Welcome to the 2018 edition of the annual Lab News Labs Accomplishments. In these pages, you will read about a remarkable array of achievements by the staff at Sandia National Laboratories.

Sandia is fulfilling its national security missions, including maintaining the safety, reliability, and effectiveness of the US nuclear deterrent forces against a wider set of threats than ever before. The scope of our capabilities sets us apart. Sandia’s deep science and engineering foundations give us a cross-disciplinary advantage that helps us solve some of the nation’s toughest problems and make the world a safer place.

From critical milestones in our key mission areas to scientific breakthroughs reached via Laboratory Directed Research and Development to valuable advances in mission support, this issue of Labs Accomplishments demonstrates that we are providing “exceptional service in the national interest.” And we’re doing our work more safely and with a more diverse workforce. Every Sandian plays a role. Behind every accomplishment is a team of talented and hardworking people at the very top of their game.

It’s impossible to collect all the great work done at Sandia in a single volume. Many of our greatest accomplishments have come in areas of national security that are too sensitive for general publication. But you’ll learn here about important experiments with tritium on the Z machine, ground-breaking work that represents a powerful new tool in our Stockpile Stewardship program and could open the door to high-yield inertial confinement fusion.

You’ll find examples of the strides we are making in our nuclear deterrence mission, meeting key deliverables in all our weapons programs. You’ll discover how our high-performance computer modeling and simulation capabilities are playing an ever-more-important role in supporting our mission work across the enterprise.

The 2018 Labs Accomplishments provides a snapshot of the contributions we are making in supporting the warfighter, protecting the homeland, ensuring the nation’s energy security, working with international partners to ensure global peace, developing innovative approaches to cybersecurity, and supporting research to advance our fundamental understanding of the universe.

Our mission support and mission assurance organizations continue to provide best-in-enterprise leadership in the areas of safety and security, sustainability, quality, and employee benefits. You can read about their latest achievements here as well.

So sit down and enjoy this look at significant work performed at the Labs over the past year. I promise it will be time well spent and make you, like me, proud to be a Sandian.

Steve Younger

Laboratories Director

About this publication

This year’s Labs Accomplishments highlights some of Sandia’s best work during 2017, as submitted by the Labs’ Center offices and selected by Division offices. Readers will see numbers in parentheses following many of the entries that indicate the Centers where the bulk of the work for those accomplishmentswas performed.

 

Download the 2018 Labs Accomplishments (PDF, 10 MB).