(AGENPARL) – ven 28 aprile 2023 A weekly compendium of media reports on science and technology achievements at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Though the Laboratory reviews items for overall accuracy, the reporting organizations are responsible for the content in the links below.
LLNL Report, April 28, 2023
A Nick News host interview’s LLNL’s Kelli Humbird to discuss how fusion experiments work. Screen shot courtesy of Nick News.
[Caring for the planet](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AY5HmmOC6c)
Nick News just took a look at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility in a recent episode on renewable energy. (Start at 2:26 in the video).
In December, LLNL achieved fusion ignition, a reaction that creates more energy than is put in. In essence, it’s like making a sun of its own but hotter than the regular sun.
Nick News interviewed Kelli Humbird and Patrick Poole to find out how fusion experiments works.
[Read More](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AY5HmmOC6c)
Tammy Ma is the 2023 recipient of the James Corones Award in Leadership, Community Building and Communication from the Krell Institute.
[A pillar of the fusion community](https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/llnls-dr-tammy-ma-named-2023-corones-award-honoree/)
Lawrence Livermore physicist Tammy Ma has helped lead the drive to fusion energy breakthroughs and is the 2023 recipient of the James Corones Award in Leadership, Community Building and Communication from the Krell Institute.
Ma, lead for the Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) Initiative and program element leader for High-Intensity Laser High Energy Density (HED) Science – Advanced Photon Technologies, will receive her engraved prize and $2,000 honorarium at a program later this year. The award is named for the late founder of the Krell Institute, an Ames, Iowa, nonprofit organization that serves the scientific and educational communities. It honors a mid-career scientist – one who has earned a doctorate in the previous 10 to 20 years – who is making an impact in the three areas the award identifies.
A committee of Krell friends and employees chose Ma, who also is Livermore’s associate program leader for HED Laboratory Plasmas, citing her outstanding contributions to and leadership of the fusion energy science community.
[Read More](https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/llnls-dr-tammy-ma-named-2023-corones-award-honoree/)
A color-enhanced image of the inside of the a NIF preamplifier support structure.
[NIF flexes its muscles](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01424-z)
Last month, the Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) fired its lasers up to full power for the first time since December, when it achieved its decades-long goal of ‘ignition’ by producing more energy during a nuclear reaction than it consumed. The latest run didn’t come close to matching up: NIF achieved only 4% of the output it did late last year. But scientists didn’t expect it to.
Building on NIF’s success, they are now flexing the program’s experimental muscles, trying to better understand the nuclear-fusion facility’s capabilities.
NIF is a stadium-sized facility that fires 192 lasers at a tiny gold cylinder containing a diamond capsule. Inside the capsule sits a frozen pellet of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. The lasers trigger an implosion, creating extreme heat and pressure that drive the hydrogen isotopes to fuse into helium, releasing additional energy.
Scientists succeeded in December by boosting the lasers’ energy and increasing the capsule thickness, which helps to prolong the fusion reactions. Experiments later this year will follow a similar strategy, said Annie Kritcher, a physicist who is heading up the design of the campaign.
In the long term, the goal is to increase the amount of energy generated by fusion reactions from the 3.15 megajoules created last year to hundreds of megajoules.
[Read More](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01424-z)
A profile of LLNL’s Annie Kitcher earned two students fromKorenge of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School a silver award in “The Writing on the Wall” project, which helps student journalists in climate change reporting. Photo by Blaise Douros/LLNL.
[A climate hero takes the stage](https://news-decoder.com/teens-show-us-that-you-can-find-climate-heroes-across-the-globe/)
News Decoder and Global Youth & News Media challenged teens to find and profile people working on systems-level solutions to climate change and they stepped up.
The Climate Champion Profiles Challenge is part of The Writing’s on the Wall project, in partnership with News Decoder and The Climate Academy. The project aims to help student journalists in their climate change reporting and to offer schools new tools to integrate climate science into their teaching.
All entries were by authors ages 14 through 19. The challenge was supported by the European Commission as part of its Erasmus+ program and by The New Earth Foundation.
One of the Silver Awards goes to Ivy Lam and Andie Korenge of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School for a profile of Andrea (Annie) Kritcher, the principal designer on a team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that produced fusion ignition in a laboratory for the first time.
[Read More](https://news-decoder.com/teens-show-us-that-you-can-find-climate-heroes-across-the-globe/)
Artist’s depiction of an ion-water cluster traveling at high speed through a carbon nanotube channel. Formation of ion-water clusters in small diameter carbon nanotubes is responsible for anomalously high electrophoretic mobility of ions inside these channels and ultimately for the strong breakdown of Nernst-Einstein relation in this system. Image by Ella Maru Studio.
[Break it on down, carbon nanotube style](https://phys.org/news/2023-03-nernsteinstein-carbon-nanotube-style.html)
When it comes to studying particles in motion, experimentalists have followed a 100-year-old theory that claims the microscopic motion of a particle is determined by random collisions with molecules of the surrounding medium, regardless of the macroscopic forces that drive that motion.
Scientists at Lawrence Livermore and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have found that this famous fluid dynamics relation, discovered by Walter Nernst and Albert Einstein in the beginning of the 20th century, breaks down completely under strong spatial confinement inside carbon nanotube pores.
In 1888, Nernst proposed a universal relation between the mobility of a charged particle and its diffusion coefficient. The microscopic origins of this relation were revealed in 1905 by Einstein, during his annus mirabilis period, culminating with his work on Brownian motion. The NE relation, as it is known, is an essential building block of several important theories of ion transport.
Confined micro- and nano-environments, such as carbon nanotube porins, can test the NE relation, because confinement can restrict ion mobility, amplify proximity effects, enhance particle–surface interactions and force unusual long-range structuring of liquids, all of which affect the particle motion.
[Read More](https://phys.org/news/2023-03-nernsteinstein-carbon-nanotube-style.html)
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