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- [00:02]
Narrator
Ancient China. Winter. The sun begins to set. Slipping behind the ridge, the wind cuts cold. Wood is scarce. To survive the night, villagers turn to what's available. An invasive, fast growing plant, bamboo. The goal is simple. Warmth, survival. But from the fire, they hear something. A loud blast. The huddled circle around the fire jolts backward as the hollow bamboo stock ruptures. Trapped air is superheated and expands, releasing its energy. All at once, fear turns to curiosity. What just happened?
- [00:53]
Alex Gash
It's a very, very broad subject. It's also a very old subject. In Asia, they were using energetic materials over a thousand years ago.
- [01:00]
Narrator
Long before equations, long before laboratories, people were asking the first version of the same question scientists ask today. How does something explode?
- [01:12]
Alex Gash
We've learned through trial and error a lot about energetic materials since then.
- [01:17]
Narrator
From bamboo stocks and winter fires to gunpowder packed into cannons. From the sharp crack of a match to the split second inflation of a car airbag. From mining blasts that carve tunnels through mountains to rockets igniting, lifting thousands of tons of steel into orbit, there's still
- [01:36]
Alex Gash
quite a bit left to learn.
- [01:38]
Narrator
Today, that question, how does something explode? Shapes the decisions that keeps our nation safe, guides manufacturing, and pushes technology to explore extremes no human could survive. And it all happens in the Energetic Material Center. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring. If you're passionate about tackling real world challenges in science, engineering, business or skilled trades, there's a place for you at the lab. Right now, positions are open for a senior Labor Relations Advocate, Operations Cybersecurity Manager, and a senior Database Administrator. These are just a few of the more than 100 exciting roles available at Lawrence Livermore. You'll work on projects that matter from national security to cutting edge scientific advancements. Join a team that values innovation, collaboration and professional growth. Explore opportunities@llnl.gov careers where your next career move is could make history. Welcome to the Big Ideas Lab. Your exploration inside Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hear untold stories, meet boundary pushing pioneers and get unparalleled access inside the gates. From national security challenges to computing revolutions, discover the innovations that are shaping tomorrow. Today. At Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, developing explosives begins with understanding energetic materials.
- [03:34]
Laura Linen
Energetic materials are anything that releases their energy quickly.
- [03:39]
Narrator
Meet Laura Linen, Director of the Energetic Material center, or emc.
- [03:44]
Laura Linen
The mission of the Energetic Materials center is to be the hub of subject matter expertise for explosives and energetic materials.
- [03:54]
Narrator
For more than 35 years, the energetic Material center has designed and tested the rapid release of energy. Energetic materials have far reaching consequences not just because they release energy in a flash, but because understanding that Flash keeps people safe. They reveal threats before anyone is in harm's way. They uncover forces that could reshape cities or protect nations. They guide decisions that prevent disasters before they happen.
- [04:26]
Laura Linen
The amount of energy that is in our explosives and energetics is not necessarily that different than, say, a high sugar candy bar. Your Snickers bar has a whole lot of energy in it, but it takes you a long time to digest that. So I'm not really worried about the national security impacts of your Snickers bar. But with high explosives, that energy is delivered in fractions of a second. And so it's not just the amount of energy, but it is the time over which that energy is delivered that makes it so impactful.
- [04:59]
Narrator
The expertise the EMC provides supports critical national security systems.
- [05:05]
Laura Linen
Homeland defense over the last 20 years has been an important national security mission area for us. When 911 happened, we were at the center of helping the United States respond to the concerns that we had about future terrorist events, about the impact of improvised explosive devices, how we needed to make sure that we protected this country.
- [05:33]
Narrator
But while 911 evolved the mission, EMC's work in national security stretches back to the Cold War, to a responsibility far older and far heavier. The real threat to our security isn't the danger of bankruptcy. It is the danger of communist aggression. The nuclear deterrent rests on a central principle. Each increase of tension has produced an increase of arms. Each increase of arms has produced an increase of tension, maintaining a safe, secure, and reliable stockpile to help prevent conflict and maintain strategic stability.
- [06:10]
Laura Linen
Our job is to underpin strategic deterrence with the science, engineering, and technology. And that's really how we show up for nuclear deterrence, in order to give confidence that the United States is going to have a safe, secure, and reliable deterrent.
- [06:31]
Narrator
Anchoring that mission means solving scientific problems at extraordinary levels of complexity and ensuring the materials behind the deterrent can ultimately be produced safely, reliably, and fast enough to respond to new challenges.
- [06:47]
Laura Linen
In order to do that, we need to be the best at our game. That means we have the smartest scientists, engineers, chemists, technologists, and support staff to be able to understand the fundamental science of explosives. We can look at things from different perspectives because everyone has a seat at the table at the EMC and a voice that is heard. And because of that, we can tackle amazingly complex problems and make solutions for the country. And I feel like that makes this very special.
- [07:21]
Narrator
Collaboration makes this kind of complexity manageable, because the answers don't sit at one scale. They begin at the smallest one.
- [07:31]
Laura Linen
We want to go all the way back to the fundamental material properties. We combine modeling and simulation with experiments. We can do large experiments. We have capabilities here at our Livermore site to go up to 10 kilograms of explosives. So that's kind of like a five gallon bucket filled with explosives. But then we can also go down to less than 10 milligrams. So that would be almost difficult to see less than 10 milligrams if you're looking at a dime coin. That's kind of like the eye on the face of the coin. We will look at things across the scales, from the powder that goes into the explosive all the way to how it becomes a part and then how it would interact with other components, either in a weapon system or in a protective system.
- [08:24]
Narrator
Inside a high explosive, chemical bonds break and reform in a chain reaction, releasing energy almost instantaneously. When that energy moves through the material, it doesn't drift, it detonates. Here's Alex Gash, deputy director of the emc.
- [08:43]
Alex Gash
Explosives can undergo a bulk phenomenon called detonation. Probably heard of it, right? And in detonation, what you're getting is you have a shock wave. That is, for example, if you take a piece of metal and a hammer, and you take the hammer and you hit the piece of metal and you hear the big bang, you're putting a shockwave into the material. With an explosive, you put a shock wave into the material and you get the material to react. And so the shock wave is going faster than the speed of sound in the material it's trundling through. Now, if the material doesn't react, that shockwave dies out. But if there's something you start that can actually sustain that shock wave or even accelerate it, then you can actually get a propagating and it's a detonation. And so with chemical explosives, what you have is you have some type of stimulus that starts this shock wave. But then the chemistry takes over and the chemistry is very, very, very, very fast. If you have a shock wave moving at 9km a second, that's an extreme condition. It's moving fast. It's generating massive, massive pressures in the gigapascals and temperatures that are like 4,000 degrees Kelvin. So there's a lot going on. Under those extreme conditions.
- [10:03]
Narrator
Nine kilometers per second is almost 10 times faster than a rifle bullet. At those speeds, chemistry becomes motion. And once it starts, it cannot be paused.
- [10:16]
Alex Gash
That's incredibly fast. And you can imagine capturing that reacting front and the chemistry that's happening behind it at that rate is really, really hard.
- [10:27]
Narrator
We Understand a lot about explosives, but what happens at the tiniest scales and in the first fractions of a second remains a mystery.
- [10:36]
Alex Gash
And that's actually one of the challenges we have. One of the still unanswered things is looking at the chemistry in what we call the reaction zone.
- [10:45]
Narrator
The reaction zone is the first tiny window of detonation where a shock wave triggers the chemical reactions that release an explosives energy. But scientists are still learning what happens in those first microseconds.
- [10:59]
Alex Gash
We really would like to understand the chemistry of what's happening behind that shock front. The energetic materials community across the world would like to know those types of things.
- [11:08]
Narrator
EMC exists to answer these questions, to discover the secrets hidden inside materials that cannot be stopped, only observed.
- [11:18]
Alex Gash
We get products that are only stable for very, very short periods of time because they are inherently unstable. But knowing the energetics of that is important. So that's where we utilize the extreme experiments under extreme conditions. So some energetic materials go well in detonators, others go well in boosters, others go well in larger charges. And depending on where it's going to be used, we have a different set of sort of specialized tests. Fundamentally all of them. We need to know things like detonation pressure, detonation velocity, and what we call initiability. That is how easy is it to ignite the material with a shock wave. A lot goes into just one single experiment.
- [12:03]
Narrator
Explosives don't forgive mistakes when curating energy designed to release all at once. There is no second attempt or margin for error. Safety depends on measuring force as it transforms matter and on containing it before it escapes. Moving through that kind of chaos with precision requires control at every level. Control that doesn't happen by accident. Control found at the High Explosives Application Facility. Looking for a career that challenges and inspires, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring for a senior labor relations advocate, a unified communications engineer and a laser modeling physicist, along with many other roles in science, technology, engineering and beyond. At the lab, every role contributes to groundbreaking projects in national security, advanced computing and scientific research. All within a collaborative, mission driven environment. Discover Open positions@llnl.gov careers where big ideas come to life.
- [13:44]
Alex Gash
Did you hear something
- [13:47]
Laura Linen
weird?
- [13:49]
Narrator
There's nothing.
- [13:50]
Laura Linen
You could be standing outside the building and not know that they are detonating explosives in sight.
- [13:55]
Narrator
This is the High Explosives Application Facility, or heef.
- [14:00]
Alex Gash
Most of the technical aspects of the MC are housed in our High Explosives Application Facility.
- [14:05]
Laura Linen
It is unique as far as we know in the western world. Over 120,000 square feet of explosive space that has been Designed specifically to contain any sort of detonations.
- [14:20]
Alex Gash
This is a facility at the Livermore Laboratory where we have all the scientists and engineers effectively under the same roof. We do experiments on a particular floor of the building so the principal investigators can talk to one another. So it's really meant to be an academic model where you've co located the expertise as well as the facilities and capabilities.
- [14:42]
Narrator
Eventually, scale does become necessary. A 30 minute drive from the Livermore campus, an experimental remote test site has been built to contain flight forces that most places couldn't survive. Site 300 the experiments conducted here reveal how energetic materials behave at full scale, providing the data needed to ensure they can be produced safely and reliably by the teams who manufacture them.
- [15:10]
Laura Linen
When we get out to our site 300 they have a complete containment environment. They do have an open firing facility, which is sort of thing that you probably would see if you're watching TV or watching documentaries on explosives. They have a contained firing facility that is reinforced concrete built bunker and they do experiments inside of it. And those experiments can go up to 60kg, which is quite a large blast.
- [15:38]
Narrator
Impacts from the experiments aren't released into the air, they're absorbed.
- [15:43]
Laura Linen
They also scrub all of the air that comes out of it. It is actually cleaner coming out than it probably was when it came into the building. So we try and minimize any potential impact that we would have on the environment, on the other animals and the environment that we share our space with.
- [16:04]
Narrator
Physical containment is only one layer of protection taken when testing explosives. The rest comes from people and procedure.
- [16:12]
Alex Gash
They involve a material that has significant safety concerns. Right. So we have to have special facility staff, have to be specially trained, specialized instrumentation.
- [16:21]
Laura Linen
Our explosive operations team is amazing and quite capable of keeping all of these facilities in state of the art condition with the best in class modernized diagnostics.
- [16:35]
Narrator
These diagnostics record the inner workings of the blast as it happens. Analyzing pressure, velocity and temperature. What would vanish in microseconds becomes measurable and usable.
- [16:48]
Alex Gash
Computation is a big part of it. Requires a lot of work between experimentalists and computational folks. The computational models are such they can tell us the right types of experiments to run. So we still need the two together. I don't think they'll ever be separate, but they definitely complement one another. We have gotten to a point actually with a lot of stuff where we have a lot of confidence in our models. Instead of running 10 experiments, we can run eight simulations and one experiment. They're intensive from a computing power standpoint. That's why the DOE national laboratories have Intensive and large supercomputers. The latest one we have at Livermore now is El Capitan.
- [17:27]
Narrator
The work begins long before the lab lights turn on. By the time an experiment is assembled and the hardware comes together, many of the unknowns have already been narrowed. Part of the preparation now includes another kind of technology. Robotics.
- [17:44]
Alex Gash
One of the nice things about robotics is ideally they're doing the process the same every single time. There's just natural variations and things that happen between different people doing it different day, that type of thing. The idea is that robotics would uniform it. We actually have some active areas and actually some of those are some of our outward facing sides of the emc.
- [18:04]
Narrator
Even small variations in how energetic materials are prepared can change how they behave. Robotics helps remove that variability, creating a more consistent starting point for experiments and for how those materials can eventually be produced.
- [18:21]
Alex Gash
We are recognized nationally and internationally as having the capability and the expertise and experience to solve problems, some of which are long standing problems, some of which can evolve really quickly. And we need to have quick answers. For example, 15 or so years ago, there was a need from a lot of first responders, if we come across something, how can we quickly identify if it's something we should be worried about?
- [18:53]
Narrator
Researchers at the Energetic Material center were able to develop portable test strips to help.
- [18:59]
Alex Gash
I've got an unknown white powder here. What is it? Is it flour or is it tnt? And so there's a kit called the
- [19:06]
Narrator
Elite Easy Livermore inspection test for explosives. Here, a color change to dark pink is seen. The color closely matches ammonium nitrate, an
- [19:15]
Alex Gash
explosive in the inorganic change to pink is seen.
- [19:18]
Narrator
The color closely matches RDX and explosive in the alpha. Instantaneous change in color to orange indicates
- [19:25]
Alex Gash
a positive for peroxides. We worked with an outside partner to actually manufacture them. We use them because it's really nice. It's quick. It's like, okay, quick color change. Oh yeah, that turned red. Oh, that's a nitromine. We have to worry about that or no, no color change, we're good.
- [19:41]
Narrator
That's fundamental chemistry translated into immediate protection. For problems to be addressed rapidly, the EMC needs to be integrated into governmental agencies and collaborate across multiple industries.
- [19:55]
Laura Linen
It's not just us working alone. We have a large network of partners across the country, the other national labs, especially our partners at Los Alamos and Sandia, the DOE National Security Laboratories. But we're part of a larger network of DOE science laboratories as well. And making sure that we're working across all of those, working with our production partners, the folks who actually have to manufacture the designs that we create. And working with industry and academia, Department of War. So it is definitely an integrated partnership is an important part of us being able to get our business done.
- [20:41]
Narrator
That often extends to working with TSA in explosive detection.
- [20:45]
Laura Linen
We work with transportation security to understand what they can do to try and enable highly effective detection as fast as possible. Because they don't want people to have to wait in line of security for half an hour for their suitcase to get through the X ray detection. What is the constituents of an explosive and how can you detect that and how can you detect that with high accuracy? Those are the sorts of technologies that we develop here for our core mission. But they can then be applied to improve national security.
- [21:23]
Narrator
While the work may expand, the core of the mission remains the same. Understand the material, reduce the risk, protect the nation.
- [21:33]
Laura Linen
It has not necessarily evolved that much since we started 35 years ago because the nuclear deterrence is just as important now as it was then when we first started. We're the place where discovery is going to be meeting delivery. We take the fundamental bits and pieces, we make sure we understand it at all the different scales and levels and we turn that knowledge into delivery for the strategic deterrent, for a national security partner, for homeland security. We are delivering solutions to the problems that concern our country as it relates to high explosives and energetic materials.
- [22:14]
Narrator
The Energetic Material center responds to today's threats and tomorrow's training scientists and engineers who know how to work across across disciplines, who understand both the physics and the consequences, who can carry decades of hard earned knowledge forward and build on it.
- [22:33]
Alex Gash
It's a multidisciplinary subject. You have to know a little bit about a lot of things and it takes a while to get up to that. So we spend a lot of time mentoring. The demographics of our EMC change significantly in like, say the last seven or eight years. We have a lot more earlier career people and I think one of the big things is going to actually sort of grow them into being the leaders in the area of energetic materials.
- [23:01]
Narrator
National safety isn't maintained by standing still. It depends on curiosity, rigor and the ability to adapt. It depends on a new generation ready to take on the problems they haven't seen yet with the science, judgment and responsibility to meet them. The blast is brief. Their responsibility is not. Thank you for tuning in to Big Ideas Lab. If you loved what you heard, please let us know by leaving a rating and review. And if you haven't already, don't forget to hit the follow or subscribe button in your podcast app to keep up with our latest episode. Thanks for listening. Looking for a career that challenges and inspires? Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is hiring for a senior Labor Relations advocate, a unified communications engineer and a laser modeling physicist, along with many other roles in science, technology, engineering and beyond. At the lab, every role contributes to groundbreaking projects in national security, advanced computing and scientific research, all within a collaborative, mission driven environment. Discover Open positions@llnl.gov careers where big ideas come to life.