Test Site to land nuke project

Friday, Nov. 17, 2000 | 11:18 a.m.

The Nevada Test Site will receive a major nuclear physics project from another U.S. Department of Energy laboratory in 2002, and the agency's Nevada office could receive $35 million a year for operating the machine.

A pulse-powered generator, called Atlas, is under construction at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. It will be completed and tested, then moved to the Test Site, 65 miles northwest of Las Vegas, it was announced Thursday.

The Atlas generator will be reassembled, certified and ready for operation beginning in 2002. The generator is used to examine nuclear weapons materials under high pressure and high stress.

"It's an important technology that we were hoping to get," DOE spokeswoman Nancy Harkess said. "It is very prestigious."

Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., said late Thursday that about $30 million has been approved for completing the project at Los Alamos.

The funding for operating the machine is under development, he said.

The generator will provide important information for keeping the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal safe, Reid said.

It is a logical move from New Mexico to Nevada, he said, because the DOE is conducting subcritical experiments at the Test Site to study how plutonium and other materials in the weapons work. The experiments do not create a nuclear chain reaction but allow scientists to examine nuclear materials in a blast with high explosives.

"The importance of this decision is that Atlas adds to the spokes in the wheel that builds a true science base for assuring the safety of the stockpile," Reid said.

A smaller part of the project, the Pegasus, will one day arrive at UNLV. With the Atlas at the Test Site, better cooperation between the national DOE laboratories and the University of Nevada system is expected, Reid said.