Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program Research Articles

The nuclear structure and low-energy reactions (NSLER) collaboration

The long-term vision of the Nuclear Structure and Low-Energy Reactions (NSLER) collaboration is to arrive at a comprehensive and unified description of nuclei and their reactions that is grounded in the interactions between the constituent nucleons. For this purpose, we will develop a universal energy density functional for nuclei and replace current phenomenological models of nuclear structure and reactions with a well-founded microscopic theory that will deliver maximum predictive power with minimal uncertainties that are well quantified. Nuclear structure and reactions play an essential role in the science to be investigated at rare isotope facilities, and in nuclear physics applications to the Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship Program, next-generation reactors, and threat reduction. We anticipate an expansion of the computational techniques and methods we currently employ, and developments of new treatments, to take advantage of petascale architectures and demonstrate the capability of the leadership class machines to deliver new science heretofore impossible.

Warfare: NRDC Knocks Nukes

Warfare: NRDC Knocks Nukes

Our perspective on the Alliance Program's benefits

The aging of the nuclear weapons stockpile in the US, due to the end of the Cold War and a halt in design and production of new nuclear weapons, has brought demanding technical challenges to the US Department of Energy's nuclear weapons laboratories: Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Laboratories. As stewards of the nation's nuclear deterrent, our mission is to maintain a safe, secure, and reliable nuclear weapons stockpile without further underground nuclear testing. This mission is an enormous undertaking, and the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI) program has a critical role in meeting these challenges within the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship program. One of the ASCI program's major goals is to create the leading-edge computational modeling and simulation capabilities necessary to shift the nation from nuclear test based methods to simulation based methods. Enabling this shift is a major challenge, not only in that it changes the way we certify the performance, safety, security, and reliability of nuclear weapons, but also because we must establish high performance modeling and simulation as an essential technology for stockpile certification. This new certification paradigm means embracing a simulation based design and engineering approach, rather than using traditional design and test methods.

Fusion Panel Meeting

Andrew Lawler's News & Comment article “Fusion panel scored for tipping results” ([14 Nov., p. 1219][1]) ignores the main issue. In six meetings over 6 months, a National Research Council (NRC) committee determined that some information relevant to its charge was best obtained from senior Department of Energy (DOE) officials responsible for the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship program. That was the purpose of the 6 December meeting Lawler describes, one quite in accord with NRC procedures. Lawler's article describes the meeting as between “physicist Steve Koonin of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, chair of the NRC panel, and DOE managers.” The full committee and its NRC staff were in attendance. Lawler also reports that “NRC Executive Officer William Colglazier says he was not aware of the meeting.” Although Colglazier was not aware of the conversations at the meeting, he was fully aware that the meeting was to be held (indeed, it is on the 6 December agenda, reproduced in the committee's report), but could not attend because he lacked the DOE clearances for the level of classified information required for this study. The headline of Lawler's article and the article itself also distort reality by implying that the committee prematurely revealed its findings. The senior DOE officials were told only that the committee to date had found nothing that would warrant stopping further work on the National Ignition Facility (NIF), but that its investigations were continuing. Given that every phase of the NIF project had been subject to continuous scientific and technical scrutiny, this observation was hardly revelatory. The committee also made it clear that its conclusions had not yet been formulated and that its report had yet to be written and peer-reviewed. The main issue is the NRC report itself, which was vetted through the National Academy of Science's rigorous review process. The committee's primary task was to assess the technical statutes of the NIF project and to make technical recommendations that would increase the likelihood that a national goal endorsed by both the Administration and Congress would be achieved. We believe that the report does so, making the legal barriers to its use by the DOE antithetical to the national interest. Those who are interested can judge the report for themselves at . # {#article-title-2} Response: Koonin's and Colglazier's arguments are with each other, not with Science. The main issue in my article was not the quality of the report, but whether the NIF committee abided by NRC rules. Disclosure by NRC panels of preliminary results to sponsors is a violation of academy procedures, as Colglazier noted in the article and as he continues to affirm. He still maintains that “what was done [by the Koonin panel] was not what the Academy wants.” Whether or not the preliminary findings were “hardly revelatory,” Koonin and Colglazier acknowledge that the NIF panel provided them to DOE managers before they were seen by NRC reviewers. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.278.5341.1219a

Sandia National Laboratories Participation in the National Ignition Facility Project

The National Ignition Facility is a $1.1B DOE Defense Programs Inertial Confinement Fusion facility supporting the Science Based Stockpile Stewardship Program. The goal of the facility is to achieve fusion ignition and modest gain in the laboratory. The NIF project is responsible for the design and construction of the 192 beam, 1.8 MJ laser necessary to meet that goal. - The project is a National project with participation by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Sandia National Laboratory (SNL), the University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics (URLLE) and numerous industrial partners. The project is centered at LLNL which has extensive expertise in large solid state lasers. The other partners in the project have negotiated their participation based on the specific expertise they can bring to the project. In some cases, this negotiation resulted in the overall responsibility for a WBS element; in other cases, the participating laboratories have placed individuals in the project in areas that need their individual expertise. The main areas of Sandia`s participation are in the management of the conventional facility design and construction, the design of the power conditioning system, the target chamber system, target diagnostic instruments, data acquisition system andmore » several smaller efforts in the areas of system integration and engineering analysis. Sandia is also contributing to the technology development necessary to support the project by developing the power conditioning system and several target diagnostics, exploring alternate target designs, and by conducting target experiments involving the ``foot`` region of the NIF power pulse. The project has just passed the mid-point of the Title I (preliminary) design phase. This paper will summarize Sandia`s role in supporting the National Ignition Facility and discuss the areas in which Sandia is contributing. 3 figs.« less