Posted on 03/09/2009 11:07:12 PM PDT by atomic conspiracy
The Department of Defense and the National Nuclear Security Administration had to wait more than a year to refurbish aging nuclear warheads — partly because they had forgotten how to make a crucial component, a government report states. Regarding a classified material codenamed "Fogbank," a Government Accountability Office report released this month states that "NNSA had lost knowledge of how to manufacture the material because it had kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s and almost all staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency." So the effort to refurbish and upgrade W76 warheads, which top the U.S. Navy's (and the British Royal Navy's) submarine-launched Trident missiles, had to be put on hold while experts scoured old records and finally figured out how to manufacture the stuff once again. According to the Sunday Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, Fogbank is "thought by some weapons experts to be a foam used between the fission and fusion stages of a thermonuclear [hydrogen] bomb." The National Nuclear Security Administration is a semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy. It is responsible for the manufacture and upkeep of the nation's nuclear weapons. A new facility was built at the Y-12 National Security Complex near Oak Ridge, Tenn., to begin production of Fogbank once again, but was delayed by poor planning, cost overruns and an failed effort to find an alternative to Fogbank. "The Navy originally planned to start replacing old W76 warheads with refurbished ones on submarines in April 2008," states the GAO report. "However, owing to W76 production delays, the Navy had to replace aging parts of W76 warheads in its current arsenal and has had to delay replacing old warheads with newly refurbished weapons until April 2009."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Oh, well, we could always test some of them when a killer asteroid is spotted heading for Berkeley; not to save Berkeley, of course; but to give the 'roid an extra boost on its terminal trajectory.
Positively mindboggling and scary!
I am afraid things will only get worse...
Don’t you just love government efficiency? I understand the need for the extreme secrecy for the material, but several people somewhere should have been instructed in how to make it.
Unless of course, you want to just write it down somewhere. :(
“There is therefore no way to be sure the back-engineered material will actually work.”
More importantly, is it safe for the environment?
They need better luck than the foam replaced on the shuttles that caused the shields to fail! That foam was taken out of production to satisfy the environmentalists, but the story was buried by the MSM.
Your logic is bad. The Kremlin isn't responsible for stopping nuclear blast testing. One doesn't have to be a commie to oppose the testing and the subsequent generation and release of very hazardous materials. These things can be simulated very accurately and with great precision.
Your conclusion is also wrong. It does not take testing to know whether, or not a design will work. In this case the material and the device it's used in is well known and understood. The material will work just fine.
....and I should take your word for it because...?
I most certainly wouldn’t take spunkets’ word — his position is not based on facts.
SImulations don’t take the place of actual tests. We have been able to test nuclear weapons safely.
And you, atomic conspiracy are right, that the peacemovement of the 60-s were fueled by the Soviet Union, to try to destroy the US from the inside.
spunkets is either very naive, or...
Yeah, they do. That's a fact!
Beat eggs; beat in sugar. Add oil, carrots and nuts. Fold in flour mixture; do not overbeat. Bake in a flat pan at 325 degrees for 45 minutes...
When I was in grad school, I made a practice of reading the WPC's latest publications (our library subscribed) to get a heads-up on the talking points that would appear in our campus paper a couple of weeks later.
I have a feeling China knows it.
“Yeah, they do. That’s a fact!”
Maybe you’re right, after all. Infallible simulations are obviously the reason we haven’t had any new drugs with harmful side-effects make their way onto the market, and also why all of our expensive Mars probes have worked so perfectly, and why parts never fall off airplanes and my Lexus never needs unscheduled repairs.
Btw, shouting a myth does not make it a fact. For instance:
The Moon is made of green cheese! That’s a fact!
Infallible? Comparing one imagined model created with insufficient critical info, to another to show the whole class is bad is illogical.
"also why all of our expensive Mars probes have worked so perfectly
No. Those probes failed, because of a failure to check the work. It had nothing to do with the overall model.
...why parts never fall off airplanes and my Lexus never needs unscheduled repairs."
These things are expected to happen and happen regardless of any modeling that may have been done.
"The Moon is made of green cheese! That’s a fact!"
Cool.
Wouldn’t you say that devices are tested in the real world to work out kinks? There are usually unforeseen problems that no amount of fiddling with a simulation could take into account.
I suppose you could argue that as long as our enemies think our nukes work, that’s enough. I would like to be sure though.
BS. Some of the parts require custom machining to very close tolerances, and we just don’t have those kinds of machine shops or machinists any more. Most of the remaining custom machine shops in the USA have been relegated to making building construction parts, and only off-and-on, for a very long time.
Most of the real custom machine shops are in the countries of our communist and fascist “trading partners.
And our nation stopped wanting to hire men, like me, a very long time ago (too “chauvinistic,” “patriarchal,” tall and manly compared to the vain bosses).
“SImulations don’t take the place of actual tests.”
Yeah, they do. That’s a fact!
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They cannot take the place of actual tests when a new material is introduced, sims rely on computer models based on assumptions , until you have actual data to base the assumptions on you have squat, the new foam makes sims useless.
I once worked in R&D at a major manufacturer. It is intersting that the lie that computer simulations can predict the unknown has gotten so widespread. That is wrong.
Even though they used the latest whistles and bells (finite element analysis, etc) to design their products, invariably, actual physical testing showed things that were not predicted by the computers. Sometimes bad things. And that was with things that were a lot less complicated than an atomic bomb.
Your logic is bad.
“Close enough for government work” used to be a mark of excellence. But that was a long time ago at Pratt & Whitney Machine Tool.
LOL!!!
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