Securing the Nuclear Arsenal with Lawrence Livermore Lab Director, Bill Goldstein

Bill Goldstein has always been attracted to a challenge. From his days in high school striving to understand theoretical physics problems, to his current work as the director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, (LLNL), Bill is a magnet for tough problems.

But the problems that he faces at LLNL today aren’t just theoretical. They are very real and account for the safety of the nation and of the world. See, LLNL isn’t just any old testing lab; LLNL is responsible for securing and maintaining the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal.

The most pressing challenge Bill and LLNL face today is maintaining the safety and utility of the nuclear stockpile. But there’s a catch. They can’t ever actually touch or test the weapons.

“These are tremendously complicated devices. They are evolving continually over time. They have radioactive materials in them. They have chemically active materials in them. They are changing every day. They've been aging since 1992. And the challenge of being able to ensure that they remain safe and reliable is what drives a great deal of the science at the laboratory, including our need for ever-increasing power of computing without being able to do the tests in real life. It's essential that we need to be able to simulate the behavior of nuclear weapons with the highest possible fidelity and the most accurate possible physics and chemistry. And we need bigger computers than we have today in order to do that.”

So how do you determine if something is safe and secure without tests? You collect data and use computer simulations to predict the state of the devices. Not exactly the most foolproof plan back in the 90s, but as technology has advanced, so have Bill and LLNL’s simulations. With the stockpile secure, LLNL’s mission has become much broader: to apply cutting edge science and technology to enhance national and international security. On this episode, Chad and Bill discuss some of these other areas of focus at the lab, and dive deep into how data and computer modeling is helping solve some of the massive challenges facing humanity today.

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