NIF and national security
Since the end of the Cold War with the demise of the Soviet Union, the US nuclear weapons program has changed dramatically. A major change has been the moratorium on underground nuclear testing, which is likely to be extended indefinitely by a Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty. Although there are now far fewer weapons and weapon types than only a few years ago, the nuclear stockpile nevertheless remains, and US policy will continue to rely on nuclear deterrence for the foreseeable future. Because the US must be confident that the nuclear arsenal would perform reliably if needed, reliance on testing to assess weapon performance must be replaced by reliance on thorough scientific understanding and better predictive models of performance - that is, science-based stockpile stewardship. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) will enable us to produce energy densities (energies per particle) that overlap with the energy densities produced in nuclear weapons, yet the total energy available on NIF will be a minuscule fraction of the total energy from a weapon. This combination of low total energy with weapons-regime energy density will allow us to pursue, besides ignition experiments, many nonignition experiments. These will allow us to improve our understanding of materials and processes in extreme conditions by isolating various fundamental physics processes and phenomena for separate investigation. Such studies will include opacity to radiation, equations of state, and hydrodynamic instability. In addition to these, we will study processes in which two or more such phenomena come into play, such as in radiation transport and in ignition. Weapons physics research on NIF offers a considerable benefit to stockpile stewardship, not only in enabling us to keep abreast of issues associated with an aging stockpile, but also in offering a major resource for training the next generation of scientists who will monitor the stockpile.
- OSTI ID:
- 50733
- Journal Information:
- Energy and Technology Review, Journal Name: Energy and Technology Review; ISSN 0884-5050; ISSN ETRED7
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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NIF facts
NIF Operations Management Plan, August 2011