
How the US forgot how to make Trident missiles - kqr2
http://www.sundayherald.com/news/heraldnews/display.var.2494129.0.0.php
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Tangurena
"Fogbank," the aerogel at the heart of this issue, is made with very toxic
solvents. It would not surprise me that most of the documentation on the
processes to make it were destroyed to avoid litigation over health and safety
issues.

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mechanical_fish
I remember when a physicist came to give a lecture at Cornell about the
difficulties of cleaning up Hanford, Washington. It was a hair-raising
presentation. I forget the details, but the gist is here:

[http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14119133.900-the-
dirti...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14119133.900-the-dirtiest-
place-on-earth.html)

It was one hair-raising talk. And so I was not at all surprised by this
fascinating news article from earlier this year:

[http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16447-earliest-
weapons...](http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16447-earliest-weaponsgrade-
plutonium-found-in-us-dump.html)

~~~
Create
Some physicist will correct me, but I think this is more of an accounting
trick than a technological one: it serves to ask for more money.

I have no evidence, but my impression is, that aerogel is used to track the
ageing of the decaying warheads, also providing data for the computed
simulations to be more realistic. Such aerogel is readily available on the
free (in the doublespeak sense) market.

~~~
Tangurena
The building it was originally made at in Y-12 (called facility 9404-11) was
torn down in 2004. The nasty solvent (which metabolises in the body into
cyanide) called acetonitrile, of which Wikipedia claims there is supposedly a
world shortage as the sole remaining factory producing it was shut down in
2008 (to reduce pollution) for the Olympics.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetonitrile>

<http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1814/fogbank>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teller%E2%80%93Ulam_design>

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siculars
This is so concerning on so many levels. The ineptitude and lack of
accountability by the powers that be is borderline criminal.

In a separate vein I'm sure I'm not the only one to realize that people in the
West, and in America in particular, have forgotten how to make things. Be it
fogbank, tanks, textiles, semiconductors and soon to be cars. We keep farming
out manufacturing to the lowest oversees bidders and soon enough all we know
how to do is place orders.

What happens, god forbid, when our trading partners become our enemies and
they withhold the materials which we need to fight them. How about the
semiconductors used in critical systems are compromised by foreign actors? All
we can do is hope people at the helm have already thought of this stuff and
are doing things to mitigate the risk. I'm not too sure.

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janetlor
Russians & Chinese probably have a detailed copy of the plans. Just ask them.

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gaius
I get this feeling every time I log into Production...

