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