Test Site expected to receive $50 million nuke research job

Friday, July 30, 1999 | 11:22 a.m.

The Nevada Test Site is in line to receive a $50 million 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 Department of Energy 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 the Nevada Test Site, 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 that have been 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.

* Moving maintenance responsibility for the W80 nuclear warhead from Los Alamos, whose scientists designed it, to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in northern California. Luis Salazar, a top Los Alamos weapons manager, has already resigned because of the move.

* Consolidate all non-nuclear explosive testing, called hydrodynamic testing, at Los Alamos, including X-ray and other techniques used to peer into mock nuclear weapons as they explode.

* Establish a $300 million new microsystems research center at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. Sandia officials received permission to begin this project last week.