Materials and Sensor R&D to Transform the Nuclear Stockpile: Livermore's Transformational Materials Initiative

摘要

As the nation's nuclear weapons age and the demands placed on them change, significant challenges face the nuclear stockpile. Risks include material supply issues, ever-increasing lifecycle costs, and loss of technical expertise across the weapons complex. For example, non-nuclear materials are becoming increasingly difficult to replace because manufacturing methods and formulations have evolved in such a way as to render formerly available materials unprofitable, unsafe, or otherwise obsolete. Subtle formulation changes in available materials that occur without the knowledge of the weapons community for proprietary reasons have frequently affected the long-term performance of materials in the nuclear weapon environment. Significant improvements in performance, lifetime, or production cost can be realized with modern synthesis, modeling, and manufacturing methods. For example, there are currently supply and aging issues associated with the insensitive high explosive formulations LX-17 and PBX 9502 that are based on triaminotrinitrobenzene (TATB) and Kel-F, neither of which are commercially available today. Assuring the reliability of the stockpile through surveillance and regularly scheduled Life Extension Programs is an increasingly expensive endeavor. Transforming our current stockpile surveillance--a system based on destructive testing of increasingly valuable assets--to a system based on embedded sensors has a number of potential advantages that include long-term cost savings, reduced risk associated with asset transportation, state-of-health assessments in the field, and active management of the stockpile.