Talk:Fogbank

Plagarism
Most of the text in this page is directly lifted from the first listed reference. This isn't allowed, is it?


 * I'm afraid you're right. It's plagiarism, and borderline copyright violation. Let me ask the original poster if they can re-write it (you're welcome to do so yourself, too.)   Will Beback    talk    03:54, 1 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The editor made a bunch of chnages, so I think the article passes muster now.   Will Beback    talk    08:40, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Removing speculative material
There is no source that indicates what FOGBANK is or what it does. In particular there is no indication that it is a material contained in the inter-stage or radiation channel.

I presume this theory comes from arm-chair analysts who said: Hey! FOGBANK -> fog -> low-density material -> aerogel!, fog -> x-ray transparent material!, or fog -> foam -> plastic! The DOE/DOD are well known for using nonsense codewords. You cannot deduce anything from the name alone.

Since arm-chair analysis and baseless speculation have no place in an encyclopedia, I have removed any speculation about the nature and function of FOGBANK. Bomazi (talk) 21:59, 22 August 2011 (UTC)


 * I have restored the information.
 * You are presuming too much. It has been reviewed by professional, published plasma and radiation transfer physicists and validated (at least in theory; the details are still somewhat unsure).  The connection with aerogels is confirmed in several different ways including budget, technical issues discussions, and known facilities capabilities listed in unclassified organizational materials.  It's reasonably well documented, not random internet speculation.
 * Georgewilliamherbert (talk) 22:27, 22 August 2011 (UTC)


 * There has been speculation, both on this talk page and in a Web forum at one of the cited reference URLs, that the actual &ldquo;Fogbank&rdquo; material couldn't have any of the properties that we casually associate with conventional fog, for the simple reason that code names are chosen specifically to obscure the identity and nature of what they refer to. But there is no documented evidence that the term &ldquo;fogbank&rdquo; is, in fact, a deliberately-chosen formal US Government code name.  We should consider the very real possibility that Fogbank was named by its developers, not by a security or intelligence agency, and that the name is deliberately descriptive, in the style of Little Boy or Fat Man.  98.218.86.55 (talk) 06:52, 10 September 2012 (UTC)


 * FOGBANK is said in open sources to be an aerogel, and in its superheated plasma form to modulate ablation of radiation cases - which must be present for thermonuclear fusion to happen. FOGBANK was first made in 1975 for the W76 warhead for the Trident SICBMs (since that's when we really started to miniaturize nuclear warheads for ICBMs and cruise missiles). The purpose of FOGBANK in the W76 is probably to superheat into a plasma that modulates ablation of the radiation case just long enough radiation pressure to be maintained inside the hohlraum, and to make it possible for fusion to occur by radiation pressure. The point was to get by with as thin a radiation case as possible - throw weight is lower on SICBMs like Trident I and Trident II than for the land-based ICBMs like Minuteman III and Peacekeeper.  The open literature hints that FOGBANK did for the W76 what polystyrene foam did for the first Teller-Ulam thermonuclear device, Ivy Mike.  The sources are cited in reflists of other related articles such as Thermonuclear weapon already (Richard Rhodes' Dark Sun for the use of polystyrene to modulate radiation case ablation in Ivy Mike, for example).  loupgarous (talk) 10:00, 5 October 2017 (UTC)

Obfuscation/Counterespionage
This FOGBANK smells like this. A fogbank is something you can't see through. This whole thing seems to be made more complicated than it is. Then again it's probably secret for a reason. 79.223.191.187 (talk) 16:05, 10 May 2012 (UTC)

Possible insight
Hi.. Found some interesting notes that suggest the "secret" material was introduced because someone at the original factory was reusing an apparently cleaned solvent previously used for making military grade electroluminescent (EL) panels intended for aircraft control panels.

The material is actually a barium salt, specifically barium acetate which in the EL panel was slurried with titanium dioxide and then heated on the metal backplane to form BaTiO3 which was then coated with the EL material. It was early on in this process that the expensive now-contaminated solvent was evaporated off and collected for reuse, carrying with it tiny quantities of the acetate which were not immediately detected.

Seems a plausible theory, a lot of military petrol contains very small amounts of additives to stop it gelling at low temperatures and contaminated solvents have been linked to a wide variety of issues with inorganic chemistry. In fact some studies suggest the original research discovering >30K HTSC in LaBaCuO could have been subtle contamination with yttrium and the related terbium which later inspired YBCO. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 185.3.100.54 (talk) 07:57, 29 March 2015 (UTC)

An angle that's glaringly missing from the article
The article and its source notes "almost all the staff with expertise on production had retired or left the agency", they then proceed to spend a little short of 100 million replicating the process.

There's no mention of any attempt to simply find the people that originally made it and asking them how it was made, since protection was halted in 1989 most of them should still be alive.

Surely that would have been more cost efficient than reverse engineering the production process, but of course the government would have had little incentive to save money.

So just reading between the lines this is less of a story of how the USA "forgot" something, and more of a story of how some sprawling bureaucracy couldn't bring itself to pick up the phone, presumably due to some combination of information siloing, the complexities of re-granting some retirees security clearances etc. --Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason 19:39, 25 September 2017 (UTC)


 * "Fogbank: Lost Knowledge Regained", an article in the final issue of Los Alamos National Laboratory's Nuclear Weapons Journal in 2009 summarizes the main issue with restarting production of FOGBANK -
 * "Laboratory data show that the presence of one particular impurity in the Fogbank purification process plays an important role in the quality of the final material. The impurity’s presence in sufficient quantity results in a different morphology (form and structure) of the material. Although the change in morphology is relatively small, it appears to play an important role in the downstream processes. A review of the development records for the original production process revealed that downstream processes had been implicitly based on that morphology.
 * However, historical records lacked any process controls designed to ensure that the purification process produced the impurity morphology or evaluate the success of some of the important processes."
 * So, the real story of the US nuclear weapons complex having trouble restarting FOGBANK production wasn't that the information was siloed, or that retirees weren't contacted. It was that the information needed to make FOGBANK that worked was implicit, not explicit.  The retirees themselves probably couldn't reconstruct that information, because "they just knew" how to make the material, but never reduced this implicit knowledge to a explicit written formula with rigorous analysis.
 * This is shockingly bad procedure for making a material vital to the performance of most of the US Navy's strategic nuclear arsenal (the W76 warhead, the only weapon known to use FOGBANK, is listed in the Natural Resources Defense Council's description of the current US Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear war as being crucial for counterforce attacks on Russian land-based ICBM launchers and other vital military targets by US submarine-launched nuclear missiles, the Trident I and Trident II). loupgarous (talk) 14:59, 6 October 2017 (UTC)

Proper name is Fogbank
I asked the page be moved from FOGBANK to Fogbank due to official documents useing the uncapitalised name. For example the Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Journal (https://www.lanl.gov/orgs/padwp/pdfs/nwj2_09.pdf Page 20) and this declassified report (http://www.trivalleycares.org/new/govdocs/SecondaryLifetimeAssessment01-part2.pdf Page 52).