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Cecilia Sanchez of Scientific Software Engineering (CCN-12) stands for a photo with Everett Beckner, National Nuclear Security Administration deputy administrator for defense programs, at Tuesday's Defense Programs Awards ceremony in the J. Robert Oppenheimer Study Center at Technical Area 3. Sanchez was representing the Pit Manufacturing Software Quality Assurance team.

Laboratory workers receive Defense Programs Awards of Excellence

Nearly 500 staff working in Los Alamos' nuclear weapons program and supporting divisions were honored with the National Nuclear Security Administration's Defense Programs Awards of Excellence for 2003 in ceremonies Tuesday in the J. Robert Oppenheimer Study Center at Technical Area 3.

Everet Beckner, deputy NNSA administrator for defense programs, presented the 15 awards with assistance from Fred Tarantino, Laboratory principal associate director for nuclear weapons programs.

The 15 large and small teams whose achievements were recognized with the Defense Programs Awards of Excellence are listed below:

Actinide Analytical Chemistry; Digital Alpha Reconstitution; ESA Centrifuge Test-Analysis; High Pressure Materials Science; Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) Target Development; Isomeric Yttrium Cross Section; Lightning Project; Los Alamos Hydrotest; Metal Materials Specification; Non-Metal Materials Specification; Pit Manufacturing Software Quality Assurance; Proton Radiography of a Dynamic Test with U6Nb; Uranium Alloy - Neutron Diffraction Characterization; Validated Actinide Cross Section Database; and X-ray Fluorescence.

Actinide Analytical Chemistry team (43 members) Team Representative - Deborah Dale
The Actinide Analytical Chemistry team serves as NNSA's primary analytical laboratory for the actinide elements, primarily plutonium, americium and neptunium. Last year, the team's analytical chemists worked with other specialists to develop and implement an electronic evidence process to support quality product acceptance of mark quality plutonium components by the production agency. This electronic records system documents that their analytical results for plutonium metal are in full and complete conformance with requirements and are of sufficient quality to be certified by the Laboratory and accepted by the NNSA. Audits of this quality program performed by NNSA and the Lab's Weapons Quality Assurance Office state that electronic records and document control processes are "highly commendable" and that "organizations seeking operations to benchmark in the areas of control of documents and records may want to consider analytical chemistry processes." The team was cited for its "outstanding records management program."

Digital Alpha Reconstitution team (8 members) Team Rep. - John Galbraith
The advent of the Enhanced Test Readiness program in 2003 provided the requirement and funding for resurrecting the capability to make high-fidelity measurements of reaction history, a critical diagnostic required for underground nuclear tests. In the decade since testing stopped, the capability to measure reaction history had nearly disappeared. At Los Alamos, only one person with direct experience of the digital alpha recording technique remained, a retiree working part-time on another project. Equipment had been stored for more than 12 years in a variety of locations. Team members assembled documentation and a partial but representative system for digital alpha recording. They operated the reassembled system using a custom calibration waveform generator with outstanding results, showing repeatability of measurements of about 0.2 percent, comparable to that measured more than a decade ago. The team also thoroughly documented the recording system in a format that should remain readable for many years.

ESA Centrifuge Test-Analysis team (10 members) Team Rep. - John Schultze
The LT4A-2 series of centrifuge experiments and related analysis greatly improved stockpile confidence, resolved mechanics questions and thoroughly evaluated the new model validation methods currently under study for a realistic scaled experiment in support of the W76 Life Extension program. The experimental effort supported a verification and validation study applied to a surrogate test article for a W76 nuclear explosive package sub-system assembly. The data was of the highest resolution ever collected for an experiment of this type. This ability to accurately measure the quantity of interest has led to changes in design efforts as well as supplemental tests to examine related phenomena that were previously masked by other effects and limited the quantity and quality of test results. This outstanding effort of combining analysis and tests efforts in a coordinated, forward looking, synthesis of application need and research effort was truly exceptional.

High-Pressure Materials Science team (6 members) Team Rep. - Yusheng Zhao
In less than two years, the high-Pressure Materials Science team performed detailed experimental and theoretical research that optimized the process for production of diamond-silicon-carbide composites that meet industrial and weapons-program requirements for superb hardness, fracture toughness and thermal stability. Through novel materials preparation procedures and ingenious pressure-temperature-time tuning for controlling synthesis dynamics, the end product was a nanostrctured diamond-SiC composite with hardness just below that of diamond but 50 percent enhancement in fracture toughness and significantly extended thermal stability. These nanocomposites hold great promise for the Department of Defense deep-earth penetrator initiative and are being fabricated for penetration testing. This work has been nominated for an R&D 100 Award and an application for a U.S. patent has been submitted. The work also received funding from the Department of Energy and DoD for further development.

Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) Target Development team (3 members) Team Rep. - Peter Ebey
This small team made significant progress enabling cryogenic target development and other accomplishments that support vital milestones for the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. During a difficult period in which the Weapons Engineering Tritium Facility prepared for a major Operational Readiness Review, the team changed the WETF Cryogenic Pressure Loader from a deuterium target loader to a full tritium loader, requiring significant testing and documentation to permit tritium introduction into the system. The team also established a NIF materials exposure capability, which will allow tritium exposure for several materials and components critical to NIF's success. The team designed and installed the capability to perform high pressure, permeation filling of deuterated plastic targets with tritium and the capability to ship these targets to the OMEGA laser facility in New York, a predecessor to NIF. All of these first-of-their-kind efforts led to excellent test data and were accomplished at significant cost savings.

Isomeric Yttrium Cross Section team (13 members) Team Reps. - Toshihiko Kawano, Los Alamos, and Paul Garrett, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
This collaboration between Los Alamos and Livermore experimentalists and Los Alamos theorists has precisely determined key yttrium nuclear cross sections needed to improve the radiochemical understanding of weapons diagnostics predicted by weapons simulation codes. Yttrium plays a key role in determining fusion yield in nuclear weapons tests and was used in many of nuclear tests as a diagnostic. Thus, computational models of the yttrium isotopic ratios is important to stockpile certification. By measuring the yttrium isotopes in the debris after a test, it is possible to infer key parameters related to device performance. Until this effort, significant uncertainties existed in the understanding of neutron-induced yttrium cross sections, due to the role of isomers, or long-lived excited nuclear states. Not only did this project determine the yttrium cross sections precisely, it also enhanced confidence in using yttrium radiochemistry to better develop weapon simulation codes for certification.

Lightning Project team (51 members) Team Rep. - David Neal
The Lightning project caps a large-scale integration effort to establish a new, cost-effective system and user software environment for very large-scale production Linux clusters. The Lightning cluster meets the demand of NNSA's Advanced Simulation and Computing program for additional computing resources to meet the everyday "capacity" workload as well as preparing for the next major ASC program procurement. Lightning uses the latest innovations in management software with a fiber Myrinet-based network interconnect. In the most aggressive schedule ever, and with limited staff, the team accepted hardware and completed Linpack runs exactly a month following delivery, potentially shortening the time from concept to installation for future new systems. The application of modern software and system engineering processes to the installation of new Tera-scale systems -- particularly in the area of requirements gathering and testing -- increases the system's production lifespan and the availability of computing environment software development tools.

Los Alamos Hydrotest team (258 members) Team Reps. - Martha Zumbro, Denise Liechty and John Milewski
The Los Alamos Hydrotest Team was challenged in August 2003 with planning, managing, implementing and successfully executing a series of six critical directed stockpile work shots and two near-term emergency response shots. The demanding six-month schedule required the team to simultaneously optimize experimental operations at PHERMEX and DARHT while employing, for the first time, foam mitigation for beryllium containment. Key achievements of the physics and engineering teams were designing and fabricating test assemblies using novel and improved fabrication methods, as well as state-of-the art diagnostics required for each hydrotest.

Metal Materials Specification team (14 members) Team Rep. - Carl Necker
In support of life extension programs, the Metals Specification team successfully released new complexwide metal material specifications, representing a significant contribution to the maintenance of the stockpile. Because metal materials will be replaced, they must provide properties equivalent to historic materials. New specifications were required based on careful examination of the historic and recently determined characterization data obtained from historic and newly produced materials. The evaluations have resulted in a much better understanding of the materials and the effects of contaminants on performance and are being used to support significant engineering and physics modeling efforts. Because of the considerable impact these specifications would have on quality, schedule and cost of fabricating these materials, considerable technical interactions between Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Y-12 and NNSA were required to balance complex-wide needs.

Non-Metal Materials Specification (23 members) Team Rep. - Julie Bremser
The Non-Metals Specification team has met the need of life-extension programs for a clear understanding and control of the chemistry of non-metal materials, which is required to understand and predict weapon physics behavior. Without underground testing, this information is particularly essential in the new computer models that predict weapon behavior. In support of life extension programs, the team has successfully released new complexwide non-metal material specifications. The evaluations have resulted in a much better understanding of the materials and the effects of contaminants on performance. The results of the modeling efforts were compared with underground test results and the specifications were reviewed and accepted by Lawrence Livermore.

Pit Manufacturing Software Quality Assurance team (5 members) Team Rep. - Kathryn Burris
The Scientific Software Engineering Group's Pit Manufacturing Software Quality Assurance team created, defined, and implemented the procedures that ensured that the 228 pieces of software used in more than 50 critical processes of pit manufacturing met QC-1, the basic, DOE-specified quality principles and requirements for nuclear weapons work. Software is an integral part of virtually every pit manufacturing process: it drives the machine tools and the inspection equipment; it regulates the casting furnaces; it analyzes test results; and it is critical to the safety of the manufacturing personnel and to the reliability of the manufacturing equipment. Without qualified software, the equipment could not meet the tolerances necessary for manufacturing a pit. Achieving the Qual-1 pit milestone would have been impossible without software that met these high standards.

Proton Radiography of a Dynamic test with U6Nb (Uranium-Niobium) (37 members) Team Rep. - Frank Merrill
In September 2003, the team safely and successfully conducted four dynamic experiments that examined study shear band failure of U6Nb under various biaxial strain conditions, collecting 21 dynamic proton radiographs during each experiment. These high-explosives-driven experiments with uranium-containing materials helped confirm new theories in the field of high strain-rate material failure. The radiographs permitted experimentalists to follow the failure process from initiation to final fragmentation for the first time. Unexpectedly, the materials were seen to continue to break up after the initial fragmentation, creating significant interest in the materials science communities. The experiments required extensive authorization and safety efforts, manufacturing of the U6Nb hemi-shells with metallurgical integrity and certification of new containment system.

Uranium Alloy - Neutron Diffraction Characterization team (10 members) Team Rep. - Don Brown
This team completed a series of fundamental studies of compositional variation and the shape memory effect for uranium alloys containing between up to 10 percent niobium by weight. The resulting measurements of the metastable phase diagram and of the polycrystalline deformation mechanisms are important to stockpile assessment. In particular, this improved physical understanding of the constitutive behavior aids development of accurate models of the mechanical properties for benchmarking predictive codes. Neutron diffraction measurements performed at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) provided key insight into microstructural response, including the identification of mechanisms for stress-strain behavior of U6Nb.

Validated Actinide Cross Section Database team (13 members) Team Rep. - Robert MacFarlane
Researchers evaluated a new set of high-fidelity cross sections for neutron reactions on isotopes of uranium and plutonium. The Applied Physics (X) Division is now using this cross section library in simulations of device performance and output, and it is proving to be a major advance. The team demonstrated excellent cross section performance in key integral validation benchmarks based on critical assembly experiments done at TA-18. This improved agreement between simulation and measured data provides an increased confidence in the weapons program's ability to model weapons systems accurately. The tools used to solve this problem - ranging from state-of-the-art cross section modeling codes to Monte Carlo radiation transport simulations - represent unique Los Alamos capabilities by leaders in these research areas.

X-ray Fluorescence team (2 members) Team Rep. - Christopher Worley
Precise determination of the gallium content in plutonium primaries is critical to certification of replacement pits. The Actinide Analytical Chemistry XRF team developed a method of preparing specimens for gallium analysis that uses dried residue thin films instead of liquid samples. The traditional method of dissolving metal in acid requires special precautions to prevent contamination and damage to the XRF instrument, a tedious and time-consuming task. Using the new method, the team achieved error levels within the pit manufacturing certification limits for gallium analysis. The new process is safer, requires less sample preparation time and incorporates smaller reagent volumes and less expensive reagents, thereby reducing amounts of liquid radioactive waste as well as overall process costs.

--Jim Danneskiold

Representatives from teams who received 2003 Defense Programs Awards pose with their plaques after Tuesday's awards ceremony in the J. Robert Oppenheimer Study Center at TA-3. At center in back row is Laboratory Director G. Peter Nanos and Everett Beckner, NNSA deputy administrator for defense programs. Photos by LeRoy N. Sanchez, Public Affairs

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