Saturn, Sandia's workhorse pulsed-power machine fires 75 trillion watts of X-rays and delivers hard radiation during one of its milestone shots.

The scarcity of jagged, lightning-like arcing between different water/metal interfaces means that the machine's water insulation is effective and that relatively much of its electrical pulse is traveling on its intended path from the machine's circular exterior to its central target.

A pulsed power accelerator can pump out absolutely staggering amounts of power. It manages to do this without dimming lights around the world by not operating continuously; instead, it charges up for a few hours, and then unleashes all of its stored energy all at once in a very short, very massive pulse.

Sandia's Saturn accelerator is specifically designed to convert as much electrical power as it can into X-rays, in order to simulate what happens during a nuclear detonation. To do this, the accelerator channels its output pulse through a tiny cylinder made of very thin tungsten wires.

As each wire essentially gets hit by its own lightning bolt, it gets turned into a plasma, which is instantly driven inward by the intense electromagnetic field. This implosion releases hundreds of thousands of joules of X-ray energy, which is as close as we can get to seeing what happens when a nuke goes off without actually, you know, setting off a nuke. via sandia.gov