Posted on 05/23/2004 10:12:37 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
May 22, 2004
NEVADA TEST SITE, Nev. (AP) - At ground zero for the nation's nuclear testing, the stewards of the atomic stockpile stopped creating mushroom clouds and craters more than a decade ago.
Now they devise complex underground experiments like the upcoming "Armando" test using radar, laser and X-ray imaging to explore the finer points of how plutonium performs in an explosion.
Scientists call the experiments "subcritical" because they don't set off full-scale thermonuclear blasts like those that rocked the Nevada desert northwest of Las Vegas from 1951 to 1992.
"When you had the nuclear test, what was the proof? It exploded," said James Danneskiold, a spokesman for Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where plutonium triggers for bombs are produced.
"Now, you have to ask the necessary questions to show that the weapon still functions as it was designed," Danneskiold said, "that it's safe, reliable, and will work when needed."
The Nevada Test Site encompasses 1,375 square miles, nearly the size of Rhode Island. The site is surrounded on three sides by the 4,562-square-mile Nellis Air Force Base bombing range. Combined, the federal reservation is larger than the state of Connecticut.
A short distance from the underground test laboratory is the Frenchman Flat dry lake bed, where the first of 1,021 Nevada nuclear weapons tests was conducted. After 14 atmospheric and five underground tests, Frenchman Flat remains strewn with structures built in the 1950s to measure the effects of primitive nuclear blasts.
Steel reinforcement bars from a crumbled concrete dome curl like hair blown back. Rusting pens mark where pigs dressed in Army uniforms were subjected to shock, heat and radiation waves. Warped wooden benches sit on a knoll where VIPs watched detonations from only nine miles away.
Before boarding a steel cage elevator for the 75-second descent down a mine shaft to the lab, Ghazar Papazian, Los Alamos project director at the test site, characterized the safety zones of the laboratory as a "nested bottle concept."
"The idea is, if the first cork leaks, the second can contain it. If the second leaks, the third can contain it," he said, pointing to escape routes on a three-dimensional mock-up of one mile of underground tunnels.
Underground, a horizontal vault 300 feet deep is filled with concrete where the 20 kiloton Ledoux underground nuclear test was conducted in September 1990. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in World War II measured 16 kilotons.
Other sealed vaults entomb most of the 20 previous subcritical experiments, and quarter-inch steel doors can be closed to seal tunnel sections like compartments in a submarine. Rubber-soled shoes squeak on painted gray cement floors.
As experiments by Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories have become more refined, electrical and communications lines and trigger wiring bundles along the hallways have grown fat.
Detonation chambers have become smaller, and Papazian said project engineers now aim to reuse space and materials.
"Armando" is the third experiment in a series. Its predecessors, "Mario" and "Rocco" in August and September 2002, were conducted in six-foot diameter wells drilled 35 feet deep beneath the tunnel floor of one finger of the complex.
The upcoming detonation 963 feet underground will involve high explosives inside a steel sphere that would fit in the back of a pickup truck. The tunnels will be cleared of workers, while diagnostic equipment shielded in tractor-trailer sized containers collect data.
"Armando" is designed to answer questions about how plutonium ages and whether weapons triggers produced by milling or casting processes perform the same, Papazian said.
Production of weapons-grade plutonium was suspended in 1989 at a mill in Rocky Flats, near Denver. A cast process at Los Alamos is expected to resume producing 10 plutonium pits a year by 2007, Danneskiold said.
Papazian estimated annual costs of the Nevada Test Site laboratory at $18 million to $20 million per year. Experiments can cost up to $40 million each, compared with full-fledged underground nuclear tests of $90 million a piece, he said. Papazian said he did not know what "Armando" would cost.
Test site officials call the program "stockpile stewardship" - essential to the U.S. policy of nuclear deterrence. The test site is the only place in the nation where the government has environmental permits to subject plutonium to explosives.
Critics, from those who picket for disarmament outside the test site to those who lobby in Washington for a nuclear test ban, call the subcritical testing program unnecessary.
"They're still doing bomb testing," complained Peggy Maze Johnson, director of Citizen Alert, a Nevada anti-nuclear advocacy group that organizes annual Mother's Day anti-nuclear protests at the gate at Mercury, 80 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
Christopher Paine, an analyst with the Washington-based National Resources Defense Council, called the program a colossal waste of money.
"You have to look at what this is really about," Paine said from his home in Charlottesville, Va. "It's about building a new nuclear arsenal."
The number of U.S. warheads is classified. The National Resources Defense Council, which has monitored nuclear issues since 1970, estimates the U.S. has about 10,400 warheads - about half the nuclear weapons in the world.
Darwin Morgan, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency that oversees the site, said nuclear tests are strictly defined by international treaty.
"We do experiments," he said. "There's no sustained nuclear reaction."
However it is defined, the work has taken on new emphasis with the Bush administration seeking to cut the lead time needed to resume full-scale underground nuclear testing from three years to 18 months. Congress last year agreed to shorten the time to two years.
The U.S. has observed a nuclear testing moratorium since 1992, but has not ratified the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Papazian, who was part of a team on the nuclear test "Icecap" when it was suspended in 1992, noted that equipment in place at the underground testing complex could be used for full-scale nuclear testing.
"We're having to test if things designed for 20 to 30 years can last for 40 to 60 years," he said.
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On the Net:
National Nuclear Security Administration: http://www.nnsa.doe.gov
National Resources Defense Council: www.nrdc.org
Nevada Test Site: http://www.nv.doe.gov/nts
Los Alamos National Laboratory: http://www.lanl.gov
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Good news/
fyi
No chain reaction.
I say test the bombs in Iraq.
Cool! I have a tour of this place planned for later this year.
It's huge. You drive (you'll be bussed) from Vegas, and when you arrive in Mercury you're only about half the way to Area 12 and Ranier Mesa where they did HLOS tests. On the way there you'll see the bank vault and motel wall structures, Frenchman Dry Lake, Japan town, some of the Apple 2 houses, the bleachers for observers are still there near CP, and Sedan Crater. If you get up on the hill towards Ranier Mesa and the light is right you can see hundreds of subsidence craters across Yucca flat.
I wish we were doing full yield tests and replacing the old stuff with all new.
We've gotta keep our nuclear weapons program absolute #1.
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