A National Nuclear Security Administration plan bound for Congress will detail the agency’s needs over the next decade for new experimental capabilities to test nuclear weapons and materials, the agency said this week.
Lasers, used at the Livermore’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) and the University of Rochester’s Omega Laser Facility, and pulsed power, used at the Sandia National Laboratories’ Z Pulsed Power Facility, are both in the mix, said Mark Herrmann, program director for weapon physics and design at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said Wednesday.
“We think it might be possible to increase the energy that comes out of the NIF from 2.05 megajoules to as much as 3 megajoules with some selective changes to a few percent of the facility,” Herrmann said during a webcast meeting hosted by the non-government groups Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance and the Hudson Institute.
On Thursday, a National Nuclear Security Administration spokesperson said the plan was complete, but that “it has not yet been delivered to Congress, as it is undergoing internal review” at the Department of Energy. On Wednesday, Herrmann said the plan had been “submitted to Congress.”
Herrmann’s team at Livermore runs nuclear-weapon experiments on the NIF, which on Dec. 5, during an experiment to test whether weapon components could withstand a potentially debilitating neutron blast from an adversary weapon, achieved a nuclear-fusion milestone the lab called ignition.
NIF’s large bank of powerful lasers shot a very small target with 2.05 megajoules of energy — which the relatively inefficient lasers got by sucking 300 megajoules of power off the electrical grid — and the target blew apart in a fusion reaction that yielded around 3 megajoules of energy.
But as NIF drew global attention for the milestones and prompted headlines and fresh conversation about the possibility of fusion power plants, it remained at its core a nuclear-weapons laboratory in need now not only of maintenance, which the National Nuclear Security Administration has funded for years, but modernization, Herrmann said Wednesday.
“We’ve been doing the oil changes on them but we have not done the transmission overhaul,” said Herrmann. “There’s also been increasing obsolescence of some of the infrastructure and parts in NIF” which are from the early 2000s “and you can’t get vendors to support it any more.”
The Z Pulsed Power Facility and the Omega Laser Facility in New York need similar tune-ups, Herrmann said.
Meanwhile, Herrmann said, Livermore is close to attempting another experiment at NIF that matches the energy input of December’s scientifically significant shot.
“We plan to do one of those in February and then we’ll be doing more as we go throughout the rest of the year, we’re going to actually keep turning the laser up,” Herrmann said.
Herrmann’s team at Livermore does about 20 experiments a year at NIF. Others also use the facility, which has been used for about 4,000 experiments since it opened in 2009, Herrmann said. Lasers and pulsed power have stood in for nuclear-explosive testing since the U.S. ceased conducting underground detonations at the Nevada National Security Site in 1992.
Editor’s note, Jan. 26, 2023, 9:39 p.m. Eastern time. The story was changed to include comment from a spokesperson at National Nuclear Security Administration headquarters in Washington.
Editor’s note, Jan. 26, 2023, 10:51 a.m. Eastern time. The story was changed to include the correct spelling of Mark Herrmann’s name, and to include the correct categorization of the Dec. 5 experiment at NIF, and to clarify the number of experiments that Herrmann’s team runs annually at NIF.
