Weapons labs hampered by restrictions on experiments, panel finds

Excessive safety requirements and micromanagement by the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) are stifling experimental work at the nuclear weapons laboratories, jeopardizing the quality of the science and engineering in support of maintaining the weapons stockpile, warns a new report from the National Research Council.

The review committee that wrote the report, chaired by former Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory director Charles Shank, says it found no science and engineering quality issues that would prevent certifying the weapons stockpile for its reliability and safety. But it says scientists and engineers at Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia national laboratories agreed that experimental work has declined due to increasing costs and more operational restrictions and controls.

In particular, it is especially difficult to gain the multiple levels of approval required for experiments using radioactive or otherwise hazardous materials, it notes. The NNSA should find opportunities for savings and efficiencies, including reducing overlapping experimental oversight responsibilities, the report said.

“It is in the nation’s best interest to stabilize the conditions for safe, secure, cost-effective

mission success,” the report said. “The risks inherent in doing an experiment need to be brought into balance with the benefits of doing the experiment and the associated risks of not doing the experiment.”

“It’s certainly harder to do experiments with nuclear materials,” comments Don Cook, NNSA deputy administrator for defense programs. “At some point it gets to be very hard, and some very good people who might otherwise do experiments conclude early on that it’s just not worth it, so let’s go do another simulation. But you need experiments and simulations.”

Cook notes that the issue is expected to be a major topic for a congressional commission on NNSA governance of the labs. The commission was established by the fiscal year 2013 National Defense Authorization Act signed into law in January. That panel, chaired by former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine and former Strategic Command chief Richard Miles, is expected to produce an interim report soon.

The report also urged NNSA and the labs to strike a better balance between large signature research tools, such as the National Ignition Facility, and small scientific facilities; Many of the latter, like the explosive test facilities at Los Alamos, are aging and deteriorating. Examples of those smaller facilities include specialized capabilities for the production of nuclear weapons components, such as neutron generators; facilities that enable processing and experimentation with plutonium, especially to evaluate its long-term aging; and capabilities for developing radiation-hardened microelectronic components and photon-related components, as well as for beryllium parts fabrication.

The panel cautioned that there are too few modeling and simulation staff in the labs to adequately upgrade the weapons modeling codes. These codes will respond to the disruptive changes in computing architecture that are expected to occur during the next 10 years.

“The laboratories recognize the need for new higher-fidelity models to replace some current key models that are based on empirical data from nuclear tests. The new models will have to account for weapons aging due to changes in materials and their properties; this requires state-of-the-art capabilities in a number of areas of S&E,” the report stated.