History of the Nevada Terawatt Facility

Monday, January 8th, 2008

The Nevada Terawatt Facility (NTF) was established by UNR and dedicated by Senator Harry Reid in 1998. Supported primarily by the U.S. Department of Energy, its mission is to conduct research and to train students in the field of high-energy-density science, the study of the behavior of matter at extremely high temperatures and densities. This rapidly developing field explores the fourth state of matter, called plasma, under conditions similar to those occurring in the interiors of stars, nuclear fusion reactors and lightning bolts.

Special research devices are needed to produce such extreme conditions in the laboratory. The heart of the NTF is a two terawatt (2,000,000,000,000 watt) pulsed electrical discharge device called Zebra, in which two million volts drive an electric current of one million amperes through a fine wire or array of wires during a very short period of time (0.0000001 seconds). The device is capable of creating temperatures measured in the millions of degrees. In response to an initiative by Professor Bruno Bauer, then an Assistant Professor in the Physics Department, the Zebra was donated to UNR by Los Alamos National Laboratory to serve as a research and training facility for students. The Zebra was installed under the expert guidance of engineers from Sandia National Laboratories and remains the highest power electrical device operated by any university in the United States.

To support and expand the capabilities of Zebra for research, a 10 terawatt short-pulse laser named Tomcat has been developed. This permits the Zebra's electrical discharge to be probed for diagnostic purposes and modified by an intense laser light beam. An even more powerful 100 terawatt laser called Leopard is also under development at the NTF. The Leopard laser will permit the creation of hot, dense plasmas on a much shorter time scale than is possible with either the Zebra electrical device or the Tomcat laser.

The NTF comprises a workforce of approximately 50 UNR faculty, staff, students and postdoctoral fellows, and also serves visiting researchers from other universities and research laboratories.

The NTF is housed in the SAGE building, a massive 153,000 square foot, four story concrete building located 10 miles north of the UNR campus in Stead. SAGE is an acronym for Semi Automatic Ground Environment, a product of the Cold War period. It is one of 22 identical structures built throughout the United States in the 1950's to serve the strategic air defense of North America in the burgeoning era of nuclear weapons and inter-continental ballistic missiles. Because the SAGE buildings housed the earliest vacuum-tube computers, they have massive air conditioning and ducting systems. Each also has a "war room" where air defense strategies were developed. Parts of the movie "Dr. Strangelove" were filmed in one of them.

Prior to establishment of the NTF, the SAGE building was used for research by the Desert Research Institute (DRI). Fortunately for the NTF, the DRI planned to move into its new research building in Dandini Research Park just as a suitable space was being sought by Professor Bauer to house the Zebra device. Since the SAGE building was in fact owned by UNR, the formal arrangements for its new tenant were simplified. However, the Zebra is a large, two-story device and its installation in the SAGE building required enlarging an entry door and cutting away significant portions of two thick concrete floors to create a high-bay research area. An engineering analysis determined that such major modifications created no structural problems because the SAGE buildings had been designed with thick concrete walls and a superstructure considered sufficient to withstand a nuclear attack!

Today the SAGE building in Stead houses ultra-modern research facilities devoted to large-scale science projects, giving UNR a significant advantage among universities in facilitating research and training students.