During the last few years, we have concentrated on developing plasma radiation sources (PRS) for the longer current rise time (up to 300 ns) of the direct-drive Decade Quad (DQ; Price et al., 1999). In particular, we have developed an argon gas-puff PRS that produces a high quality pinch with an ∼200-ns implosion time, twice the implosion time of typical z pinches. We have shown that large-diameter, solid-fill (i.e., the gas density is a smooth function of the radial distance rather than a discrete shell) gas puffs can achieve adequate heating and stability for long-implosion z pinches with good K-shell yield.