Big Ideas Lab - Site 300

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

After the first successful atomic bomb test in 1945, code-named Trinity, a new era in global politics began. Unlocking the power of the atom sparked a race among world governments—not just to build bigger weapons, but smaller, cheaper, and more agile ones. Achieving this would require rapid iteration to stay ahead.In 1955, the Atomic Energy Commission purchased 3,400 acres of farmland near Livermore. This barren stretch, later known as Site 300, became the proving ground for the Lab’s most ambitious innovations. What unfolded there would shape the future of weapons development—and change the course of history.-- Big Ideas Lab is a Mission.org original series. Executive Produced and Written by Lacey Peace. Sound Design, Music Edit and Mix by Daniel Brunelle. Story Editing by Daniel Brunelle. Audio Engineering and Editing by Matthew Powell. Narrated by Matthew Powell. Video Production by Levi Hanusch. Guests featured in this episode (in order of appearance): Valerie Dibley, Site 300 Manager at LLNLBrian Cracchiola, Explosive Operations Manager for the Strategic Deterrence Directorate at LLNL Jeff Florando, Associate Program Director for Hydrodynamic and Subcritical Experiments in the Weapons Physics and Design Program at LLNLBrought to you in partnership with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Herbert York looked out at the vast expanse of land before him. It was 1955 and York was just 34 years old, remarkably young for being the director of a major national lab. His dark hair fluttered in the wind and he breathed in as he overlooked the foothills of the Diablo Range. Before him lay thousands of acres of untamed nature. The terrain was a patchwork of dry grasslands and rolling hills. It was remote and uniquely contoured to absorb sound.

An ideal haven for conducting high explosive experiments. York and his team had a monumental task ahead to remake this rugged landscape into a beacon of scientific progress. Despite the challenge, he knew the construction of this site would be a pivotal moment for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The area, now called the Site 300 Experimental Test Site,

would mark a strategic expansion in Livermore's explosive testing and research capabilities. Not long after it broke ground, Site 300 was transformed from a desolate expanse to a crucial asset in the technological competition of the Cold War, evolving over time into a hub of cutting-edge research and development that continues to address some of the world's most pressing challenges today. Welcome to the Big Ideas Lab, your weekly exploration inside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hear untold stories, meet boundary-pushing pioneers, and get

unparalleled access inside the gates. From national security challenges to computing revolutions, discover the innovations that are shaping tomorrow, today. After the first successful atomic bomb test in 1945, codenamed Trinity, a new and complex era in global politics began to unfold. This era was defined by the political, military, and scientific rivalry between the Soviet Union and the United States. Now that they had unlocked the power of the atom, world governments were set on exploring

its other capabilities. This wasn't just about making weapons bigger and more powerful. Instead, they were trying to make them smaller, cheaper, more agile, and less complex. But this type of innovation required lots of iteration, and to stay ahead of other nations, that iteration needed to be fast. What the US government needed was efficiency. And in the early 1950s, what Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was doing to test and develop weapons was, well, anything but efficient. To detonate an atomic bomb, high explosives are required to compress

fissionable materials to a critical point. Before running live tests, scientists would use surrogate or dummy nuclear materials in experimental designs to see how these designs behave. But to do this effectively, they needed to run a lot of tests. These tests were too big to be held at the Livermore campus, so scientists and engineers would travel to the Nevada or Los Alamos test sites to test their designs. This required traveling back and forth, transporting bomb parts and special nuclear materials on commercial transport.

Workers at the time stated that the process had more in common with a military itinerary than a scientific research lab. They had long yearned for a site of their own, and in 1955, they found the perfect spot. Site 300 is shaped like a boot, and it has a lot of peaks and valleys. That's Valerie Dibley, Site 300 manager. Site 300 earned its name as a sequential knot, where Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's main campus is famously called Site 200, and the original Berkeley lab is called Site 100.

Back when the Atomic Energy Commission established Site 300, it was a gravel road to get here. Used to be a sheep ranch. The benefit is how close it is to the Livermore site. So people don't have to travel to Nevada. In 1955, the Atomic Energy Commission purchased 3,400 acres from three sheep farmers. This land was just 15 miles from the main Livermore site. The nearest urban area was

the small town of Tracy, which at the time in the 50s was home to only a couple hundred people. Site 300 was officially established as a non-nuclear test site. It would be used as a high explosive or HE process area, primarily for the production of HE prototypes for the lab's weapons program. It's unincorporated, really uninhabited land, geographically rolling hills and valleys, deep ravines. Brian Cracchiola is the explosive operations manager for the strategic deterrence Directorate.

He oversees all of the explosive operations related to the lab's weapons mission set. Obviously, Livermore Campus is in the middle of the town, and so we're not going to be setting off a lot of high-volume, high-quantity explosives, right? Especially now with the neighborhood right across the street. So what we do is a lot of proof of concept on Site 200. And then once we've got confidence in the material or the experiment, we carry it forward. I take all the people that have worked on it and they supplement the shadow staff that I have out at Site 300 and we scale up.

We do the experiment in as close to full size as we can. Two years after acquiring the original plot of land, the lab purchased a little over 3000 additional acres to the west, growing the total site size to about 7000 acres. Today, less than 5% of the land at Site 300 is developed due to the nature of the work conducted there. Site 300 consists of 145 buildings.

Most are small, not occupied full time. We have 40 high-explosive magazines nature of the work conducted there. Site 300 consists of 145 buildings. Most are small, not occupied full time. We have 40 high explosive magazines scattered around the site, 26 miles of roads, and 80 miles of fire trails. From its founding until the end of the Cold War, Site 300 was heavily involved in formulating, mixing, casting, pressing, machining, and assembling high explosives. These explosives, while not nuclear on their own, are crucial components of nuclear weapons.

Additionally, Site-300 conducted extensive testing on other non-nuclear systems of nuclear weapons, including the testing of firing systems, fuses, and other mechanical and electronic components. This included performing environmental tests, in which scientists would subject weapon components and systems to extreme temperatures, vibrations, and other environmental stresses, all to ensure total reliability under the unpredictable conditions encountered at deployment. During the first 40 years of the lab's operation, these non-nuclear tests and experiments pushed weapon development forward. But in the 1990s, as global political tensions eased, new areas of focus emerged.

The United States imposed a ban on explosive nuclear testing, and the lab's primary mission transitioned toward stockpile stewardship, a scientific program aimed at ensuring the effectiveness of the country's nuclear arsenal without conducting such tests. As the stockpile stewardship program grew, the capabilities of Site-300 started to be applied more broadly, diversifying into various other fields. What do those experiments look like? Runs the gamut.

One day, we could be doing experiments that support the nuclear stockpile and our deterrents. Or the next day we could be doing experiments for the FBI or the Department of Transportation Security. Or we've been approached by a civilian company that wanted us to look at their rocket motors and tell them if it was safe. Today, the work that gets done at the site falls into many categories. The 300 divided herself up into seven functional areas based on the types of work we do in each area. The first area I'll talk about is area one.

We call it the West firing area. We have our outdoor firing facility there that performs experimental outdoor detonation of explosives up to 100 pounds a day, 1000 pounds a year. Area 2 is the east firing area. That's where we have the contained firing facility at Building 801. It's designed to contain up to 132 pounds of explosives along with materials such as depleted uranium and beryllium with zero environmental emissions. Area 3 is our small firearms training facility operated by security. We have area 4 is our chemistry area where we do high explosive research and development. Area 5 is the high explosive process area. Area six is our engineering test area where we do non-destructive environmental testing.

And then area seven, our last area, is our general services area where we have our administration, our waste management, our environmental restoration, our craft shops, our fire department, and our health services. These seven areas not only work together with one another, they also cross-pollinate and work directly alongside Site 200, Livermore's main campus.

So how does an explosive, weapon device, or other project end up at Site 300? Ideation begins in the offices and computer rooms of Site 200. Typically a designer will come up with an idea for an experiment. They'll run some simulations to have an idea of what they might find out. That's Jeff Florando, who is the Associate Program Director for

Hydrodynamic and Subcritical Experiments in the Weapons Physics and Design Program. And then that starts this process. They'll have a conceptual design. Then a device engineer gets involved, and that's the person who is in charge of trying to figure out, how am am I gonna build this thing? What are their tolerances? What materials are you using? What kind of fixturing do I need?

All those kinds of things. After the design has been drafted, gone through a review and revision phase, and then officially approved, the team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory moves on to the next step, actually developing the components they will need.

A lot of making explosives is kind of like baking a cake. You got wet ingredients and dry ingredients, then you mix them together and you put it in the oven, you make a cake. I have a radiography area, a machining and processing area. I have a chemistry area. So they're doing extreme chemistry, they're creating new energetic materials and molecules. So we're mixing those explosive molecules, we're mixing in other materials to begin to glomp it together, and then we press it into a solid part

that then I have explosive machinists. So fully qualified journeyman level machinists that instead of putting a piece of metal into a lathe or a mill and then creating something subtractively like you would in a machine shop, they're creating exquisite geographical structures out of explosives. Once we make those parts and we've machined it, we have to make sure that it's as perfect or near perfect as we can. So we send it over to radiography and we do x-rays, much like going to the dentist to get an x-ray of your molar if you think you've got a cavity.

We need to look inside of that explosive part that we just machined to make sure there aren't any cracks or voids, nothing inside of it that we couldn't see physically while we were handling it. From there, they take that raw explosives and they put all the metal and plastic all the parts and pieces together to make it the functional experiment. Next the experiment is ready to become operational. The choice of facility for this phase is determined by the specific

goals of the test. Being done in a facility can change the dynamics, can actually give us reverberations and reflections. If it goes out to the west firing area, then that means that it's gonna go out and be detonated outdoors. It's a gravel pad with a big, huge concrete bunker. The gravel pad is where we set up the experiment. Inside of the bunker, we've got a control room and then all the diagnostics.

We have cameras everywhere. So we've got high speed cameras, we've got GoPros, we've got all different kinds of cameras with different speeds that allow us to actually see the explosions. We're looking at it with X-rays. We're gonna have all sorts of sensors and diagnostics embedded in the experiment.

Every experiment has to contribute to the team's understanding, requiring details that conventional cameras can't capture. Using X-rays, they can hopefully reveal a hidden order to each explosion. Why do you need to X-ray an experiment that you're blowing up? Well, you think of an explosion. We've all seen them on TV, right? You get boom, you've got the light and the fireball and all of that flash. If I videotape that, even with a high speed camera,

I can't really see what's going on outside of the fireball. If we use x-rays and take radiography, we can see through all of that. We can see what's happening to either the case or the material. Or is the explosive actually blowing up or is it throwing material out that's not fully igniting and burning? Most of our experiments out there are going to be really relatively small.

Think of a regulation softball, those big fluorescent yellow ones. If you compacted a military type explosive, let's say say C4, we see it on TV all the time, it's a white explosive. If you pack that into a good size snowball or a softball size, that would be about three and a half, four to five pounds, depending on how much you densify, how hard you pack it, right? A couple of hand grenades equivalent. We go through a huge process to make sure that everyone's in the bunker, everyone's completely accounted for. We're on the radios calling to make sure that everyone's outside of the exclusion zone or the muster area.

We close gates, we have flashing lights and audible sirens so that everyone knows that we're getting ready to do a detonation. When we do the detonation, we fire the shot. We give it so long. We watch the cameras to make sure that everything's safe. And then we have fully trained and qualified explosive handlers that go up afterwards to make sure that everything's good. And then they provide the all clear on an outdoor shot. Once they give all clear, then you see all the ants come out, all the scientists, all the experimenters. Because everyone wants to get out and see what it did. They watched it on the camera,

but now they want to see the bits of twisted metal and stuff and actually see what did the experiment do. And so we take that metal and all those forensic pieces and those tell the story. But then we've got all of the data from the X-ray, from the high-speed cameras, from all the diagnostics that the experimentalists take off and then they put that all together and formulate some sort of a report or refining based off of it. As the team navigates the complexities of each experiment, it's important to keep in mind that the activities of the West Fire area take place outside in the open air. And with that, extra safety measures are necessary.

We're fairly close to a residential neighborhood. I actually live in the neighborhood that's closest to Site 300. And it's about a 10-minute drive away from Site 300. Starting in the 90s, the nearby town of Tracy grew dramatically, reaching a population of almost 60,000 by the year 2000. At this time, Site 300 underwent a transformation in planning and thinking about how they execute on experiments, including reviewing the safety and impact of the tests on the nearby town. Our forebears were really smart in setting the table that we use. They put it in this horseshoe-shaped valley. And so when we do our detonations, most of the sound and all of the energy goes upwards versus going outwards as you would think if we were on just basically flat ground. When we do those detonations, if there's an aversion layer, there's clouds, the sound

from that detonation will go up and it will reflect off the clouds and come back down. And so we look at the atmospheres before we make a determination whether we can without sending loud sounds onto the nearby neighborhoods. In addition to the concern of sound, the team at Site 300 is also very mindful of the possible environmental impacts on the wildlife and land in the area. We take great pride in how we treat the environment and how we are respectful of the endangered flora and fauna. So we do very few outdoor experiments and they're really limited to much smaller amounts. We have a lot of special status animal species, rare plants, fossils, and cultural sites that are monitored and protected at Site 300.

All 7,000 acres is critical habitat to one or more of 35 special status species, and those are the threatened or endangered plants and animals. Some of our rare plants include the Ampsinkia grandiflora and the diamond-pedaled poppy that was thought to be extinct until they found it at Site 300. We have a lot of different birds, including the tricolor blackbird. We have the loggerhead shrike, the braying owl, golden eagles, just too many birds to list. We also have animals like the American badger, tiger salamanders, elderberry longhorn beetles, red-legged frogs. We have mastodon bones, petrified oyster shells, petrified wood, and artifacts from when this

area was a town that all have to also be protected. For example, if we want to disturb the earth, we have to consult with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. That process takes about a year. We have limits on what we can do during the rainy season. We also perform a prescribed burn. We use weather balloons to ensure the noise from our outdoor experiments won't impact the community. Outdoor testing is taken very seriously and with very clear guidelines. But when indoor reflections aren't detrimental to the goal of the test, the lab will conduct explosions at their east facility.

This gives the opportunity to work with fewer environmental restrictions. West is outdoors, east is indoors. It's completely enclosed, a facility that we call CFF, or the Contained Firing Facility. The chamber is very large. It was constructed using 100 cubic meters of concrete and 2,000 metric tons of steel. It's got the large area, the 2,500 square feet, so we can do these specialized experiments in there,

so we can do hazard materials. One of the things that makes it super important, it makes it a national capability, is that attached to that firing chamber we have a flash x-ray. The flash x-ray machine, also called FXR, is an imaging system that allows the lab to take x-rays of really dense materials and get experimental pictures that can't be captured anywhere else in the nation. We can actually produce x-rays that see through very dense objects.

You can imagine your medical x-rays are typically in the low hundreds of KEV. This is typically 18 MEV, so it's a couple of orders might have been larger than that, so higher energy. The uniqueness of this is that having the FXR with the CFF and that large footprint, we can actually see very large field of view things.

And that really allows us to do experiments that you really can't do anywhere else. One type of experiment that is performed within the facility is called hydrodynamic testing. Hydrodynamic testing is designed to simulate the first stages of a nuclear explosion. One of the main missions of the laboratory is maintaining our nuclear stockpile. And one of the ways in which we do that is by doing basically what's called hydrodynamic experiments. These are experiments that allow us to have confidence that our stockpile is going to perform as expected. Hydrodynamic testing has been a key function of Site 300 since its inception.

But it wasn't until the rise of high-performance computing in the 90s that these types of experiments dramatically improved. This new approach allows for more precise simulations of nuclear explosions, a vital component in the development, refinement, and maintenance of nuclear weapons. The reason it's called a hydrogen ion experiment is that you basically have your high explosives,

and when the high explosives detonate, they push the materials so quickly that they act like a liquid, but after they get fluid in some sense. And we get a lot of information. We have diagnostics, which allow us to give a lot of information then on the behavior, which gives us confidence in our models and our simulations that we use to basically certify that our stockpile is going to do what we think it should do. We can't do underground testing anymore.

So we really have to rely on these type of experiments in order to help increase our understanding. Those thousands of acres of farmland that Herbert York stood looking out over in the 1950s have certainly evolved and changed in the past 70 years. And the future of Site 300 is equally as dynamic. A lot of our infrastructure is aging, our water system, our high voltage, our sewage treatment, our roads, our facilities. In general, most of them were built in the 60s.

There are plans to upgrade everything. We have new buildings with new high explosive capabilities in the works. Thunder Hunter is not going away. It's not being phased out. It's getting busier and busier. Lawrence Livermore is improving the site so it is ready to meet the national security needs, challenges, and opportunities of the future. They are committed to being prepared to support whoever comes knocking. Our mission set is really broad, right? A lot of people would come in with the notion that we just make bombs and that's not the

case at all. Other things that we do that most people would never even think of out of Site 300 is we're looking at setting up energy, microgrid for looking at green energy technologies and things like that, right? We've got this space that we use very little of those 7,000 acres, maybe a third of it, and the rest of it is all open terrain. And it's a natural habitat with a number of protected species, both flora and fauna.

And so setting up green energy makes sense out there. Being able to not just test the efficacy of the proposed technologies, new solar panels or things like that, but also looking at it from the lab's collaborative approach, can some of our folks try and hack into that grid? Can we make that grid more secure so that we don't have to worry about losing critical infrastructure to potential cyber attacks and things like that? So everything that we do at the lab, we try and look at it from a very holistic approach. And that's just another way that we use Site-300. Site-300 is home to some of the most advanced technology in the world. But this technology is only as good as the people using it.

And as Brian shared, it's Livermore's holistic, collaborative approach that truly sets this team apart. I'll tell you the most unique thing for Site 300, the most important thing is the people that work there, people that execute the experiments, top-notch, trained, qualified experts in their field. When you think about our founding fathers, E.O. Lawrence, Herb York, Edward Teller, right? Their whole concept of the way that our lab organized people was to bring multidisciplinary teams together

to tackle these grand scientific challenges. And you have to look at the lab's grand mission. How do we maintain an efficient, safe, secure, reliable deterrent that has kept the world in a safe, stable geopolitical environment since World War II? Psych three hundred is absolutely key to our nation being able to do that. The work that our scientists, engineers, technicians, all the way to our administrators and the janitors that come in and out clean up. Every one of us

plays a role and owns some piece of that peace and prosperity. What Site 300 is doing is absolutely essential not to the United States, but to the entire world. Site 300's enduring legacy is one of relentless commitment to peace and security. What started as thousands of acres of grazing land for sheep has transformed into a hub of scientific exploration, contributing significantly to our understanding of the universe and our place within it. Thank you for tuning in to Big Ideas Lab.

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