Features
Firing up the Big Gun
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Neil Holmes, who leads the lab’s research at the Nevada National Security Site’s JASPER facility, says plutonium has been studied for decades, “but the data were never quite good enough.” That is, not until Holmes considered the gas guns NASA had used to evaluate nose-cone re-entry and came up with a big idea.
Hammer Time
The Z machine at Sandia National Laboratories has a new little brother, a compact pulsed-power workhorse called Thor that will produce pressure equal to that at the Earth’s core.
'Tickling the Dragon'
Through simulations and experiments, a Los Alamos team pushes toward a technology that promises new ways to remotely detect hidden explosives.