Hyping Billions in Taxpayer Spending

In today’s issue of Nature, scientists from the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California are trumpeting their advance in achieving fusion ignition. However, the National Ignition Facility is just like so many other projects from the Department of Energy. It’s behind schedule and over budget.

Approved by Congress in 1993, the lab did not officially open until 2009 after numerous delays. According to a report in 2000 by the Government Accountability Office, “NIF’s cost increases and schedule delays were caused by poor Lawrence Livermore management and inadequate DOE oversight.”

The completed lab has cost taxpayers $5 billion, up from the initial estimates of $2.1 billion. It costs an additional $330 million to operate annually.

In 2009, scientists proclaimed that the NIF would achieve fusion within three years. Unsurprisingly for a government-funded project, NIF announced in 2012 that it failed to meet its goal. The New York Times said “the output of the experiments consistently fell short of what was predicted, suggesting that the scientists’ understanding of fusion was incomplete.”

NIF announced that it would spend the next three years trying to evaluate why it hadn’t achieved it. But in a moment of honesty in its report to Congress, NIF conceded “it is too early to assess whether or not ignition can be achieved at the National Ignition Facility.”

So while some news reports herald the advance at NIF as bringing it closer to achieving a sun-like power source, the project is still years away from its goal and billions over budget.