Nevada site in line for weapons research project

Friday, July 30, 1999 | 3:12 a.m.

The Nevada Test Site is a possible candidate for a nuclear weapons research complex that Congress had approved for New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory last year, according to a Senate report released this week.

The Energy Department proposes to spread post Cold War work among its national laboratories and test sites under a "Mega Strategy."

The proposed Atlas complex would be used to destroy targets the size of soda cans with massive jolts of electricity, producing the enormous pressures and temperatures needed to study how nuclear weapons work without having to detonate them at NTS. The test site is located 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas.

The pressure and energy released in the small target space are equal to that found in some stages of a nuclear weapon's detonation. Weapons scientists can conduct these experiments instead of detonating underground nuclear weapons blasts prohibited by a 1992 moratorium.

In addition, a small machine called Pegasus would go to a UNLV engineering and physics facility for experiments on condensed matter. The laboratory tests would serve as preliminary experiments to full subcritical experiments at the test site. Subcritical tests are explosions using radioactive materials that do not become nuclear blasts.

The test site is hosting a series of subcritical tests that allow scientists to understand what happens to weapons material without detonating a nuclear explosion.

The Senate's 2000 budget proposal contains $15 million for further experiments at the test site. Last year $60 million was approved for subcritical experiments after India and Pakistan conducted nuclear weapons tests.

In a Senate report explaining the details of the DOE's ideas to spread work around, the approach includes moving the Atlas project to the Nevada Test Site.

The Senate appropriations bill must still survive a budget conference and then be signed by President Clinton.