Chapter 1: What unique conditions are created at JASPER for studying plutonium?
As the car door slams shut, dust scatters. 90 miles one way deep into the Nevada desert has coated everything in a fine layer of grit. It's 7.06 a.m. A scientist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has just arrived at a remote facility built for a single purpose. To measure an event that no human can fully witness.
A dry wind gusts across his face one last time before he steps inside the doors of the concrete building. He runs through his checklist. Materials shaped and delivered, systems aligned, and diagnostics tuned to capture a moment too fast for human senses to register. the data collected will ripple far beyond the harsh Nevada desert and directly influence national security.
He's made this trek many times before. But today is different. Today is the day that three years of preparation culminate in less than a microsecond. Today is the day a two-stage gas gun drives a radioactive, hazardous material into conditions too extreme to observe directly. Today is the day they measure plutonium. Today is shot day at Jasper.
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An unmanned test vehicle tears out of the atmosphere.
In the vacuum of space, it's silent as it makes its way back to Earth. Then it hits. Reentry. The air doesn't part. It compresses. Temperature spikes. The surface begins to burn. The vehicle, and whatever it could have told us...
Back in the 60s, the space race, people wanted ways to test reentry nose cones.
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Chapter 2: How does a two-stage gas gun function in plutonium experiments?
Turn stored energy into extreme speed.
The old magic trick where the magician pretends to catch a bullet in their teeth. We're really doing that. But this bullet is traveling 10 times faster than a rifle bullet. The portion of time where we are collecting useful data is less than a microsecond or one millionth of a second. And that's actually maybe for our slower experiments.
Some of the more typical experiments, it's more like 100 nanoseconds. So a typical experiment for us would be we may be measuring the speed of a shockwave as it transits through a sample. So we'll measure very precisely the moment of impact. And then we'll measure how long it takes for that shockwave that's generated to transit across the sample.
And that tells us something important about the thermodynamic state.
In a fraction of a microsecond, plutonium is pushed into extremes too fast to see and too important to guess at. You can imagine a shockwave
Like imagine a snowplow driving down the street. The snow has fallen overnight. The road is covered in a nice even layer of it. As the snowplow goes, the snowplow blade moves at a certain velocity and the snow piles up in front of it and it compacts. And as it compacts, you can imagine that wave starts to move forward away from the plow.
So the farther the plow moves, now there's this wave traveling forward of compacted snow. That disturbance is what we're looking at, where you go from unmoved snow to compacted slab.
The shot only matters if the diagnostics can capture it clearly enough to make the result repeatable, credible, and useful.
And when you do that, it makes an astounding mess. When a projectile hits something going at kilometers per second, people sometimes ask me what's left afterwards. What's left is almost nothing. The target's essentially exploded.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do scientists face when working with plutonium?
What leaves JASPER isn't the shot itself. It's the understanding that remains after it. Thank you for tuning in to Big Ideas Lab. If you loved what you heard, please let us know by leaving a rating and review. And if you haven't already, don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast to keep up with our latest episode. Thanks for listening.
Looking for a career that challenges and inspires? Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring for a nuclear facility engineer, systems design and testing engineer, and a senior scientific technologist, along with many other roles in science, technology, engineering, and beyond.
At the lab, every role contributes to groundbreaking projects in national security, advanced computing, and scientific research, all within a collaborative, mission-driven environment. Discover open positions at llnl.gov forward slash careers, where big ideas come to life.