Todays’ computing, modeling and simulation tools, plus the National Ignition Facility that unlocks physics “not accessible in the laboratory,” have given nuclear-weapon stewards capabilities unimaginable almost 30 years ago, when the U.S. ceased explosive tests, the director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory said this week.
“On all of those fronts, the capabilities we have in place today far outstrip what the creators of the stockpile stewardship program imagined would be possible,” Kim Budil, director of the country’s second nuclear-weapons design laboratory since March, told the University of California Board of Regents on Tuesday.
The virtual meeting of the university’s National Laboratory Committee was webcast and open to the public. Along with Bechtel National, the university system is one of the lead partners on Lawrence Livermore National Security, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) prime contractor for the Livermore lab.
Budil spoke to the university committee the very same day, she said, that she verified the viability of the U.S. nuclear stockpile to the President: an annual exercise for the weapons labs.
Budil faced few questions about the lab’s bread-and-butter nuclear weapons programs during a roughly one-hour appearance before the regents. She did volunteer that Livermore had hired around 1,000 people during the COVID-19 pandemic, boosting the lab’s headcount to about 7,900, mostly on growth in “our core programs from the National Nuclear Security Administration.”
Livermore is in charge of the W87-0 and W87-1 warheads that will tip the planned Ground Based Strategic Deterrent intercontinental ballistic missiles slated to replace the Minuteman III fleet around 2030 or so. The W87-0 is a Minuteman III warhead that will be adapted for use on the successor missiles, which are scheduled for flight tests beginning in December 2023. The W87-1 is a replacement for the Minuteman’s W78 and will, unlike the W87-0, include a fresh plutonium pit cast at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Budil did tell the regents that, in the wake of its best energetic performance yet, Livermore was looking for a little money from Washington to repair and upgrade the National Ignition Facility: the laser-powered research center used to experiment with materials in conditions that approximate periods of a thermonuclear detonation.
“It’s time for a tune-up,” Budil said. “And so we’re working with NNSA to get the resources to really address some of the needed maintenance recap and potential improvement to performance that we could get” at the National Ignition Facility.
The House of Representatives seems to have gotten that message, too. In its version of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act, approved on Sept. 23, the lower chamber okayed the NNSA to spend $71 million more than requested for the agency’s inertial confinement fusion facilities, which include the National Ignition Facility.
