3 ms·
It seems like a textbook case of 'use it or lose it.'
by stretchcat 6y ago
It seems like a textbook case of 'use it or lose it.'
- Animats 6y agoThe Department of Energy maintains a large nuclear weapons establishment for "stockpile stewardship", so the US doesn't forget how to make nuclear weapons.[1] That already happened once with a material for fusion bombs called FOGBANK. The original manufacturing plant was shut down in 1989. In 2000, there was a demand for more FOGBANK, to refurbish old nuclear weapons. But attempts to make more of it failed. Attempts to make an alternative material failed. It took until 2008 to get production working again. "The new production scientists noticed that certain problems in production resembled those noted by the original team. These problems were traced to a particular impurity in the final product that was required to meet quality standards. A root cause investigation showed that input materials were subject to cleaning processes that had not existed during the original production run. This cleaning removed a substance that generated the required impurity. With the implicit role of this substance finally understood, the production scientists can control output quality better than during the original run." That's one way an institution forgets how to make something. There are other ways. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_stewardship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_stewardship [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOGBANK