Alissa Tabirian
NS&D Monitor
1/15/2016
The state of design competition at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) national security laboratories is not adequate to maintain design and production skills within the nuclear enterprise, according to the co-chairs of a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine committee created by the request of Congress to study the topic.
Paul Peercy and Jill Dahlburg, co-chairs of the Committee on Peer Review and Design Competition Related to Nuclear Weapons, highlighted their findings and recommendations this week at a House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee hearing, including that peer review at the labs “is healthy and robust,” but “the state of design competition is not.”
“The scientists and engineers who designed and built the weapons currently in the stockpile have either retired or soon will retire," said Peercy, former dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering, so design competitions are "essential for training the next generations of weapons designers" and for "maintaining production skills within the NNSA complex."
The goal is to “make sure that we have a cadre of people who are going to be able to maintain the stockpile into the indefinite future,” according to Dahlburg, superintendent of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory’s Space Science Division.
The committee began studying the Los Alamos (LANL), Lawrence Livermore (LLNL), and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) in June 2014 and published its conclusions in a book late last year. The book noted the study is based on the history of design competition – validated by nuclear explosion testing – between LANL and LLNL during the Cold War. The U.S. halted testing and full design competitions in the early 1990s, after which the labs relied heavily on competitive reviews and simulations to validate their work and have since strengthened their peer review processes to maintain design and innovation capabilities, the book said.
Now, however, design competitions and component testing may become “critical to developing the next generation of nuclear weapons designers with expertise that goes beyond analysis and modeling,” the committee of scientists said, particularly since the number of personnel with hands-on nuclear weapons design and nuclear explosion testing experience is expected to drop to zero over approximately a decade. These competitions would serve not only to maintain a credible nuclear deterrent workforce, but also to understand foreign nuclear-weapon programs and determine the best ways to address future weapons life-extension program issues, the committee said.
The committee suggested that NNSA develop “a series of design competitions that include designing, engineering, building, and non-nuclear testing of a prototype” weapon integrated with SNL’s non-nuclear components that would not enter the stockpile. This is necessary, it said, because analysis and modeling exercises have not exercised all the skills the NNSA complex requires, as they do not involve the engineering and fabrication of components.
“The committee thinks it is important because we do not have complete understanding of the physics, of the materials and processes that go into the weapon” solely through experiments, Peercy said at the hearing.
Moreover, while life-extension programs have enabled SNL designers to exercise their skills, “these exercises do not stimulate the full creativity and innovation that result from a true blank slate design competition that includes engineering and building a prototype,” the committee said.
“The design and fabrication should exercise the full range of skills needed to produce a new weapon,” Dahlburg said. “It doesn’t mean produce one. It just means you have to make sure that these people know every aspect of what they’re doing."
