The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) wants to perform larger explosive tests to support nuclear arms-maintenance and counterrorism research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, according to a Nov. 3 regulatory filing.
The 65-year-old nuclear weapons research facility in Livermore, Calif., wants to increase the size of the non-nuclear explosive tests it is allowed to perform to a maximum of 1,000 pounds a day and 7,500 pounds a year from the current maximum of 100 pounds a day and 1,000 pounds a year, according to a draft environmental assessment released by the NNSA on Friday.
The tests, performed some 15 miles southwest of the lab near the town of Tracy, Calif., support “research vital to stockpile stewardship program, counterterrorism and counterproliferation program missions,” the NNSA stated in the draft document.
“[A]s scientific understanding supporting the stockpile stewardship program has increased, it has become necessary to reach higher pressures, volumes, and temperatures in experimental testing which requires larger explosives,” according to the filing.
NNSA uses conventional explosives to simulate the effect of a nuclear explosion on small amounts of materials. A properly modeled explosion will affect material at the core of an explosion in a similar way to a nuclear detonation, which eliminates the need for an actual nuclear test.
The agency also needs larger explosives to simulate an expanding array of potential terrorist weapons, ranging from the sophisticated to the primitive, according to the draft assessment.
Since the 1992 ban on explosive nuclear weapons tests, the Department of Energy has assessed the potency of the U.S. deterrent through a combination of of non-nuclear explosives tests, plutonium chemistry tests, high-energy physics experiments, and surveillance of existing weapons.
The draft environmental assessment is out for public comment through Dec. 7. The NNSA would publish a final environmental assessment sometime after that, which would eventually clear the way for the agency to increase the maximum weight of the explosives it tests outside Livermore Site 300.
