Sandia National Laboratories announced the unveiling of its newest supercomputer, Spectra, on Monday.
Sandia teamed up with technology company NextSilicon by using 128 of its specialized chips, with aims to increase performance but reduce power consumption. The chips, called Maverick-2 dual-die accelerators, analyze code to prioritize tasks, a different system than the CPUs and GPUs used in other DOE supercomputers that “typically treat all data equally,” the release said.
The release added Sandia researchers are leading a consortium with Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos, under the Advanced Simulation and Computing program, to see how Spectra handles national security-related tasks and assesses the “safety and reliability of the nation’s nuclear deterrent without underground testing.”
BWXT Technologies said last week it has delivered its first full core of modern nuclear fuel for the Project Pele mobile microreactor prototype at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory.
The tri-structural isotropic (TRISO) particle fuel, made of uranium, carbon and oxygen within small kernels, has been delivered to Project Pele, BWXT said.
BWXT has been working with the Department of Defense on the compact and transportable Generation IV high-temperature gas-cooled reactor units capable of generating 1.5 megawatts of electricity.
The head of the Golden Dome initiative last weekend confirmed that while the Pentagon still plans to deliver an “operational capability” to defend against advanced threats by 2028, cultural challenges are harder than the technical issues for the program overall.
Speaking during the Reagan National Defense Forum on Dec. 6, Gen. Michael Guetlein, the first Golden Dome for America direct reporting program manager, said the Golden Dome program is working with a timeline to deliver some unspecified amount of capability on President Donald Trump’s request of summer of 2028.
“That will not be the final capability, but we will have the ability to protect and defend the nation against advanced threats by the summer of 2028,” the Space Force general said. When asked about his confidence to pull off that ambitious schedule, Guetlein said they believe they have the plan and technology to reach that point.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Dec. 6 he expects that the percentage the U.S. spends on defense will increase in coming years, adding that President Donald Trump has also offered his support for “substantial spending.”
“I think that number is going up,” Hegseth said in a discussion at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, California, referring to the percentage of the gross domestic product that the U.S. spends on defense. “I don’t want to get in front of the president and his desire to properly shape what the budget should look like. But just reading the tea leaves and watching it, he understands the threat better than anyone I’ve ever seen articulate and understand the threat, and that includes investment.”
Hegseth said he participated in discussions this week in the Oval Office regarding fiscal year 2026 and 2027 funding matters for the Pentagon. The U.S. currently spends nearly 3.4 percent of GDP on defense, with NATO having recently adopted a goal for member nations to spend five percent on defense by 2035. That target, a boost from alliance’s current two percent mark set in 2014, is split between investing 3.5 percent of GDP on “core defense” priorities such as weapons and 1.5 percent on “defense-related” items, to include infrastructure and cyber security.
Fluor-led Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) has started early construction of a training facility for National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) plutonium pit production at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Construction of the High-Fidelity Training and Operations Center, a future non-nuclear operations training facility for the Savannah River Plutonium Processing Facility, started in October, SRNS said in a Thursday press release.
SRNS subcontractor Enercon has completed 90% of the training center’s design, and SRNS has issued a limited notice to proceed to subcontractor Kiewit to begin site prep for the center, said Brian Pool, the SRNS project director for the training center. “SRNS also is expediting our procurement and fabrication strategy for [training center] gloveboxes and long-lead items,” Pool said. The training center should be complete in the late 2020s.