A core mission of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), under the Stockpile Stewardship Program, is to deliver the science, technology and engineering capabilities needed to maintain the nation’s confidence to assess and certify the safety, reliability and performance of the stockpile systems and to deliver design and manufacturing options to support an efficient complex to sustain the nuclear deterrence mission. Without further underground testing to validate the integrated performance of our stockpile, NNSA’s nuclear security laboratories rely on validated codes and models, integrated by our “numerical test site,” to deliver the needed assessment.
This presentation summarizes the range of high-energy-density (HED) physics experiments that deliver data meeting the mission requirements for stockpile-stewardship-relevant physics issues in regimes otherwise inaccessible with other facilities. Key HED physics topics range from material properties at high pressures and temperatures to radiation transport and radiation hydrodynamics.
This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344.
