The world’s most powerful laser is making some powerful enemies. A fairly scathing report out of the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), the congressional watchdog, is taking the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to task for its management of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), a 1.8-megajoule machine that will use 192 lasers to blast the bejesus out of a target no bigger than a thumbtack.

The idea is to test models of nuclear fusion, which have been built over the years by physicists at Livermore and her sister lab Los Alamos. Those models are a key part of the US stockpile stewardship programme, which is designed to check the health of the nation’s aging nuclear weapons without actually testing one.

Key to all of this is the idea that NIF’s powerful lasers will be able to drive fusion in two isotopes of hydrogen contained in the target. But the GAO report calls that into question. Plasma instabilities might frustrate the heating process, and the thermal effects of pumping several megajoules of energy onto a tiny ball of frozen hydrogen are still—to say the least—poorly understood. It won’t be a big deal if NIF fails to achieve “ignition” of the fuel later this year (or even by 2012 as hoped), but if the machine never reaches ignition, then there’s gonna be trouble in the stockpile stewardship programme.

These sorts of problems have been known about for a while, but the GAO says the lab has not been aggressive enough in addressing them. An independent panel set up by the lab to look at the issue hasn’t been independent enough, and it doesn’t contain enough nuclear weapons scientists, the report says. A more independent, more adequately staffed panel might be able to reduce the already substantial setbacks and delays NIF is facing.

To be fair, this looks like a slap-on-the-wrist compared to some of the trouble NIF has faced in the past. The project was originally supposed to be completed in 2002, for a fraction of the current US$3.5 billion price tag. In 2000, it looked like the Department of Energy, which oversees the lab and ultimately the laser, might even kill the project out of pure frustration.

Those days are long past, but this report makes clear that congress, which appropriates funding to the project, continue to be displeased. The report means that it’s likely the lab will face a fight for funds in the coming fiscal year.

Credit: LLNL