extremely safe and reliable, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.

There are better and less expensive ways to address any problems. Most problems occur in the non-nuclear part of the weapons -- the part full of fuses, switches, gyroscopes, etc. These portions can be rebuilt and replaced. If problems arise in the nuclear portion of a weapon, it most likely would be safer simply to remove the warhead from the stockpile. (Weapons experts warn that if you fiddle with nuclear components and are not able to conduct a test afterward, you actually may do more harm than good.)

Traditionally, DOE has conducted a stockpile surveillance program in which warheads were inspected, taken apart and non-nuclear components tested to assure safety and reliability. More than three-fourths of all problems ever found in the US nuclear arsenal have been discovered through this process. However, DOE currently is falling behind in its surveillance schedule, and expensive toys like NIF would drain even more funds from this program. Sacrificing stockpile surveillance for endeavors like NIF is akin to firing construction workers and building engineers for the sake of keeping the architects: You may come up with some great new designs, but woe the day when you need to fix something.

Disassemble, Don't Dissemble

The US supposedly has made a commitment to nuclear disarmament. The job, then, is to ensure safety while removing and disassembling our warheads -- not to monitor and preserve them indefinitely.

Recently, a joint statement issued by more than 60 admirals and generals worldwide called for "continuing, complete, and irrevocable elimination of nuclear weapons," since they "constitute a peril to global peace." Leading this movement are several prominent retired US officers, including Gen. Lee Butler (until recently commander of the US Strategic Air Command).

Historically, the world has viewed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) as a step toward nuclear disarmament. A key purpose of the treaty is to halt and then reverse the development of nuclear weapons technology. NIF is an attempt to do an end run around the CTBT.

The existence of NIF and the SBSS program presents a direct threat to achieving international CTBT ratification. In order for the treaty to "enter into force," the 44 nations that maintain nuclear reactors must ratify it independently. Some will not ratify if the US seeks to improve its nuclear know-how with high-tech machines and multibillion-dollar budgets. Several countries have harshly criticized Inertial Confinement Fusion programs, and NIF in particular, as "provocative" weapons programs that are unacceptable in a test-ban regime.

It is hypocritical for the US to endorse nuclear disarmament (as it did when it ratified the 1970 Nonproliferation Treaty) while simultaneously seeking to maintain as robust and complete a nuclear weapons infrastructure as is "legally" possible.

Fusion energy research (and especially inertial confinement fusion machines like NIF) represent a foray into a realm of energy the world has not yet mastered.

As with fission, there is no effective way to limit the use of fusion to purely civilian needs. NIF could become the machine that leads to the advent of pure fusion weapons and "directed energy" devices. Imagine a nuclear weapon of immense power that did not require costly and hard-to-produce materials like uranium and plutonium. By paying smart people to work on fusion energy "problems," we are inviting the possibility that a future Oppenheimer might one day invent a pure fusion weapon requiring only small amounts of deuterium and a suitable detonator.

Do as We Say, Not as We Do(E)

In response to public outcry over the nuclear proliferation risks of NIF, DOE has begun touting the program as a critical step in the quest for cheap, environmentally friendly and inexhaustible energy (sound familiar?).

DOE claims that NIF will achieve fusion "ignition" -- a self-sustaining burn of the deuterium -- tritium fuel that would begin to produce more energy than was required to start the reaction. But so far, it takes more juice to study fusion than fusion experiments have produced.

Billions of dollars are spent each year on fusion energy research programs worldwide. However, most civilian energy projects have focused on magnetic confinement techniques, which use large-sized plasmas and longer time periods to create fusion reactions. Magnetic confinement systems do not have the weapons applications that machines like the NIF have. If fusion energy is the goal, why has DOE gutted civilian magnetic confinement research budgets over the past 10 years?

Inertial Confinement Fusion techniques always have been used to produce weapons, not energy. Practical fusion energy plants will need to fire powerful blasts of energy several times a second. Because the glass components of NIF's laser require hours to cool down after each "shot," NIF can never be a suitable device for producing usable, economical fusion energy.

NIF could become a colossal $4.6 billion fizzle (the total lifecycle cost of NIF). Despite progress in achieving greater energies and temperatures with lasers, researchers have not come close to attaining true "ignition and energy gain."

The conditions required to ignite a NIF fuel sphere are extreme and unforgiving. The laser beams must be produced to precise specifications and aimed extremely accurately. In a 1995 run of the Beamlet -- a $37 million, 200-foot-long prototype of one of NIF's 192 laser "arms" -- the device imploded due to microscopic flaws in the glass, causing $228,000 in damages and shutting down the project for nearly seven weeks. Last September, the Beamlet again blew itself up, causing an additional $70,000 in damages and a monthlong shutdown.

Even if the laser's parts work, challenges in the reaction chamber are daunting. Compression of a BB-sized solid pellet to such a small size to ensure atom fusing must occur uniformly. But during the process, the plasma produced by the lasers' heat becomes amorphous and difficult to control. If the symmetry is compromised, the pellet will fail to achieve ignition and simply will splatter the tritium.

Even if everything works perfectly and ignition occurs, NIF will not "burn" 100 percent of its fuel, meaning that unfused tritium still will escape. At best, lab scientists estimate that NIF would only be able to achieve a 10-30 percent burn.

Some physicists (including some NIF advocates) argue that DOE should wait until experiments can be conducted on existing facilities to solve some of these problems. By overlooking serious uncertainties that could be resolved before spending billions, DOE is engaging in shoddy science.

If the Cold War is truly over, why has DOE requested over $5.1 billion this year for its nuclear weapons programs, including $876 million for NIF? Far from crafting ploughshares, DOE is gold-plating and sharpening its swords.

[] What You Can Do: Last year, NIF's budget increased by 213 percent. Congress currently is debating NIF's fiscal 1998 budget. A good NIF critique is available for $5 from TriValley CAREs, 5720 East Ave. No. 116, Livermore, CA 94550, [phone], fax: -0177.

RELATED ARTICLE: Flash! NIF Not Needed

Tests on a pulse-power facility at the Sandia National Laboratory (another part of DOE's Inertial Confinement Fusion program) produced impressive amounts of energy at a far lower price than NIF. Last November, the pulsed-power Particle Beam Fusion Accelerator Z-pinch configuration (PBFA-Z) produced 1.8 megajoules (mj) of energy -- the same energy level that NIF theoretically would produce.

The PBFA-Z's X-ray power peaked at more than 160 trillion watts, prompting a Sandia newsletter to report that the powerful "shots" could "provide data for computer simulations used to predict the physics within, and effect of, a nuclear blast."

NIF would be only 1 percent efficient, at best. NIF must consume several hundred mj to produce each 1.8 mj laser "shot." While NIF is projected to cost about $1.2 billion to build and $115 million a year to run, PBFA-Z cost about $40 million to build and operates for $20-30 million annually. The bottom line7 PBFA-Z is both cheaper and more efficient than NIF.

Paul Carroll is a policy analyst at Tri-Valley CAREs (Citizens Against a Radioactive Environment), a citizen's watchdog organization. Carroll served two years at the Office of Technology Assessment and two years at the Department of Energy's Environmental Management Office of Budget and Policy Analysis.