2023-10-06 06:52:02
RENO, Nev. (AP) — Scientists charged with ensuring the aging nuclear arsenal is fit for use say they will begin transporting crucial components to the Nevada desert next year to prepare for underground tests they define as “ tickle the dragon’s tail.”
Experts at national defense laboratories have not been able to physically validate the effectiveness and reliability of nuclear warheads since the ban on underground testing in 1992. However, Energy Department officials announced Thursday that they are close to gathering the technology necessary to move to the next stage in the most optimal way.
In 2027, the $1.8 billion Scorpius project will go beyond theoretical computer models to study in much more detail the conditions found in the final stages of a nuclear weapon’s implosion, but without a nuclear explosion, he said. Jon Custer, director of the Sandia project in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Scientists call this “tickling the dragon’s tail,” Custer said, because the experiment comes close to, but does not reach, the stage where the fission of nuclear materials sustains a continuous series of chain reactions.
The hope is to answer many crucial questions regarding whether the nation’s aging nuclear weapons still function as designed.
During the Cold War, those questions were answered by nuclear explosions. In the 1950s and early 1960s, explosions caused mushroom clouds to rise into the sky over the deserts of New Mexico and Nevada. Afterwards, and until 1992, tests were limited to underground explosions.
The new era of testing, which has been in the works for 10 years, has advanced to the next phase at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, where workers have begun assembling the high-energy electron beam injector, considered the most complex piece of Scorpius, Energy Department officials said Thursday.
The experimental machine is the length of a football field and will be located 1,000 feet (304 meters) deep at the Nevada National Security Site.
“It is clear that we need to know that the arsenal will work if it is needed,” Custer said. “If you have a vehicle in a garage for 30 or 50 years and one day you insert the ignition key, how much confidence can you have that it will start?”
“The same thing happens with our nuclear deterrent. “It has been more than 30 years since we conducted an underground nuclear explosion test.”
Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California will also participate in the project.
The injector being assembled at Sandia is a linear induction accelerator that will generate a beam of high-energy electrons that will collide with a metal target that will generate X-rays, which penetrate the objects under test. As the plutonium is compressed with powerful explosives, a detector will convert the X-rays into images recorded by a sensitive camera that can capture images at speeds of 1 billion per second.
Those nanosecond images will be compared to images of the same events generated by supercomputer codes to check their accuracy.
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