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The nuclear rocket stuff was in the 50s and 60s. With the shift to stock-pile stewardship at the end of the cold war all of the labs became fairly focused on mo
by elektronjunge 12y ago
The nuclear rocket stuff was in the 50s and 60s. With the shift to stock-pile stewardship at the end of the cold war all of the labs became fairly focused on modeling. It also depends on what group you work for. I worked for one of the modeling groups so we were obviously talking about it all the time. Many other groups did to. Some were more experiment focused. Most the physicists treated it as a third branch to the classic experimental, theoretical split in physics.
- ganzuul 12y agoWhy do nuclear stockpiles require HPC?
- icegreentea 12y agoSince actually testing nuclear weapons is banned, the only way to verify (ha! verify with simulation) that the current nuclear stockpile is reliable is with simulation. In brief, the idea is to model degradation of current warheads and how that effects their performance/reliability. For example, the National Ignition Facility (the warp core in Into Darkness) was created partly too provide a source of fusion that could be used to verify the computer models used to simulate nuclear weapon stability. Ie, write a general enough model to see what happens in the fusion bit of a nuke, then apply the model to something like what the NIF does, and then actually test it in the NIF. If the NIF experimental outcomes are in agreement with the model predictions, then we now have higher confidence that the model predictions with regards to the actual nukes are useful. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_stewardship http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockpile_stewardship