House Appropriators didn’t go for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s plan to trim the Inertial Confinement Fusion program’s budget by about $5 million in 2022 by using leftover 2021 funding to continue a portfolio of high energy density physics projects that can aid nuclear-weapons maintenance.
A bill approved Friday by the House Appropriations Committee would provide $580 million for Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) in fiscal year 2022, up $5 million compared with the 2021 appropriation but more than $50 million above the request of roughly $530 million.
“The Committee notes the importance of the ICF program and the aging nature of the facilities,” appropriators wrote in a detailed report appended to the 2022 Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill that was approved for a vote in the full House on Friday. “The NNSA is directed to provide to the Committee not later than 120 days after enactment of this Act a strategic plan for recapitalizing, upgrading, and maintaining ICF facilities. This plan shall include cost estimates and a reasonable timeframe for implementation.”
The committee’s bill overall has about $20 billion for the NNSA, roughly flat with the 2021 level, but with a smaller increase for nuclear weapons life-extension programs and infrastructure upgrades than the Donald Trump administration thought would be necessary for the budget year that begins Oct. 1. The full House had not scheduled a vote on the bill at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
ICF’s three big facilities are: the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California; the Z pulsed power facility the at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M.; and the Omega Laser Facility at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics in Rochester, N.Y.
These facilities can produce data that is useful for evaluating plutonium aging, or for simulating the effects of nuclear explosions and environments on different materials. However, the ICF program, especially the National Ignition Facility at Livermore, have sometimes taken a ribbing throughout the nuclear security enterprise for its attempts to produce a sustained nuclear fission reaction — a breakthrough, as one old saw goes, that is always 30 years away, no matter which year it is.
“NNSA’s internal ICF 2020 review … concluded that the ignition threshold is likely beyond current experimental capabilities,” the agency wrote in its 2022 budget request. That report “recommended a research program focused on resolving key gaps in physics understanding and acquiring information at the current scales to justify cost, scope, and schedule for any future investments in experimental capability.”
Implementing that recommendation will be a “primary focus” for ICF in fiscal year 2022, the NNSA wrote in the request.
