WSU Lab To Test Safety, Reliability Of N-Weapons Shock Physics Lab Gets $10 Million In Federal Funds As Part Of Program Checking Viability Of Aging Stockpile

Washington State University’s big gun just got a lot more bucks for its bang.

The 40-foot-long gun, which is used in high-speed, high-pressure tests on shock waves, is now part of a local Institute on Shock Physics to be funded with $10 million in federal funds over the next five years, officials announced Monday.

The institute will be used to demonstrate, without actual testing, the safety and reliability of the nation’s aging nuclear stockpile. It is funded through the Department of Energy’s Science-Based Stockpile Stewardship Program.

In the past, questions and doubts about the reliability of the nuclear stockpile could be answered with underground testing, said Vic Reis, the DOE’s assistant secretary for defense programs. But the nuclear tests that started in 1945 ended with the moratorium enacted by President George Bush in 1992.

WSU’s lab can play a key role in gauging the viability of nuclear weapons because it is one of the nation’s leading facilities in the field of shock physics, officials said.

“If you look at the details of a nuclear weapon, there’s a whole variety of shock processes that take place,” said Reis.

Yogendra Gupta, director of the shock physics lab, said the institute grows out of a new mindset toward maintaining the nuclear stockpile.

“This is a new era,” he said.

But Jackie Cabasso, executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation, was not so sanguine about the aims of the stockpile stewardship program. Cabasso, whose foundation is one of 39 plaintiffs challenging the program in federal court, said the $40 billion program is maintaining and bolstering the nuclear stockpile just as it should be being dismantled.

The DOE program contracting with universities is “alarming,” she said from her office in Oakland, Calif., “because traditionally universities have stayed out of the weapons establishment.”

WSU officials said research on shock waves has implications not only for weaponry but aircraft safety, the creation of industrial diamonds, treatments for kidney stones and what we know about planets like Jupiter.

Gupta stressed that the lab for the most part does basic research and will not deal with any nuclear materials. Rather, it will focus on the fundamental processes of what happens to materials at the molecular and macroscopic level when exposed to intense pressure.

Toward that end, the lab’s steel gun fires an aluminum projectile at more than 3,000 mph into various materials attached to equipment so sensitive it can detect molecular changes in one-tenth of a billionth of a second.

WSU made its announcement with a high-tech flourish that featured Reis and U.S. Rep. George Nethercutt, R-Wash., speaking from Washington, D.C., via a television link.

, DataTimes