Atlas Lugged from Los Alamos to Nevada

As part of a scheme to give the Nevada Test Site a raison d’être in an era of no nuclear bomb test explosions, the Department of Energy will haul Atlas, a pulsed-power machine built at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, to the former testing grounds some 140 kilometers northwest of Las Vegas.

Atlas produces currents up to 30 million amperes, and pressure from the accompanying magnetic fields collapse a liner—a tuna-can-sized cylinder—radially inward. The resulting implosions can be used to study hydrodynamic instabilities, stress, strain, compression, distortion, and failure of metals—either in the liner or in a target at its core—at high pressure, temperature, and magnetic field.

Los Alamos scientists have begun experiments using the $43.5 million machine, which was completed last year. Moving Atlas is intended to help spread activities among DOE’s three weapons labs and the test site and to keep skills at the test site honed to resume nuclear testing should the 1992 moratorium be lifted. The move also fits with a broader push in Nevada to increase scientific and technical training and job opportunities.

Atlas will be taken apart and the first of 50 or so truckloads will set off for Nevada next spring. Moving the machine is expected to cost between $10 million and $20 million, including a new building to house it at the test site. The annual tab for operating Atlas, which is scheduled to come on line at the test site in late 2003, is expected to be about $25 million.

Atlas will join other facilities contributing to the test site’s facelift: Already ongoing are the so-called subcritical experiments, which subject plutonium to high pressures and temperatures, but without causing the chain reactions that would lead to a nuclear explosion; BEEF (Big Explosive Experimental Facility) came on line in 1998 to look at conventional chemical explosives; and since spring, shock behavior of nuclear materials slammed into each other has been studied with a two-stage gas gun known as JASPER (Joint Actinide Shock Physics Experimental Research). The test site is also a candidate to host a potential successor to Sandia National Laboratories’ pulsed-power Z machine. The common thread is the study of material properties for stockpile stewardship, DOE’s program of experiments and computer simulations aimed at keeping US nuclear weapons in working condition in the absence of test explosions.