Monday, March 12, 2007

 

Does RRW Difference (LANL vs LLNL) Boil Down To This?

"It's one thing to have all the components working, and another to have them all working together.
To me, that's the key technical issue that has yet to be resolved."

-Raymond Jeanloz
University of California, Berkeley (on untested replacement nuclear warheads, in The New York Times, January 7. 2007)

Comments:
Exactly right, and that is why engineers test their systems. No competent engineer will field a critical piece of hardware without full-up system tests.

I'd like to see the politicians sit on the next generation of aircraft and powerplants designed solely in supercomputer space...
 
And how about "experimental space"? The LLNL design was ALL computer, while LANL's design was computer PLUS experiment. And LLNL's computer "space" was flawed, failing to even predict the experiment, while LANL's computer "space" agreed with experiment.

So, now what?

I'd say we're talking about "political space," and that's not what the Navy much cares about.
 
"Exactly right, and that is why engineers test their systems. No competent engineer will field a critical piece of hardware without full-up system tests."

The Space Shuttle.First full-up test had 2 guys in the cockpit.
 
"The Space Shuttle.First full-up test had 2 guys in the cockpit."

Next test like that, I nominate Cheney and Bush as the 2 guys in the cockpit!
 
So, if Los Alamos had simulation, experiment, assembly mock-ups, full coordination with the production plants and essentially complete plans, why did we "have further to go" to field a first production unit? That logic seems pretty flawed.
 
Closer to home, it's worth a reminder that the first test of the Little Boy device was Hiroshima. When you do a sound design from first principles versus slapping everything you can think of on a pre-existing item known to exhibit strong butterfly effects you greatly reduce the need for testing to satisfy yourself that all the little bells and whistles work together.
 
9:27 PM, I am struggling mightily with the same question. The only explanations I can come up with are:

(1) NNSA doesn't believe in, or doesn't understand, the "science" word in science-based stockpile stewardship. In the end, it boiled down to "Which RRW physics package claims a direct lineage to a specified NTS test?"

(2) NNSA hates LANL for drawing negative publicity onto NNSA.

(3) Workload leveling.
 
8:35 am

Part of your first point is correct. "NNSA doesn't believe in, or doesn't understand, the 'science' word in science-based stockpile stewardship" so it's not clear how they could understand the correlation between an RRW design and an NTS test.

And part of point two is correct, "NNSA hates LANL." NNSA can do a fair job of drawing negative publicity on to itself.

Point 3 is load unleveling, otherwise known as turning LANL into Rocky Flats south.
 
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