The UK’s weapon lab’s scalpel

Nature News : With the launch of a powerful laser facility, called Orion , the UK’s atomic weapons establishment (AWE), which is generally closed to academic research, is opening up.Researchers will use Orion to explore two key parameters for materials used in nuclear weapons: their opacity and their equation of state.The first describes how radiation travels through a material—in this case, the two stages that make up a weapon, particularly as how the opacity changes with ageThe other parameter—the equation of state—describes how a material behaves at enormous pressures and temperatures. By generating data on these and other crucial parameters, Orion will give nuclear-weapons scientists the information they need to ensure that their models are correct.If the US National Ignition Facility is a thermonuclear hammer, then Orion is a scalpel says Peter Roberts, head of the AWE’s plasma-physics department to Nature’s Geoff Brumfiel.