Geoff Brumfiel
Appearances
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
I would say the official answer is no, but. There is more concern that the U.S. or another country might soon test another nuclear weapon.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
You know, you think a nuclear test and it's like a mushroom cloud over the desert. But that was actually just a very brief period that those above ground tests were happening. It was mostly in the 1950s and it stopped because of radioactive fallout. The wind was carrying radioactive material much further than expected. And it started showing up on fishing boats.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
In milk and baby teeth, places nobody wanted it. So in 1963, the world's nuclear power signed a treaty to move testing deep underground. And it kept going that way all the way until the end of the Cold War.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
I spoke to Hans Christensen with the Federation of American Scientists. He tracks nuclear weapons all over the world, and he says there were two big reasons.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
It was this growing power of supercomputers. They could now take these supercomputers and simulate nuclear testing in silicon.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
Yeah, and that actually takes us to the first stop on this whole nuclear testing road trip.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
I traveled out to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and I got to see their newest computer where they do what they call the button-to-boom calculations.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
It's inside a secure vault. The computer is called El Capitan.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
Terry Quinn oversees high-performance computing at Livermore, and she showed us around. Now, this machine uses advanced processors, similar to those used for generative AI, actually. LCAP can do more than two quintillion calculations per second. Wow. That's two exaflops for those in the supercomputing game. And its only job is to calculate, you know, a nuclear weapon's detonation.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
It used to be it might take them a week to do a calculation on how a weapon would detonate.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
As you know, Gina, any good computer model still needs some real world data to make sure it's grounded in reality. Okay. And so, you know, nuclear weapons scientists have continued to collect data. They're doing experiments in the same tunnels underground where they used to set up their nuclear weapons tests.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
Now, this is not a place many journalists get to go. But I asked and asked and asked very nicely— And eventually, I and a few other journalists made it to Nevada, where they do this testing. We stepped onto an old mining elevator. And the elevator just drops into pitch blackness, nearly a thousand feet underground. Here's what it was like at the bottom.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
There's a long corridor that's been carved out of an ancient lake bed. Pipes along the walls carry air, water, and power. Workers in hard hats are everywhere. David Funk, who oversees work underground, leads us in.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
So this would have been a test shaft, potentially.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
Subcritical experiments. That means experiments that simulate conditions inside a nuclear weapon without triggering a nuclear chain reaction. That runaway chain reaction is what gives a nuke its incredible power. These tunnels were originally built to contain nuclear explosions. Then in 1992, the US officially stopped all testing.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
The Cold War had ended and the thinking was nuclear testing could end too. It would make the world safer. But fast forward to today and nuclear weapons are back on the front pages. Same goes for nuclear testing. China, Russia and America are all upgrading their test sites. And that's why we're here to see what U.S. scientists are up to underground.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
Speaking of which, why do they still work down here?
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
We arrive at our first stop, a long, empty corridor that's just been dug out for a new experiment.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
The Scorpius machine. It kind of feels like you're in a James Bond movie. Funk explains it's actually a giant x-ray machine. You guys are familiar with chest x-rays, right? Scorpius is going to work in the same way. It'll create extremely high-powered x-rays.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
Plutonium from America's nuclear weapons. Much of it was made decades ago, and it's getting old. The x-rays are used to take a look inside to see how well the plutonium would work if detonated. Scorpius will cost $2 billion to build down here. We walk deeper into the tunnel network. Some of the floors are still rocky. They've just been dug. Next stop, an experiment that simulates a nuclear weapon.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
It's called Cygnus, and it's arguably the most secretive scientific project in the U.S. government.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
Cygnus is a smaller version of Scorpius. It fires x-rays of plutonium that's inside a spherical steel container about the size of a mini-fridge.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
Tim Beller is directing the next test, codenamed Knob Hill.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
In a few months inside this vessel, scientists will blow up a tiny quantity of plutonium using chemical explosives. It's designed to simulate a nuclear detonation. But again, this test will be subcritical. The U.S. government says there will not be a runaway nuclear chain reaction.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
To talk about one of my all-time favorite topics, nuclear weapons testing. And I got a question for you. Okay. When do you think is the last time the U.S. tested a nuclear weapon?
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
No, actually, it isn't. In fact, I heard again and again from nuclear weapons scientists on this trip. There is no technical need to test right now.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
We'd start testing again for exactly the same reason we stopped testing, and that's politics. Nuclear weapons have a new role in the world. You know, Russia is developing some wild new nuclear weapons designs. China is expanding its nuclear arsenal. And into all of this comes the Trump administration. Now, Project 2025, which is sort of a conservative blueprint for the government. It says the U.S.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
should be ready to test another nuclear weapon if it needs to. Trump's former national security advisor has gone further. He's written that the U.S. should test another nuclear weapon.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
First things first, we should say underground testing is safer than atmospheric testing, but that doesn't mean it's totally safe. Here's Jamie Kwong with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
And historically, at least, testing's been done in some pretty marginalized communities, places in rural Nevada, rural Mississippi, the Aleutian Islands. These are communities where the population just doesn't have that much political power. But there's also another way in which the resumption of nuclear testing could hurt the U.S. strategically.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
The U.S. has more than 1,000 nuclear tests under its belt. Now, China only has 45. Oh, wow. So if global testing resumes, China's going to learn a lot more from test 46 than the U.S. will from its next test. But I should say, like, you know, this isn't all up to Trump and the Trump administration and America. China or Russia could decide it was time to do an underground test.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
They actually stopped a lot later than that. They stopped in 1992. Wow. Yeah. And they've been pursuing a very different program based on science. And recently, I got a very, very unusual look at that program and all its facets and sort of how the U.S. continues to verify its nuclear weapons work without having to set any of them off.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
And if they did, the U.S. would be under a lot of pressure to test as well.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
That's exactly it. And, you know, if testing happens, arms control experts worry it's going to spark new kinds of research into other nuclear weapons and those weapons will get built and we'll be right back in the middle of a nuclear arms race.
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What Happens Inside A Top-Secret U.S. Nuclear Facility?
You're welcome, Gina. Pleasure to be here.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
Well, I didn't go to Tesla or Google, but I did drive right by them on my way to Stanford University.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
And specifically the IRIS laboratory, which stands for Intelligence Through Robotic Interaction at Scale. I got a tour from a graduate student named Moojin Kim. Moojin works on a new kind of robot powered by AI similar to the AI used in chatbots.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
Well, this wasn't some humanoid robot that the big tech companies are rolling out. It's just a pair of mechanical arms with pinchers.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
But what made it interesting was that it's powered by an AI model called OpenVLA. So first, we should probably just say quickly, you know, a regular robot must be very, very carefully programmed. An engineer has to write it detailed instructions for every task you want it to perform.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
Exactly. And that's what's going on here. This robot is powered by a teachable AI neural network. The neural network operates kind of how scientists think the human brain might work. Basically, there are these mathematical nodes in the network that have billions of connections to each other in a way similar to how neurons in the brain are connected together.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
And so when you go to program this sort of thing, it's simply about reinforcing the connections that matter between the nodes and weakening the other ones that don't. So in practice, this means Moojin can just teach OpenVLA a task by showing it.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
The robot's AI neural network becomes tuned to that task and then it can do it by itself.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
Yeah, it's exactly the same thing, except instead of just smiling, this robot's actually doing stuff. So to show me, Moojin brought out a tray of different kinds of trail mix, and I typed in what I wanted it to do. Okay, so scoop some green ones with the nuts into the bowl. See what happens.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
That's exactly it, you know. And this really is the dream of the researcher who runs this laboratory. Her name is Chelsea Finn.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
And by intelligently, she means the robot could understand a simple command like scoop some green ones into a bowl or make me a sundae and then execute in the real world.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
These are simple tasks that could help humans do their jobs or do tasks at home. Now, Chelsea also has co-founded a startup called Physical Intelligence. It recently demonstrated a mobile robot that could take laundry out of a dryer and fold it. Again, this robot was taught by humans training its powerful AI program.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
And this is a complicated task. It's got to pull these clothes out. It's got to figure out what they are.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
Yep. I don't know if you tuned in for Tesla's big marketing event last year, Regina. No. But AI was there.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
Yeah. I mean, right. It looks cool on the video. The truth is that, you know, when you get out and these robots are trying to do these tasks over and over again, they get confused, they misunderstand, they make mistakes and they just get stuck.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
So, you know, it might be able to fold laundry 90 percent of the time or 75 percent of the time, but the rest of the time it's going to make a big mess that then a human has to get in there and clean up.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
I spoke to Ken Goldberg, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and he is pretty emphatic that AI powered robots weren't here yet.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
Okay, so it's true that AI has improved massively over the past couple years, but that's because chatbots have a huge amount of data to learn from. They've taken basically the entire internet to train themselves how to write sentences and draw pictures.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
And if robots really need as much training data as their virtual chatbot friends, then having humans teach them one task at a time is going to take a really long time.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
Yeah. Well, scientists are exploring them right now. And one might be to let the AI brain of the robot learn in a simulation. A researcher who's trying this is a guy named Pulkit Agrawal. He's at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
Tesla is obviously a car company, but Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, made a big part of the event about a humanoid robot powered by AI and called Optimus.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
So this is a really promising approach for some things, but it's much more of a challenge for others. So for example, let's talk about walking. When you're just dealing with the earth and your body, the physics of walking around, it's actually kind of simple.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
And so the simulation can do that reasonably well. But if you want your robot to, say, try and pick up a mug off a desk or something, that's a lot more complicated.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
Basically, your robot will fling things across the room if it doesn't understand the weight and the size of what it's carrying. And there's more. You know, if your robot encounters anything that you haven't simulated 100% perfectly, then it won't know what to do. It'll just break.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
Exactly. And some researchers think there are even deeper problems actually with trying to put AI into robotics. One of them is Matthew Johnson Roberson at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
So getting back to AI chatbots for a minute, Matt says for all their incredible skills, the task we're asking them to do is actually relatively simple. You know, you look at what a human user types and then try to predict the next words that user wants to see, right? robots have so much more that they're going to have to do than just compose a sentence.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
So in other words, the sci-fi tasks that we want our robots to do are so complicated compared to sentence writing. No amount of data may be enough unless researchers can find the right way to teach the robots.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
You know... I'm sorry if I've like turned you into a pessimist here, Gina.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
And just this year, they started using AI image recognition to pick the best points for their robots to grab the packages. Ooh, okay. Yeah, and it's working really well, he told me. And I think we're going to see a lot of that. AI being used for parts of the robotic problem, you know, walking or... vision or whatever, it's going to make big progress. It just may not arrive everywhere all at once.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
And Google just unveiled another humanoid robot that operates using AI.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
And to really end on a high note here, let's get back to that Stanford lab. Remember, I asked it to grab some trail mix. Yeah.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
So the robot correctly identified the right bin to Moojin Kim's relief.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
And then very, very slowly and kind of hesitantly, it reached out with its claw and picked up the scoop.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
And to my mind, it's incredible. Like, remember, nobody really programmed the robot exactly. This is all neural network learning how to move the claws and respond to the commands on its own. And to me, it's pretty wild that that works at all. And I think it's going to lead to some very cool developments.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
They have. They have. And the robots, as I'm sure you know, Gina, have always disappointed compared to the vision.
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Is AI Ready For Robots?
And that's why I set out to understand the truth about AI and robotics. The truth. And I think I kind of found it in Ebola trail mix.