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U.S. Department of Energy, said it has begun using computed tomography (CT) scans to detect aging defects on critical components in the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal.

Technically, the scanners work exactly the same on nuclear weapons as they do on people.

"In the medical world, someone lays on the table and either the body moves through the scanner or it goes over the person," Geoffrey Beausoleil, deputy site manager at the NNSA's Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, said in a telephone interview.

"For us, it's the same kind of thing. We put a component on a table and the table moves through the scanner unit," said Beausoleil, who is charged with maintaining the security and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile.

The major difference between a medical CT scan is the radiation, Beausoleil said.

"Because we are not scanning body tissue, we are scanning metals, the energy level is a lot greater. You would hurt somebody from a radiation dose if you put them through our scanner," he said.

The high-resolution scanner, called the CoLOSSIS (Confined Large Optical Scintillator Screen and Imaging System), was built by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

It is used to scan weapons components to look for signs that nuclear weapons have degraded in the past 30 to 40 years since they were first built.

"There are up to 6,000 components in a nuclear warhead. Those can be anywhere from very small to relatively large. I don't think we are talking about passing the whole thing to the scanner," said Damien LaVera, director of public affairs at the National Nuclear Security Administration.

LaVera said the work is typically done at the Pantex Plant, where the NNSA assembles and disassembles nuclear weapons as part of its stockpile stewardship mission.

"It's not done on the top of a missile silo by any means," LaVera said.

INSPECT A WEAPON

Before the scanner, the team at Pantex would take a weapon out of service and inspect it.

"We would have to cut it, take it apart completely and make everything completely useless. You couldn't re-weld them back together," Beausoleil said.

"What this allows us to do is take a component and without damaging it -- find out what's inside and outside."

Beausoleil said the scanner allows the team to see down into the less than 1,000th of an inch.

"Think about a pipe that is rusting. The metal flakes off. We're looking for things like that," Beausoleil said.

The first user of the CoLOSIS will be Los Alamos National Laboratory, which will test the Air Force's B61 gravity bomb, checking components for signs of aging or manufacturing defects.

"We can better ensure the reliability of all of the components we put into a weapon," Beausoleil said.

"If we are not going to build and test new weapons -- or any old weapons for that matter -- we need to assure our customer, the Department of Defense, that the product we give them is reliable," he said.

In October, President Barack Obama signed into law a $33.5 billion spending bill to fund government energy and water programs for the 2010 budget year, including $6.4 billion to maintain the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile.

Source: Reuters

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