in the deserts of new mexico scientists have been conducting groundbreaking energy
and weapons research since the end of world war ii
and in the shadow of the sandia mountains inside this u.s government facility
that work continues we're part of the national nuclear security administration
we're doing work to ensure that we have safe and reliable nuclear deterrent
but beyond that sandia national labs also works to develop advanced technologies to ensure global
peace though that still involves some danger there are radiation hazards in the building
when the machine fires it creates radiation today this facility is the world's most powerful and
efficient laboratory radiation source capable of creating conditions found nowhere else on earth
there's a rumor that some of the folks filming the avengers movie wanted to use the
as a portal and have something come out of it this team of physicists engineers
and technicians are in the final stages of careful preparation to fire the z machine
so this is a z machine it's the nation's flagship pulse power facility the whole point of the z
machine is to store energy and then compress it in time and space to achieve high energy densities
essentially this means the z machine can replicate the cosmos right here on earth allowing scientists
to run a wide array of experiments giving researchers the ability to study everything
from plasma to x-rays to neutrons and nuclear fusion expanding beyond weapons research to drive
innovation in the fields of material science renewable energy and even helping redefine our
very understanding of the universe so how does the z replicate the stars down in the desert
this entire facility a third of a football field in diameter as essentially one giant
machine engineered to store and then fire more than 20 megajoules of energy
the way we do that is the outer ring of the machine is a series of marks capacitor banks
they store about 20 mega joules of energy 28 mega joules is a fully loaded 18 wheeler
barreling down the freeway full speed that's 20 megajoules of energy but it's electrical
energy stored in capacitors charged up over a minute and a half there's 36 separate modules
that radially transport that energy into a target all this energy from the z machine
flows into the very center this is made possible by the technology beneath our feet
we're standing above the oil section of z inside this whole section is filled with oil right now
it's drained out so we can take a look and we can see the marks capacitors down there these
big silver boxes that store electrical energy as the machine prepares to fire
roughly three hours out from the day's scheduled fire six hundred and fifty thousand gallons of
transformer oil fills the section insulating disease generators and capacitors three hundred
and fifty thousand gallons of deionized water also fills the adjacent section closer to the center
of the machine so deionized water has a very high dielectric constant and it's good for filling the
parallel plate transmission lines that then take the energy into the center of the machine when the
z machine fires energy from its marks capacitors discharge and travels along transforming lines
which pulse compress that energy as it makes its way to the center target so we started out
minute half charging by the time we're in this water section we're shortening that pulse to 100
nanosecond rise time that's 100 billionths of a second with the current from all 36 modules rising
to 20 25 mega amps and now if you can imagine that 18 wheeler barreling down the freeway hitting a
dime and depositing its energy into a dime and not only that but it's dumped in on the time scale of
a few nanoseconds or to put it another way the z machine fires more than one thousand times the
electricity of a lightning bolt twenty thousand times faster hitting a target the size of a dime
this center circle is the z machine's experiment chamber currently being cleaned and prepped
by technicians this is where the immense energy fired by the massive machine ends up
everything about this size in the middle is destroyed and turned either into debris and
particulate or a little further into molten metal or very close to the middle into a hot plasma
that stuff goes splattering all over the walls of the machine that's why it looks black in there
there's soot from the debris from disassembling targets in decades of previous experiments on z
using currents measuring roughly 26 million amps z compresses that energy in time and space
generating x-ray emissions of 350 terawatts and producing incredibly high energy densities
we can produce temperatures hotter than the sun you can create plasmas that are
equivalent to plasmas around white dwarfs you can create plasmas equivalent to plasmas and
accretion disks of black holes but creating the stuff of stars makes a really big bang
aside from the highway being a radiological hazard and they're being hard x-rays that are emitted
from the machine there's a lot of straight voltage strain energy you would not want to
stand here during a shot the pulse-powered z machine is able to convert roughly 15
of the electricity from its marks capacitors to x-rays at its center the energy that we're
putting finally into the center is equivalent to a couple sticks of tnt that's all packed into
sort of like a cubic centimeter sort of volume as far as energy conversion this is fairly efficient
but when you're dealing with more than 20 megajoules of energy we get a couple sticks
of tnt in the middle but we started out with a fully loaded 18 wheeler what happens the rest
of it that's where we get the arcs and sparks the discharges across the top of the machine
we get shock in the water section there's actually plasma channels formed in the water switches when
they self break and transfer the power down line the plasma channels form it's like little
mini lightning bolts between two conductors in the water section and just like you have
thunder from a lightning bolt you have water shock that reverberates through the machine attention
every time the z machine fires it generates a shock wave that can be
felt throughout the building my office for example is probably 300 yards away
on the second floor i can feel the building shake every time z shoots
it's even been said that if you're looking at the right place at the right time
you can actually see dirt rise from the desert as the shock wave goes out
we like to aim for 150 shots here we don't operate 24 7 we have sort of a defined window we typically
shoot late in the day after each fire the team will clear the debris remove all the instruments
at the center clean and refurbish those instruments and then reassemble the z machine
then there's a few more hours in terms of installing the target diagnostic alignments
with the target now in place and the diagnostics instruments installed
the high bay is cleared of all personnel as they enter the final stages of firing a shot
z's pump system is engaged to create a vacuum in the experiment chamber
but an hour into the process it's clear something's wrong there's a
leak somewhere and they're unable to reach the final vacuum state inside the experiment chamber
if the team is unable to find and seal the leak the day shot planned several
months in advance can't happen as these technicians scrambled to locate the leak
the two astrophysicists from the university of texas grew concerned they know this complication
could jeopardize their research on white dwarf stars that they've spent years working on
on our next focal point will the team at sandia successfully fire the z machine
and recreate the conditions of a white dwarf star