Safety Overview of the National Ignition Facility^A

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) is a proposed U.S. Department of Energy inertial confinement laser fusion facility. The candidate sites for locating the NIF are: Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratory - New Mexico, the Nevada Test Site, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), the preferred site. The NIF will operate by focusing 192 laser beams onto a tiny deuterium- tritium target located at the center of a spherical target chamber.

The NIF has been classified as a radiological, low hazard facility on the basis of a preliminary hazards analysis and according to the DOE methodology for facility classification. This requires that a safety analysis be prepared under DOE Order 5481.1B, Safety Analysis and Review System.¹ A draft Preliminary Safety Analysis Report (PSAR) has been written, and this will be finalized later in 1996, after independent review.²

This paper summarizes the safety issues associated with the construction and operation of the NIF. It provides an overview of the hazards, estimates maximum routine and accidental exposures for the preferred site of LLNL, and concludes that the risks from NIF operations are low.