Latest news with #LANL
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
‘Bringing our research community together': Quantum Week to come to Albuquerque
NEW MEXICO (KRQE) — Quantum seems to be all over the headlines when it comes to tech, and as previously reported in 'New Mexico Frontiers,' there's a big push to make the Land of Enchantment one of the nation's quantum hubs. Coming up at the end of August, those interested in learning more about the technology will have a week-long opportunity to see what all the buzz is about. Story continues below News: New Mexico Supreme Court throws out embezzlement charges against former official Trending: A 'professional courtesy': How an officer crossed the line Community: Funding for farming internship program at APS in jeopardy KRQE Investigates: Embattled McKinley County DA asks for emergency funding to keep her office running The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has declared 2025 the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, recognizing 100 years since the first developments of quantum mechanics. Now, New Mexico is poised for a foundational role in the technology that could change the world. Kicking off Aug. 31, hundreds of stakeholders in quantum will descend on the Albuquerque Convention Center for a week-long collaboration affectionately known as Quantum Week. 'Quantum Week is all about bringing our research community together with industry,' said LANL Project Director Candace Culhane. 'So we have academics. We have researchers from the national labs. We have key personnel from industry that are creating quantum computers and selling them to the public. And we bring them all together in one place.' Among the attendees are leaders in quantum technology working at the 'forefront of quantum computing and engineering,' as well as industry leaders, government and academic stakeholders, and folks looking to break into the vast world of quantum. 'We have workshops to bring to communities that have a particular interest together, tutorials where people can learn and exchange ideas, panels, birds of a feather session,' said Culhane. 'And then we also have our very exciting exhibit hall where you can go in and meet the vendors, talk to their key people, learn about their products, and just make new connections.' As project director for Los Alamos National Labs and Quantum Science Coordinator Candace Culhane says, the Land of Enchantment is primed for a ground-floor role in the technology. 'We like to say that New Mexico is a quantum state,' said Culhane. 'We have the center for quantum information and control at the University of New Mexico, and they have trained many quantum physicists who have gone on to hold senior positions and companies that are doing this great cutting-edge research in quantum computing.' And with a legacy of scientific discovery, two national laboratories, and state institutions going all-in on the technology, the quantum sky's the limit for New Mexico. About New Mexico Frontiers Sponsored content disclaimer: The information and advice displayed in this story are those of individual sponsors and guests and not Nexstar Media Group, inc. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Solve the daily Crossword
Economist
4 days ago
- Science
- Economist
The bomb (part 1): were nuclear weapons inevitable?
Where did the world's most devastating weapon come from? In a four-part series, we go behind the scenes at America's nuclear laboratories to understand how a scientific-mystery story about the ingredients of matter led to a world-changing (and second-world-war -ending) bomb less than five decades later. Nuclear weapons have been central to geopolitical power ever since. Now America is seeking to modernise its stockpile and, in doing so, its scientists are pushing the frontiers of extreme physics, materials science and computing. In episode one, we look at the birth of nuclear physics—the science that emerged early in the 20th century to answer a mystery: what is an atom actually made of? Host: Alok Jha, The Economist 's science and technology editor. Contributors: Frank Close, a physicist and author of 'Destroyer of Worlds', a history of the birth of nuclear physics; Cheryl Rofer, a chemist who used to work at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL); and Nicholas Lewis, a historian at LANL. This episode features archive from the Atomic Heritage Foundation.
Associated Press
4 days ago
- Business
- Associated Press
Fuse Teams Up with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Signs Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA)
Partnership combines LANL's 80-year experience in high-energy density physics and Fuse's next-generation pulsed power systems SAN LEANDRO, Calif., July 16, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Fuse, a leading U.S.-based fusion company, today announced the signing of a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to advance pulsed power technologies for fusion energy and national security. The partnership is designed to accelerate the development of technologies that support both the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) mission and the commercialization of fusion energy. As part of the agreement, LANL will evaluate Fuse's current and future hardware designs and cooperatively work to develop target designs, which will be tested by LANL and Fuse experts specializing in plasma, radiation, and energy outputs. This partnership brings together LANL's 80-year experience in high-energy density physics, plasma theory, computational modeling, and materials science with Fuse's novel, next-generation pulsed power and z-pinch systems. 'By working collaboratively with private sector partners like Fuse, we can accelerate the pace of innovation and ensure that critical capabilities are developed for the public benefit,' said Pat Fitch, deputy Laboratory director for Science, Technology and Engineering at Los Alamos. 'It is essential that the Laboratory and the private sector continue to learn from and support each other to address shared challenges and deliver on our responsibilities to the nation. We look forward to joining forces with Fuse.' Fuse has built impedance-matched Marx generators (IMG) and high-energy dense plasma focus (DPF) machines that are on the path to large-scale fusion machines. Fuse's current, operational hardware is critical for development of z-pinch targets, addressing plasma instabilities, and demonstrating the feasibility of fusion as a commercial energy source. James C. Owen, President of Fuse Federal commented, 'This partnership connects Fuse's commercial fusion technology development with Los Alamos' scientific expertise to benefit national security and both public and private interests. Fuse's team will work closely with LANL to advance national security and the realization of commercial fusion energy.' Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, Fuse Board of Directors member and former Under Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Security and NNSA Administrator, commented, 'Fuse is providing a critical national security capability that will be utilized in full spectrum radiation testing for nuclear and conventional delivery platforms and their associated payloads. Fuse's partnership with LANL will further augment the incredible capabilities supporting the US strategic deterrent.' JC Btaiche, Fuse Founder and CEO, said, 'Nuclear fusion is the holy grail of energy; and energy security is national security. On the path to commercial fusion power, Fuse is uniquely positioned and proud to deliver technology supporting nuclear security and deterrence.' About Fuse Federal Fuse Federal is a subsidiary of U.S.-based Fuse Energy Technologies Corporation and is focused on U.S. Government customers. The company is accelerating the world's transition to fusion energy by securing clean, reliable, global energy abundance while also ensuring U.S. and Allied competitiveness. About Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory is a multi-program, federally funded research and development center for the National Nuclear Security Administration of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Laboratory's priority roles are serving as a nuclear weapons design agency and a nuclear weapons production agency; addressing nuclear threats; and performing national security science, technology, and engineering. View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE Fuse Energy Technologies Corporation
Yahoo
07-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Los Alamos Scientist's Insights On The GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator
Sometime around 2012, Gary Stradling looked into a deep hole at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and pondered the future of the 30,000-pound GBU-57/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP) bunker buster bombs, America's largest conventional weapon. The hole was made during testing of the MOP and Stradling, at the time, was division chief of the Nuclear Detection Division of the J9 directorate at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). While he was not involved in MOP testing, Stradling was 'intensely interested in the science of earth penetrating munitions having had professional engagement in related subjects at different times in my highly-varied career.' Me, standing at the edge of a MOP crater on a mountain top at White Sands Test Range, where detailed studies of massive earth penetrators were studied for effectiveness against deeply buried targets by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) —formerly Defense Nuclear Agency.… — Gary Stradling (@gary_stradling) June 24, 2025 In addition to leading the Hypervelocity Impact team at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), he served as a science advisor, detailed from LANL to the Nuclear Forces Policy Office of the Secretary of Defense. He later served with the Office of Military Applications at LANL and is now retired. We spoke to Stradling about his observations of the testing that led up to the MOP and its recent use against Iranian nuclear facilities during Operation Midnight Hammer, which resulted in 14 being dropped by B-2 Spirit stealth bombers on two very hardened locations that were key to Iran's capacity to produce nuclear weapons. The questions and answers were lightly edited for clarity. You can read more about the fascinating 15-year development of the MOP in our deep dive here. Q: Talk about how researchers dug into the mountain and blew it up. Can you provide more details about that? A: Well, the mountain in White Sands, they specifically picked mountainous areas that were solid rock, and they used state-of-the-art tunneling technology to make the kind of cavities in the mountain that you would put this kind of [Iranian nuclear] facility in. I think that there is a lot of work that DOD has done in these kinds of facilities that is highly classified, and I couldn't talk to you about it. This is very sophisticated work. It is not casual, and it's not speculative. These are real experts who are doing the work. Careful, technical, quantitative work to be able to deliver this kind of war-fighting capability to the services. Q: Describe the scene as you were looking into the MOP hole. A: The picture that you have of me is standing at the entrance hole where the MOP went into the mountain that had a crosshair on it, and the hole was really close to the crosshair, and it was a big hole, and I'm standing right at the edge of the barrier to keep people from falling into this big hole. And the hole went down into a chamber that had been mined into the hard rock below that was intended to simulate, or to be very much like these hardened facilities. Q: When you were looking at this hole, what were you thinking in terms of what the weapon could be used for? And did you ever imagine that it could be used as accurately as it was in Operation Midnight Hammer? A: Well, during my time at Los Alamos in the nuclear weapons directorate, when I came back to Los Alamos in 2000, I was in what was called the Military Applications Office and worked closely with STRATCOM and developmental ideas for how nuclear weapons could be used for some of these applications. So I had the opportunity to look at what it really takes for a weapon to penetrate into the ground. And one of the things that became clear to me was that this is not just something that if you hit it harder, you go deeper, or if you make it bigger, you go deeper. There are real limitations to how deep you can get into rock when you plunge something into it. It's very interesting to have gone from that background, that computational background, to standing over such a hole that had been blown into a mountain. One of the things that has been discussed is, can you do what they call multiple miracles – sequential miracles? If you can drop a weapon – if you've got three B-2s up there – and they each drop a weapon that can vector itself to a very highly accurate position in a mountain, and you can penetrate with one and blow a hole, and then all of that material is suspended. And you have another one come in immediately afterwards and penetrate through much softer material, until you get into hard material, and you penetrate that, and then you explode, and you levitate all that material. Then you bring a third one in after it, you could start thinking about digging really deeply in. Now, I've got no idea whether this operation, Midnight Hammer, I think, is the term that was used, whether that was such a sequential process with that kind of accuracy [it was, each hole got six MOPs]. But, gee, that's awesome, to be able to have subsequent devices, avoid the blast of the previous ones, and yet penetrate in and, like a sledgehammer, drive through again and again into a harder material. Q: So you have to make sure that the subsequent MOPs don't get affected by the overpressure and explosive force of the previous ones, right? A: Right. So you'd have to have those in a sequence that took all of that into account. You're surely going to have suspended material. But if you can avoid the shock from the initial explosion for the second and third penetrators – you know that that is really highly, highly tuned delivery, and we have gotten very good now. I'm not saying that I know anything about that. I'm just saying that that was part of the discussion during the time that I was working on it, could we actually do these sequential miracles and get these things on target? And when we watch Elon Musk land rocket ships, we go, maybe we're in that kind of a world. Q: When you were there, what was the sense of whether these so-called multiple miracles would ever come to pass? A: Oh, I think everybody was optimistic and skeptical simultaneously. We know how hard these jobs are. Q: You talked about doing computational work. What were you considering as you were doing computational work on how these things could achieve the maximum effectiveness? A: Early in my career, I was diverted to a project called the Hypervelocity Impact Project … It was a project at Los Alamos that mirrored other things that had been going on in other places. There was a place in Germany where you take small particles and you accelerate – you put a charge on small iron particles and you accelerate them through a very large electric field using a Van de Graaff accelerator. And so we had particles that were growing between five and 50 kilometers per second that were not just atoms, but they were chunks of iron, very small chunks, but they were macroscopic. And then we measured the impact craters into different kinds of materials, and we calculated what those impacts would look like. So we gained a pretty good idea of how effective such a technique would be. One interesting fact about the MOP: The US appears to have tested it against a real underground facility just 30 kilometers south of the site of the world's first nuclear weapons test. Thread from a recent OSINT side quest. 1/10 — Fabian Hinz (@fab_hinz) June 25, 2025 So later, when I came back from the Pentagon and was in the Military Applications Office, people were talking about using penetrators with nuclear weapons, a theoretical discussion. I don't know if there ever was a nuclear penetrator program. And so I got a chance to study the physics of the penetrators. The question of how much acceleration or deceleration could nuclear weapons tolerate? Because, as one of these MOP devices goes into a solid rock mountain is going to decelerate rapidly, and if you've got fragile stuff inside the casing, you could break it. So those are the the kind of questions that you had to deal with. And of course, you can design just about anything because we have very clever people, but that's one of the questions. So how deep can you go with a penetrator? If you just have a solid piece of tungsten, and you deliver it at infinite velocity, would it go all the way through the Earth? And the answer is no, it would go a certain depth, and then would stop. Even if it was solid tungsten, three feet in diameter and 30 feet long, there is going to come a point where it's going to lose all of its momentum, and that energy will be dissipated into sort of a half sphere. So understanding that there are limitations to penetrators, and there are limitations to what kind of forces, shock forces that the explosive package can tolerate, is part of the question. So that was very interesting for me, then to be standing on this mountain, looking down in this hole, and then touring the … facility that had had the experience of having a MOP device dropped on it. Q: What year was that? A: Probably 2012 or 2013. Q: Is there a concern that radioactive materials like enriched uranium could be disturbed by the force of the MOPs? A: If you're blasting into a facility that has nuclear materials, it's always possible for some of that material to vent out as that shock wave goes through the material and finds ways to you know, you don't know whether it is completely enclosed or whether you've got ventilation ducts or whatever. But I frankly don't think that's a big issue. It's enormously overplayed by the green community that the amount of material that you'd have and its effect on anything is. My sense is that it's very small. Q: You mentioned that you have experience in developing the signatures to look for radioactive materials and enrichment. Can you talk about that? A: There is a large national and international technology effort to understand, detect and analyze signatures of nuclear proliferation. This has been an ongoing DOD/DOE effort for decades; the IAEA in Vienna does some of this. The U.S. has a large nuclear monitoring system that at one point was under my purview. I funded that and the staff who were the DOD overseers of that. There are contractors who do this work. Some of the national laboratories do a lot of work on that. So, there are seismic sensors and where they're positioned and how they're monitored and analyzed can tell you whether you see a lot of seismic activity on the Earth. And you have to understand the geology of the Earth. And then when you see signals, you will see if there's a nuclear explosion or an earthquake. You will see it across what is becoming a vast array of seismic sensors today, and you could do a lot of analysis on the nature of the explosion and its location. So that's one very interesting thing. Can you tell if Iran conducts a nuclear test? If North Korea conducts a nuclear test? Pakistan, India, etc. If they conduct a nuclear test, there is a lot that this community is going to know about it. And so also, if somebody conducts a nuclear test, you have more than seismic activity. You can watch the mining activity using overhead imagery. You can smell – you can sniff the air and see whether there are radioactive materials that have particular characteristics that would result from a nuclear test. And if there's a fair amount, you can know about the nuclear test by knowing what the salad of isotopes is that comes off of the test. And so you've got their half lives, and you can detect what their isotopes are, and so on. So there is a great deal of work that goes on. The office that I had at DTRA was a relatively small office compared to the work being done at the Department of Energy and at the Air Force, and also other international partners that work in this area. Q: And as chief of the DTRA office developing technologies for detecting nuclear proliferation, particularly clandestine nuclear testing, that's where your experience comes in with how to find this stuff, correct? A: Right. The Proliferation Technology Office really had responsibility for figuring out how to enhance, how to make better our capability to know exactly what potential proliferators were doing and what activities they were conducting. There's a huge effort across the intelligence community to know who the scientists are and what kind of technologies are going there, and whether we could embargo technologies to slow down the spread – a huge effort going on from early days to try to limit the spread of nuclear weapon technology, the kinds of things that are at the cutting edge now. Can you sense? Can you smell the air? How close can you get to the event? Where can you take a sample? Can you measure something seismically? Can you see a flash if there's a nuclear explosion? Can you see a flash from space? And would that flash tell you? Would it tell you with confidence that it was a nuclear flash, or might it be something else? Might it be a meteorite? So those are the kinds of things that the Proliferation Technologies Office cared about. And we weren't alone. DOE has groups working on that, and has an organization that works on that, and also people at Los Alamos here up on the Hill are actively working in some of those areas. And I actually contracted as a DTRA manager. I contract with Los Alamos to help me in some of those areas. Q: As far as we know, Iran is still not at the threshold of creating a nuclear weapon. What are the kinds of things that would have been done to get a sense of what's happening in Fordow and Natanz and Isfahan, and what might be happening now in the wake of these attacks? A: The time it takes to refine uranium is much less once you have a few percent concentration. The time it takes to go from natural uranium to a few percent is long. The time it takes to go from 8% to weapons-grade is short. And I think that legislators and the general public just don't appreciate that the process of refinement can go very fast in the late stages. It's not linear in any sense. Q: If you were a betting man, what would you say the odds are of the Iranians having a nuclear device sometime this year? A: Howard, I can see your headline right now. Dr. Stradling, former DTRA blah, blah, blah says the Iranians … I actually would not make such a guess, such a headline. I would just say I think that to presume that they don't have one is overly optimistic. To presume that they don't have sufficient nuclear material, to presume that they don't have a tested device, we may not have intelligence that tells us they do, but to presume that they don't is, I think, overly optimistic, and I really love President Trump. He's my kind of guy. I mean, he has amazing huevos and a determination to do good in a way that I see good, and yet he wants to have positive reports. And I understand him saying, 'Somebody told me that this was the best, you know, the best penetrating attack ever in the history of mankind,' and that's the way he talks. But I don't want him to be embarrassed by finding out later that the uncertainty of the battlefield still applies, even to this latest attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities – that things don't go as well as we expected, and that's the nature of warfare. Contact the author: howard@
Associated Press
16-06-2025
- Business
- Associated Press
UP Aerospace Successfully Launches Maiden Flight of the Spyder Hypersonic Rocket
WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE, N.M., June 16, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- UP Aerospace has achieved a significant milestone with the successful launch of its high-performance Spyder rocket. The maiden flight took place at 7:00 AM MST at Launch Complex 36, marking a new era in hypersonic mission capabilities. The mission reached the threshold of hypersonic speeds similar to the UP Aerospace SpaceLoft rocket missions that have been operational for 20 years. The mission was funded by the Stockpile Responsiveness Program (SRP) at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and was executed with the support of the Navy White Sands Detachment. The LANL payload test vehicle was successfully deployed in flight. Spyder was specifically designed to support hypersonic missions reaching speeds of Mach 10. The launch vehicle is the result of an eight-year collaboration between UP Aerospace, Cesaroni Aerospace, NASA's Flight Opportunities Program, Marshall Space Flight Center, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. Since 2005, UP Aerospace and Cesaroni Aerospace have worked closely to develop cutting-edge solid rocket motors technologies including the Spyder booster and upper stage motors. Future developments of Spyder include the maximum performance booster motor and multi upper stage Spyder variants capable of achieving altitude's approaching 300 km to support a wide variety of hypersonic mission objectives. For over 16 years UP Aerospace has been providing launch services supporting a variety of customers including NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA), and LANL, and began developing Spyder technologies under the NASA 'Tipping Point' contract awarded in 2017. The Spyder rocket was developed to provide enhanced mass lifting and speed performance capabilities to support thermal protection system development, re-entry capsule stability and control evaluations, and high speed suborbital flight testing capabilities at a greatly reduced time and cost. Jerry Larson, President and CEO of UP Aerospace, commented on the achievement: 'The successful launch of Spyder-1 sets the stage for the next mission, which will integrate guidance and control systems into the Spyder-2 vehicle. We are excited for its upcoming launch, scheduled for early 2026.' View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE UP Aerospace, Inc.
