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The wikipedia article also mentions, [..] the NNSA eventually decided to invest $23 million to attempt to find an alternative to FOGBANK. and, In
by mpk 16y ago
The wikipedia article also mentions,
[..] the NNSA eventually decided to invest $23 million
to attempt to find an alternative to FOGBANK.
and,
In 2008, following the expenditure of a further
$69 million, the NNSA finally managed to
manufacture FOGBANK [..]
So not counting the initial cost (which isn't mentioned), we're already up to 92 million USD.
- burgerbrain 16y agoAll things considered (this being the military, government, and science all rolled into one), I sorry to say that I'm a little impressed by 92 million USD. I would have expected it to run a few orders of magnitude higher.
- djcapelis 16y agoYes. My guess is we had some information on them and the money was spent to fill in the gaps.
- wlievens 16y agoIndeed. The blog post seems to assume no reverse-engineering occurred. That means they assume that reverse-engineering some highly complex thirty year old technology in a top-secret military context would somehow cost significantly less than that number.
- hartror 16y agoThe US no longer tests Nukes right? So how do they know the new stuff works I wonder . . .
- ceejayoz 16y agoMy understanding is that they simulate them via supercomputing. I imagine this fact has caused a few Pentagon generals to go bald prematurely.
- jfb 16y agoA friend of mine from college works at Livermore labs doing exactly this (simulating, not going bald.) He can't really talk about work, but it certainly seems like a pretty good gig for a physicist.
- InclinedPlane 16y agoAs far as I can tell the US hasn't had a nuclear test that went far different from expectations since the 60s. And modern nuclear warheads haven't used dramatically different designs for quite some time. Given that it's a pretty good bet that all US nuclear weapons in service are reliable.
- GHFigs 16y ago4 of the top 20 super computers in the world, and another 2 in the top 100[1], are operated by the US National Nuclear Security Administration. What do they do? "One of the primary missions of NNSA is to maintain and enhance the safety, security and reliability of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile. NNSA, through its Office of Defense Programs, ensures that the U.S. nuclear arsenal meets the country’s national security requirements and continues to serve its essential deterrence role." [1]: http://www.top500.org/list/2010/11/100 http://www.top500.org/list/2010/11/100 [2]: http://nnsa.energy.gov/aboutus/ourprograms http://nnsa.energy.gov/aboutus/ourprograms
- gamble 16y agoInspections, subcritical testing, and computer simulation. The Russian solution is much simpler: when their bombs reach their shelf life, they're recycled into new weapons. Like the Soyuz versus the Space Shuttle, it's a lot easier to just rebuild a complex system then to predict how it will age. Of course, it does have the tiny drawback of generating enormous amounts of highly toxic waste, but in Mother Russia you can simply dump the waste in a lake.
- kijuhygtyujikol 16y agoRecycling a nuke doesn't create much waste. The main components of a nuke are the fissionable material = reused as is (plutonium has a rather long shelf-life), the chemical explosive = reused ( a lot of the explosive used in gulf-war-1 was WW11 surplus stuff, baritol and compB explosives can be remelted and recast continually), and possibly a neutron trigger which does decay - but into a less radioactive isotope. The only waste is irradiated casings, but since Pu isn't really that radioactive it's a lot less of a problem than a used cancer therapy machine.