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University of California
"Science
in the national interest."
President: Robert Dynes
Website: http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/
Overview
The University of California runs two national
laboratories in collaboration with the Department of Energy
and the Department of Defense. They are Los
Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in California. The duties
of the two labs vary but both have a role in weapons and non-weapons
related nuclear activities. Due to their involvement in this
type of research the role of the laboratories was threatened
when the United Nations ratified the Comprehensive
Test Ban Treaty. This treaty outlaws all nuclear testing,
halts the modernization of nuclear weapons, and would inevitably
lead to disarmament. The United States Senate has thus
far failed to ratify the treaty through Congress, signaling
to the international community that the United States has
no interest in the elimination of nuclear weapons.
In 1992, the President George Bush followed the Soviet and
French moratoriums on nuclear testing and initiated a suspension
of U.S. nuclear testing. With no way to test their designs,
national nuclear weapons laboratories, like Los Alamos National
Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory faced
a sudden cut back in the demand for their services. In the
face of this challenge, the DOE, the facilities, and their
congressional supporters devised the Stockpile Stewardship
Program. This program created a way for the laboratories to
stay in operation without cutbacks to their funding or employees.
The reality of this program was to maintain the vitality of
this large, government created enterprise. The DOE legitimized
this program to the public by stressing the need to monitor
the existing nuclear arsenal in order to predict age-related
problems. In addition, the labs have expanded the program
into a funding source that has been used to design new kinds
of nuclear weapons (without testing) while rapidly reconstituting
the already large arsenal. In effect, the United States is
continuing the nuclear arms race virtually by itself with
a blatant disregard for the international community’s
efforts to end this dangerous pattern.
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is located in New
Mexico and is the DOE weapons laboratory with the largest number
of defense facilities and weapons-related activities. It is
the foremost site for the government’s ongoing research
and development on the measures necessary for certifying the
safety and reliability of nuclear weapons without the use of
nuclear testing.
The Applied Physics (X) Division is responsible for nuclear
weapons design as well as having a lead role in assessing
the safety, reliability, and performance of the nuclear weapons
in the nation’s nuclear stockpile. The X-Division works
closely with several government agencies including the Departments
of Energy and Defense, the intelligence community, other DOE
labs, and the United Kingdom’s atomic weapons establishment.
In addition, they provide operational assistance in response
to nuclear emergencies, and advice to government agencies
about treaty negotiations and foreign interactions. The expertise
of the X-Division includes the physics design and assessment
of nuclear and non-nuclear weapons, and the analysis of the
output and effects of nuclear weapons.
l The Dual Axis Radiographic
Hydrotest Facility (DARHT) is a facility near the Los Alamos
National Laboratory. The DARHT serves to test the first stage
of a thermonuclear weapon. The mockups are imploded while
photographs and x-rays are taken rapidly. This allows the
scientists to see inside the explosion.
l The Accelerated Strategic Computing
Initiative is a tri-laboratory project involving the LANL,
LLNL, and Sandia National Laboratory that will create modeling
and simulation capabilities for both the stockpile of nuclear
weapons as well as aiding to design new ones.
l The Weapon Design Technologies
(NIS-9) section of the Los Alamos lab analyzes the threat
posed by foreign weapons of mass destruction to the United
States or it’s allies. It uses resources available throughout
the LANL to support national agencies concerned with the proliferation
of technologies that could be used to produce weapons of a
nuclear, chemical, or biological nature.
l The Accelerator Production
of Tritium Project (APT) is a project between multiple laboratories
and some industry members to design and develop an accelerator
to produce the tritium needed to maintain the nuclear stockpile.
LANL is the site of Area G, a solid radioactive waste dumping
ground. It has received 10.7 million cubic feet of radioactive
waste since its establishment in 1952. The site has grown
from its original size of 5 acres, to 37 acres in 1976, to
its current size of 63 acres. LANL seeks to more than double
its size in the near future by adding another 70 acres. The
waste is buried in dozens of shallow pits or one of the roughly
200 shafts drilled into the ground. According to the Los Alamos
Study Group, "Most LANL radioactive waste, and virtually all
plutonium waste, comes from its nuclear weapons programs…
" Area G is not subject to formal inspection or regulation
by the State of New Mexico, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,
the EPA, the Pueblos, or any other outside agency.
Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory was established in 1952 to design and develop
nuclear weapons. Scientists at LLNL are responsible for four
out of nine nuclear weapons systems in the United States'
stockpile. There are several different programs that are run
at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The Ground-based
Nuclear Explosion Monitoring Program is an effort in monitoring
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Even though the United
States has not signed this treaty, we still have a standing
mission to monitor nuclear weapons testing and proliferation.
Through this program, scientists are able to detect, identify,
and locate small nuclear explosions while also being able
to decipher between nuclear explosions and any number of small
non-nuclear explosions.
Construction of the world’s largest laser installation,
the National Ignition Facility (NIF), is underway at the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory. The NIF’s intended use
is to produce contained thermonuclear explosions to provide
data for the advance of nuclear weapons science. According
to LLNL and the DOE, the National Ignition Facility will preserve
the U.S.’s ability to maintain, test, modify, design
and produce nuclear weapons. NIF is used both to train weapons
designers in nuclear weapons science and for nuclear weapons
effects testing. Replacement of underground testing will be
a result of this new laboratory, demonstrating a continued
commitment to nuclear weapons as core instruments of national
policy.
There are some problems with this new facility.
According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, no laser
facility has successfully produced significant amounts of
energy through Inertial Confinement Fusion (the approach utilized
by the NIF). This brings into question the necessity of an
extremely expensive project whose main goal is not proven
to be effective. The NIF project has also suffered from significant
cost overruns and schedule delays, announced by the Secretary
of Energy in 1999. The NRDC estimates the construction costs
of NIF to be between $5.3 to $8.5 billion before any cost
overruns are added. The annual operating costs are estimated
to be between $100 to $200 million a year.
Lawrence Livermore is also heavily involved in establishing
an underground nuclear waste repository for the permanent
disposal of nuclear waste. The potential place for such a
facility is Yucca Mountain, 100 miles north of Las Vegas on
the edge of the Nevada Test Site. The Nuclear Waste Policy
Act of 1982 demanded the U.S. Department of Energy to establish
such a site. Amendments to this Act in 1987 required that
the Yucca Mountain site be the only site in consideration
for the underground repository. The work that LLNL is doing
at Yucca Mountain is development work based upon predictive
models and accelerated age testing of materials, systems,
and geological effects. These tests are necessary because
little is known about the long range effects of depositing
spent nuclear fuel and other high-level waste into rock formations.
It is questionable whether rock formations are stable enough
to contain radioactive gasses, liquids, and particles from
escaping after thousands of years. The Yucca Mountain site
is supposed to safely dispose of 77,000 tons of deadly radioactive
waste, this translates into 11 billion curies. Eighty to 100
curies were released from Chernobyl in a nuclear disaster
that killed thousands and contaminated much of Europe.
There are several risks that have been identified by the
people of Nevada, the Senate, and various organizations. Risk
that surface water could penetrate to the repository level
has been identified. This is unacceptable because the waste
containers need a dry and non-corrosive environment. The previous
notion that in the case that radioactivity did escape from
the canisters, it would be immobilized within the rock has
been found to be untrue. In addition, there are also dozens
of earthquake faults in the surrounding area. The planned
nuclear waste shipments to Yucca Mountain would run for 20-30
years. In just one year, the shipments would outnumber all
such shipments made over the past three decades in the U.S.
Large expenditures to deal with upgrades to highways and rail
routes, to build and test new shipping containers, and to
train emergency response personnel nationwide are expected.
As indicated by to the DOE's own figures, 150-400 accidents
are expected over the shipping period. This would put approximately
50 million people in 43 states in direct risk for at least
20 years. According to the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability
the Senate Committee discussing Yucca Mountain expressed many
concerns including issues of expenditures. They said, "To
say the least, it is disturbing that overall costs have nearly
doubled (from $30 billion to $58 billion) since the early
1990's."
Sources:
The Los Alamos National Laboratory
www.lanl.gov
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory www.llnl.gov
The Los Alamos Study Group www.lasg.org
The National Academy of Sciences www.nap.edu/issues
The Western States Legal Foundation www.wslfweb.org
The Natural Resources Defense Council www.nrdc.org
Tri-Valley CAREs www.igc.org/tvc
The Center for Responsive Politics www.opensecrets.org
The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability www.ananuclear.org
This fact sheet was prepared
by Erin Peck of the Arms
Trade Resource Center of the World
Policy Institute.
Aerospace Contributions
Programs and Products:
UC has managed and operated the Los
Alamos National Laboratory on behalf of the US Department
of Energy since 1943. In 2006, UC joined
with Bechtel Corporation, BWX Technologies,
and Washington Group International to form a new private company,
Los Alamos National
Security LLC, which will now be responsible for managing
the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Focus
areas of Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Battlefield
Technologies sector include missile defense and military space
technology. The Los Alamos National Laboratory’s
missile defense work is focused
largely on studies of aerodynamics and radar. The
Los Alamos National Laboratory also builds small satellites
and satellite instruments. The military
applications of this technology include space surveillance
of threats to the US’ space assets. In addition,
the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Center
for Space Science and Exploration is currently developing
nuclear power and propulsion systems for outer space exploration.
UC also manages the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory for the US Department of Energy.
In the 1980s under the Reagan administration’s Star Wars
program, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory worked
on a number of space weapon projects, such as particle beams,
nuclear-powered x-ray lasers, and Brilliant Pebbles, which were
going to be small spacecraft that could stop advanced ballistic
missiles by colliding with them at high speeds.
Work on Star Wars continued until the early 1990s. Technologies
developed during this era, such as sensors and cameras, were
applied to later projects. For example, a laser designed by
the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2002, which can
burn a 1-centimeter-diameter hole through a 2-centimeter-thick
stack of steel in 6 seconds, used
technology from Star Wars laser projects. In
the 1980s, laser technology wasn’t portable. Now, as this
laser shows, the technology is compact and mobile enough to
be used by the Army - which also means it is compact
and mobile enough to be used by the aerospace industry on satellites,
interceptors, and other potential space weapons.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has also developed
sensors for the Ground-based Midcourse
Defense system that determine whether the interceptors used
to take out their targets are successful.
In addition, an aerospace engineer at the Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory named Preston
Carter has suggested the development of HyperSoar,
a hypersonic aircraft that can fly at Mach 10 (3 kilometers
per second), enabling it to reach any point on the globe within
two hours. Conceptually, it would be able to put satellites
into space more efficiently than today’s launch systems,
transport people and goods, and strike enemy targets.
It could take off from anywhere in the US, deliver its payload,
and return to the US without refueling. It is expected cost
about $10 billion to develop the aircraft and all relevant technologies.
This research and report was
compiled by Ray Acheson of Reaching
Critical Will in February
2007 in coordination with the Secure
World Foundation.
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