NNSA, NSTec Highlight Changing Mission for House Subcommittee

August 27, 2008

The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), National Laboratories and National Security Technologies (NSTec) have a vision for modernizing the country’s national nuclear weapons complex.

And now, politicians in Washington have an idea of that vision too.

NNSA Administrator Tom D’Agostino was joined by NSTec President Steve Younger, the directors of the weapons laboratories and plant managers as they recently testified before a subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee.

D’Agostino highlighted NNSA’s efforts to reduce the nuclear weapons complex “footprint” by program consolidation. This will enable the agency to operate more safely and cost-efficiently while meeting national security needs, he said.

D’Agostino’s emphasis on transforming science, technology and engineering to better respond to evolving global security threats was echoed by Younger and other managers. Younger asserted that the fundamental role of nuclear weapons deterrence is the same today as during the Cold War – but that changing technology requires a different approach.

“Nuclear weapons are extraordinarily complex objects that achieve conditions found nowhere else in nature outside of exploding stars,” Younger told the subcommittee. “They are highly compact and were designed to employ the minimum amount of nuclear materials to achieve their mission. Some of the materials and processes that were used in their manufacture are no longer available.”

“Using new materials and manufacturing processes is certainly possible, but doing so introduces small changes into the weapon, the effects of which we can only estimate,” he said.

With a moratorium on testing, and with more science and engineering necessary to test those effects, Sandia National Lab Director Tom Hunter hailed the role of the National Laboratories in helping maintain the nuclear weapons stockpile. He called the labs a “large player” in science and technology advancements, including those focusing on energy.

Younger recapped recent developments in the changing mission of the Nevada Test Site (NTS), among them the transition of site operations from the National Laboratories to NSTec. He briefly discussed how the Device Assembly Facility (DAF), the Joint Actinide Shock Physics Experimental Research (JASPER) Facility and the Big Explosives Experimental Facility (BEEF) were supporting those efforts. He also touted how the NTS has trained more than 60,000 first responders to deal with radiological emergencies.

Younger pointed to the need to keep the NTS at the center of nuclear complex transformation to ensure success. “I see no specific technical issue that would demand a return to nuclear testing, but I also appreciate that science – including the science behind nuclear weapons – proceeds through an interchange between theory and experiment,” Younger said. He addressed the need to “maintain an ability to perform experiments on weapons-scale quantities of plutonium and high explosives; experiments that can only be performed at the Nevada Test Site.”