NTS now NNSS

[Smart People]

Nevada Test Site has changed their name to Nevada National Security Site

[Rennhack]

What?  No links to news stories?  No spin?

The name change was brought about by legislation from Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and the state's congressional delegation. The branch of the Department of Energy that runs the site -- the National Nuclear Security Administration -- selected a name to reflect the site's expanded missions on counter-terrorism, homeland security and treaty verification.

Wade said. "But I think the point the senator (Reid) made and (NNSA Administrator Thomas) D'Agostino made is the world has changed and the needs have changed. And name recognition is an awful lot of the world we live in."

I guess Reid's NIMBY's don't want a nuclear test site in their back yard, but a "national security site" is ok.

Over the years, employment and funding at the site have gone from a peak of 12,000 employees and a $1 billion budget in the late 1980s to 2,300 workers and a $500 million budget this year.

1/5th the manpower for 1/2 the price.

On Dec. 18, 1950, President Harry Truman signed the top secret memorandum that made a 680-square-mile swath of Nevada the nation's continental site for testing nuclear weapons.

The first nuclear test at the site, originally called the Nevada Proving Grounds, was on Jan. 27, 1951. A 1,000-pound bomb was dropped from a B-50 airplane flying more than three miles above ground.

The proving ground was dubbed the Nevada Test Site on Dec. 31, 1954. Four years later, it was doubled in size to 1,350 square miles. A realignment of the site's boundary with the Department of Defense land that borders it on three sides expanded it to 1,360 square miles.

From 1951 through 1992, the test site's role focused on full-scale tests of nuclear weapons. During that time, 100 tests were conducted in the atmosphere until the Limited Test Ban Treaty took effect in 1963. That was followed by 828 below-ground tests that shook the desert. The last test, dubbed Divider, was on Sept. 23, 1992.

A moratorium that has been extended indefinitely is now in place.

The stockpile stewardship mission at the site now focuses on how plutonium ages in the decades after weapons were produced.

A key tool in that task is the underground subcritical experiments complex, known as U1a. In the array of chambers that extend off a deep shaft, tiny amounts of plutonium are detonated but don't erupt into nuclear chain reactions.

And 2 New fire stations? (See attached image)  And whats the green 51...area in the top right?

[Smart People]

  And whats the green 51...area in the top right?

Nothing!! Nothing at all!!

[Rennhack]

And Yucca Mountain Repository has been renamed Yucca Mountain Characterization Area.

The President has made clear that Yucca Mountain is not an option for waste storage.

On March 3, 2010, the Department of Energy filed a motion with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to withdraw the license application for a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain with prejudice. The President's fiscal year 2011 budget request eliminates funding for the Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management.