Jill Hruby, the new administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) continued her tour of the nuclear security enterprise last week, dropping by both the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
A resident of New Mexico at the time when she was confirmed to lead NNSA this summer, Hruby started her tour of the enterprise at NNSA headquarters west at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M., near the Sandia National Laboratories.
Gen. Anthony Cotton on Aug. 27 took over as commander of Air Force Global Strike Command, the part of the service responsible for the U.S. fleet of nuclear-tipped, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and nuclear-tipped air-launched cruise missiles.
Cotton’s predecessor, Gen. Timothy Ray, retired in July. Cotton had been Ray’s deputy for about two years.
At the National Homeland Security Conference in Las Vegas this week, the NNSA lifted the lid on a new effort aimed at safeguarding radiological materials including medical isotopes in 100 cities, the agency wrote in a press release.
As part of the RadSecure 100 within the Office of Radiological Security, NNSA plans to partner with local law enforcement to improve security around such materials as cesium-137, cobalt-60, americium-241, and iridium-192, the agency said.
The U.S. and Norway agreed to work together to downblend all of the Nordic country’s highly enriched uranium, including some laced with thorium, into low enriched uranium starting in 2022, the NNSA wrote in a press release this week.
The effort will rely mostly on Norway’s own nuclear infrastructure, though the Department of Energy’s Mobile Melt-Consolidate system will also lend a hand, according to the press release.
A wildfire that started last week at the Nevada National Security Site was still burning Thursday evening although it was “greatly diminished” from the day before, the National Nuclear Security Administration site said in a press release.
The Nevada National Security Site (NNSS) Fire & Rescue team will continue to monitor the fire, according to the latest press release from the site. “The fire is not burning, and has not burned, in any contaminated areas,” according to the release. “There is no off-site risk to the public. No structures or assets are in danger. No injuries have been reported.”
As of Wednesday, the Southern Bench fire, as it is known, had burned roughly 1,000 acres, including at the site’s Area 12, the Department of Energy site said in a press release. That made the blaze a fraction of the size of the Cherrywood fire that burned parts of 35,000 acres in and around the security complex, which is roughly the size of Rhode Island.
There were 61 nuclear tests and 62 nuclear detonations at Area 12 before the self-imposed U.S. testing moratorium in 1992. Area 12 is in the site’s north-central region.
Sandia National Laboratories’ Z Pulsed Power Machine, part of the NNSA high energy density program that supports maintenance of nuclear weapons, was to be the center of a ceremony on Friday marking the 25th year since the machine was modified into its current configuration, the labs network wrote in a press release.
“Once it was confirmed in experiments in 1996 on a machine temporarily called PBFA II-Z that enormous pressures (millions of atmospheres) and very high temperatures (millions of degrees Celsius) could be produced by z-pinches, we renamed the machine simply Z in 1996,” Don Cook, a former pulsed power science director at Sandia and also an ex-deputy administrator for defense programs at NNSA headquarters, said in the release. “So, 2021 is the 25th anniversary of Z.”
