Warhead tied to mysterious material at Y-12

This could be of significant interest to some countries(ie China, and NK) and or terrorist groups. I dont think this would cause a national security emergency, at least I hope not.

New Scientist magazine is reporting that problems with a super-secret material manufactured at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant are what's holding up efforts to refurbish W76 warheads, which are deployed on Trident missiles.
According to the magazine's report by Rob Edwards, the material is code-named "Fogbank" and is extremely hazardous. It is reportedly produced at Y-12's new Purification Facility, a $50 million facility that was completed in mid-2005.

www.knoxnews.com...



[edit on 6-3-2008 by Master_Wii]

eventually the lab boys were able to recreate the FOGBANK formula

www.washingtonexaminer.com...

Straight away, the NNSA realized that Fogbank could be a problem because, as the GAO would later report, they had "kept few records of the process when the material was made in the 1980s and almost all the staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency." The NNSA briefly considered creating a substitute for Fogbank, but ultimately decided that since they had made it before, they would be able to make it again...A year later--and with an additional $69 million spent--the NNSA finally rediscovered a workable way to manufacture Fogbank.

nukes aren't much in the news these days, which is a good thing.
I suspect if WWIII happened a lot of the Russian tech would crash and burn.
fine with me if they all misfire, on both sides. maybe one or two hit Russia, just enough to convince them to surrender.

FOGBANK is still secret stuff. sometimes discussed with Red Mercury, which apparently doesn't really exist, but still fascinates a lot of us.

IIRC some NASA people said that the Saturn 3 was lost tech and couldn't be re-created.

a reply to: Master_Wii

I used to work in the nuke field and went down in the silos a few times. Also where I worked was a System Program Office for the ICBM program. In it, they had a mock up of a real ICBM and also a warhead in the lab there. One day I was walking by with an old crusty Master Sergeant and we stopped to look at the warhead. There was a black coating on it that the MSgt said was called “Substance X” or something to that effect. He said it was highly classified and that he could not even speak the name of it. I believe it was used as a heat shield on the warhead for re-entry into the atmosphere. I wonder if this is the same thing? At the time I assumed it to be some sort of graphene or something like that...

Edit: after further reading I see that FOGBANK is actually a component inside the nuke. So, probably not the same thing I’m talking about here. Still, I’m curious to know what the substance I’m talking about actually is.

a reply to: PokeyJoe

en.wikipedia.org...