Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

NUCLEAR STOCKPILE: Atlas added to test site

New machine to help scientists evaluate weapons' readiness

The Atlas machine at the Nevada Test Site is the latest addition to the facility's efforts to check the nation's nuclear stockpile without having to conduct full-scale weapons tests. Photo by Gary Thompson. Everet Beckner, who heads up the National Nuclear Security Administration's stockpile stewardship effort, speaks at the dedication of the Atlas machine. Photo by Gary Thompson.

With a powerful burst of electrons, scientists in a few weeks will launch the first experiment at the Nevada Test Site on Atlas, the latest addition in a trio of world-class physics tools for checking how U.S. nuclear weapons will perform.

The 80-foot-diameter Atlas machine is housed in a cavernous, four-story garage that's more that half the size of football field. With its huge capacitor banks fanning out from a central target area, Atlas looks like a giant wheel resting on one side. The banks altogether hold 150,000 gallons of mineral oil for storing electrical energy.

The machine is designed for "crushing tuna cans," as Project Director Bob Reinovsky put it Monday, after a ribbon-cutting ceremony by the National Nuclear Security Administration.

According to Reinovsky, of the Los Alamos, N.M. national laboratory, that's essentially what happens to a metal sleeve, about the size of a can of tuna, when Atlas sends out a high-voltage pulse. This creates a magnetic field so fast and powerful that it instantly crushes the sleeve around a small metal target. The nonradioactive target, which in the first run will be a small chunk of very pure and soft aluminum, has properties similar to components used in nuclear bombs.

By analyzing what happens in this one-ten-millionth of a second, the scientists who are charged with ensuring that the nation's nuclear warheads are safe and reliable, will be able to tell how plutonium and other components fare as they age.

Combined with data from the test site's subcritical nuclear experiments, its gas-gun facility and the giant, National Ignition Facility laser system at the Lawrence Livermore lab in California, the data from Atlas allow scientists to check the stockpile without having to conduct full-scale weapons tests. Full-scale nuclear tests at the test site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, were put on hold indefinitely after the last one on Sept. 23, 1992.

"It's part of our effort to use other means to find out about the conditions of the stockpile," said Everet Beckner, deputy administrator for Defense Programs, who heads up the National Nuclear Security Administration's stockpile stewardship effort.

Atlas was first built at the Los Alamos lab in 2000 and its performance demonstrated the following year.

At the urging of Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., it was relocated to the test site under a $20.7 million project to put it in a central location for all the national labs, universities and eventually some foreign scientists to use. The machine is essential, Reid said last week, because it is needed to keep the skills of the nation's nuclear weapons scientists honed in the absence of full-scale testing.

What needs to be done, according to Beckner, is very important work, critical to understanding what happens to nuclear bombs as they sit in the stockpile decade after decade.

Like a car that hasn't run for 30 years, scientists must be able to certify for the president each year that a particular nuclear bomb will work when the ignition is switched on the first time since the design was tested in the 1970s or 1980s.

"The longer we go in time, the more we need tools like Atlas and JASPER and the National Ignition Facility," Beckner said. JASPER is the name of the test site's two-stage gas gun facility, where, like Atlas, metal targets are smacked with projectiles to simulate conditions of a nuclear detonation.

The program will conduct 15 to 20 experiments a year under its $14 million annual operating budget.

The Atlas machine will also be used by university scientists for research into fusion energy, the process of using magnetic fields to confine the energy released from the joining or fusing of atoms. Fusion leaves behind relatively little radioactive waste as compared to fission, the process of splitting atoms to release energy.