National Ignition Facility monthly status report-January 2000

The Project provides for the design, procurement, construction, assembly, installation, and acceptance testing of the National Ignition Facility (NIF), an experimental inertial confinement fusion facility intended to achieve controlled thermonuclear fusion in the laboratory by imploding a small capsule containing a mixture of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. The NIF will be constructed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, California as determined by the Record of Decision made on December 19, 1996, as a part of the Stockpile Stewardship and Management Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement. Safety: On January 13, 2000, a worker received a back injury when a 42-in.-diameter duct fell during installation. He was taken by helicopter to the hospital and released on January 16, 2000. All work in the area was suspended, and the construction contractors went through a thorough safety review before work was started. A DOE occurrence report was filed. An independent LLNL Incident Analysis Team is reviewing the cause of the accident and will report out on March 1. A Project management review team is reviewing construction line management and safety support and will also report out on March 1. Several changes in work planning and site management have been incorporated to increase site safety. Technical Status: The general status of the technologies underlying the NIF Project remains satisfactory. The issues currently being addressed are (1) cleanliness for installation, assembly, and activation of the laser system by Systems Engineering; (2) laser glass--a second pilot run at one of the two commercial suppliers is ongoing; and (3) operational costs associated with final optics assembly (FOA) optics components--methods are being developed to mitigate 3 ωdamage and resolve beam rotation issues. Schedule: The completion of the Title II design of laser equipment is now approximately 80% complete. The Beampath Infrastructure System is on the critical schedule path. The procurement strategy is being evaluated by commercial construction management and Architectural/Engineering (A/E) contractors with a report presented to a panel of independent experts, the Beampath Infrastructure System Implementation Review Committee Advisory Group who wrote a set of recommendations for proceeding with this critical path activity. In January, a briefing was given to DOE Oakland (OAK) Field Manager who then arranged briefings for the DOE OAK Procurement organization with the LLNL Procurement organization to review the proposed procurement strategies. The next step is to review the strategy with DOE Headquarters (HQ) procurement. The construction status of the Conventional Facilities at the end of January is 83% complete and is projected to finish within budget and on schedule. Cost: The NIF Project Total Project Cost (TPC) is $1.2B. The Project has obligated 73% of the TPC funds. The remaining contingency is $21.8M. Because of schedule delays and projected increases in the design, construction management, assembly, and installation of the system infrastructure, cost growth of the TPC is anticipated and will remain a major concern until the budget rebaseline process is completed