Strongest of the strong
Tiffany Tafoya, a Sandia missile defense technologist, deadlifts cars and carries around giant heavy stones in her free time. She’s also really good at it. Tiffany trains in strongman, a weightlifting-based sport that involves physical and mental strength, speed and endurance.
Blast tube tests at Sandia simulate shock wave conditions nuclear weapons could face
Sandia researchers are using a blast tube configurable to 120 feet to demonstrate how well nuclear weapons could survive the shock wave of a blast from an enemy weapon, and to help validate the modeling.
Keeping perspective during a long recovery
Sean Dunagan knows firsthand how to bring a major project back online after a three-year shutdown. Following the February 2014 events that closed the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New Mexico, he was the senior WIPP recovery manager at DOE. Now back in Sandia’s employ, Sean manages special projects and remote site support for the Labs’ Carlsbad office.
First responders confront shooters, explosives in emergency exercise
More than 200 members of Sandia’s workforce got a realistic taste of what might happen in a shooting incident on July 25 in the annual full-scale emergency exercise at the New Mexico site.
NNSA breaks new ground
At a July 2 groundbreaking ceremony, Lisa E. Gordon-Hagerty, Undersecretary for Nuclear Security and NNSA Administrator, described plans to build the new NNSA Albuquerque Complex.
Sandia to celebrate 40 years of solar power research
In 1978, Sandia began a unique program of research on concentrating solar power at the newly constructed National Solar Thermal Test Facility. Forty years later, the facility is still the only one of its kind in the United States. Sandia will celebrate the solar tower’s 40th anniversary on July 31.
The amazing growth of renewable energy from solar cells: A lesson for how we fund research?
Since 2004, the rate at which solar cell power is installed has doubled every 22 months and is now in excess of 0.1 terawatts per year. Research driving some of this expansion began right here at Sandia more than 40 years ago.
Dry casks take the heat
Sandia researchers have built a scaled test assembly that mimics a dry cask storage container for spent nuclear fuel to study how fuel temperatures change during storage and how the fuel’s peak temperatures affect the integrity of the metal cladding surrounding the spent fuel.
Cooking composites in the sun
Sandia’s solar tower is helping to assess how extreme temperature changes affect materials. The tests for the Air Force take advantage of the ability of Sandia’s National Solar Thermal Test Facility to simulate a very rapid increase in temperature followed by an equally rapid decrease.
Smarter, safer bridges with Sandia sensors
Sandia and UK-based Structural Monitoring Systems PLC have been working together for 15 years to create transportation systems that can send a signal when they're damaged. They've outfitted a U.S. bridge with a network of sensors that will alert maintenance engineers when they detect a crack large enough to require repair.