OSINFO - Open Sources Information

Rob Edwards in New Scientist writes about a material called FOGBANK, which is used in US nuclear weapons such as the W76. (Ian Sample in the Guardian also picked it up.)

Edwards’s article contains some speculation on the use of FOGBANK, which is something I’ve been looking into since Frank Munger started asking uncomfortable questions about delays in the W-76 Life Extension Program in January (January 24, January 25, February 12, and March 6).

I believe that FOGBANK is an aerogel used as the interstage material — Howard Morland’s exploding styrofoam — in three thermonuclear designs: the W76, W78 and W80. I believe it is recycled, and will be produced, at the so-called Purification Facility at Y-12.

John Field thinks FOGBANK is an aerogel based on a hypothesis he has about how a thermonuclear secondary works. I suspect he is right for a more mundane reason. Aerogels (that’s one on the right, with a brick sitting on top of it) are extremely low-density materials that feel like polystyrene and look like smoke or fog. Indeed, the nicknames for aerogels include “frozen smoke” and “San Francisco fog.”

Witty bastards in our nation’s nuclear weapons complex, eh?

***

There are not many official references to FOGBANK, but I’ve collected them for you here. I think they link FOGBANK, ACN, interstage material and the Purification Facility very tightly.

• We also know that Y-12 Facility 9404-11 is used to make FOGBANK based on a DOE memorandum, entitled, Y-12 Safety Analyses/Criticality/Chemical Safety Review.

• A fellow named Thomas Larson mentioned that he worked on FOGBANK while at Los Alamos in a public meeting. (FYI: Los Alamos does a lot of work on aerogels.)

• A Y-12 employee was paraphrased as saying “They’re starting to make things with FOGBANK again after many years of not using it, and it’s a big concern.”

• NNSA Administrator, Tom D’Agostino, has mentioned FOGBANK twice, linking it to the interstage material of a Navy nuclear warhead and the flammable chemical, Acetonitrile (ACN):

Finally, there is a material that we currently use and it’s in a facility that we built … at Y-12. It’s a very complicated material that — call it the fog bank. That’s not classified, but it’s a material that’s very important to, you know, our life extension activity. And we are spending a lot of money as part of the [LEP] in making — trying to … produce that material, and we are not out of the woods yet. And it’s a material that uses a cleaning agent that is extremely flammable. And in fact, we had to build a separate spillway, external, because if this stuff ever caused a problem we would want — we would have to put it in this area. It’s expensive to operate and maintain that facility.

• READ FULL POST HERE…