Department of Energy FY 2012 Congressional ... - The FIRE Place

including securing dangerous nuclear materials world-wide. Science and engineering advances are the
foundation for achieving these goals. NNSA programs have, since 1992, assured confidence in the U.S.
nuclear deterrent without nuclear testing and provided high confidence assessments of the capabilities of
potential adversaries to guard against technological surprise. NNSA-developed technologies support
treaty monitoring and verification, as well as, broader homeland security detection needs.
The science and engineering basis for assessing and certifying nuclear devices has systematic gaps that
are being closed by application of advanced computing, materials research, and foreseeable advances in
high energy density physics including fusion ignition. A Predictive Capability Framework identifies
specific advances and expected time scales for resolution of questions regarding all aspects of the
performance of nuclear weapons.
The ST&E activities within the nuclear security enterprise utilize this framework and fund the detailed
activities necessary to provide the experimental data, models and simulation capability, and certification
methodologies to be used in concert with historical nuclear test data to gain adequate confidence in the
reliability, safety and security of our warheads without nuclear tests. These capabilities are also applied
to assess and counter increasingly more advanced threats from adversaries and the possibility of attack
or sabotage on nuclear facilities and processes. The same capabilities for assessing our stockpile and
detecting nuclear materials are central to assessing foreign or improvised nuclear devices so that threats
can be avoided, disabled or attributed. This field of nuclear forensics and counterterrorism is
increasingly enabled by NNSA’s science and engineering advances.
The applications of ST&E funded capabilities not only advance NNSA’s nuclear program, but are
increasingly used to support related national security and economic goals. The technical approaches for
nuclear analysis and security issues developed in NNSA are useful to other national security, scientific,
and economic programs. For example, stockpile analysis and assessment by the NNSA has driven
advances in computing power that have enabled U.S. leadership and demonstrated progress on complex
applied technical problems.
Computational powers, and the techniques for its application, have broad value that can also be applied
to analysis of a wide range of national energy issues. For example, the approach taken for quantifying
margins and uncertainty for establishing confidence bounds for systems that are not amenable to
statistical testing methods is applicable in many engineering analyses and complex problems. Fusion
ignition, under development for investigations of nuclear explosion physics, has potential for nuclear
energy applications being analyzed within the Offices of Science and Nuclear Energy. Other parts of
the DOE and other agencies require access to the NNSA’s capabilities.
A final example of NNSA’s nuclear program ST&E funded capabilities supporting related national
security and economic goals is in materials under extreme environments. This area is an ongoing NNSA
competence with a focus on developing new techniques, diagnostic methods, and data on materials
behavior under extremes of temperature, pressure and strain rates. A particular new focus is on
characterizing materials behavior under both static and dynamic conditions using advanced light sources
and stockpile stewardship tools such as NIF, LANSCE, and Z, as well as the computational materials
science enabled by the Advanced Simulation Computing platforms.
To enhance the application of NNSA’s capabilities to broad national security and economic goals,
NNSA is engaging with the other parts of DOE and other agencies in developing a strategy to make
Weapons Activities Overview FY 2012 Congressional Budget
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