LANL Upgrades Proton Radiography System After 25 Years and 1000 Explosions

Following last week’s discussion about LANSCE and dynamic imaging at the national labs, here’s a deeper look at a sibling system: pRad (proton radiography).

Los Alamos just ran Pagoda, an experiment probing why some detonations fail, using pRad—one of the few facilities anywhere that scientists can image high explosives in billionths of a second using near-light-speed protons (not x-rays).

Built after nuclear testing ended, pRad feeds critical data into stockpile certification models. But the system is aging. After 25 years and nearly 1000 experiments, it’s finally getting a major upgrade—Cold War hardware out, throughput doubling, and plutonium capability returning.

This is the kind of highly specialized, high-accountability work that likely helps keep DOGE out of the weapons side of the national labs.

Full story (great visuals, including images of the explosion at the bottom): https://www.lanl.gov/media/publications/1663/prad-future-sto...

Pretty wild to see how the DOE labs certify the stockpile without live testing anymore, just layers of modeling, diagnostics, and some very calculated inference.

Stockpile stewardship these days seems less about building stuff and more about making sure the models don’t lie.