(AGENPARL) – ven 12 maggio 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, May 12, 2023
Congresswoman Zoe Lofren, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and LLNL Director Kim Budil talk about the future of fustion energy during a celebration for the historic ignition event last December. Photo by Jason Laurea/LLNL.
Employees and national officials gathered Monday to celebrate Lawrence Livermore’s historic breakthrough in fusion energy..
Last December, in the early hours of a Monday morning, scientists blasted a diamond-shaped fuel capsule the size of a peppercorn with 192 lasers, producing a controlled fusion ignition that generated more energy than the lasers put into the initial reaction.
The team of more than 100 scientists had achieved a net energy gain. The nuclear fusion energy breakthrough six decades in the making could pave the way for incredible advancements in the future of clean power.
“Fusion offers the promise of affordable, abundant, reliable, clean energy. It is the holy grail. We now know that commercializing fusion is less a matter of whether than of when,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, who attended the celebration.
Layers of Earth’s atmosphere are shown in a view looking across Earth’s surface from the International Space Station. Photo courtesy of NASA.
[The human touch](https://scienmag.com/atmospheric-research-provides-clear-evidence-of-human-caused-climate-change-signal-associated-with-co2-increases/)
New research by Lawrence Livermore and collaborators provides clear evidence of a human “fingerprint” on climate change and shows that specific signals from human activities have altered the temperature structure of Earth’s atmosphere.
Differences between tropospheric (lower layer of the atmosphere) and lower stratospheric temperature trends have long been recognized as a fingerprint of human effects on climate. This fingerprint, however, neglected information from the mid to upper stratosphere, 25 to 50 kilometers above the Earth’s surface.
“Including this information improves the detectability of a human fingerprint by a factor of five. Enhanced detectability occurs because the mid to upper stratosphere has a large cooling signal from human-caused CO2 increases, small noise levels of natural internal variability, and differing signal and noise patterns.
[Noise in the troposphere can include day-to-day weather, interannual variability arising from El Niños and La Niñas and longer-term natural fluctuations in climate. In the upper stratosphere, the noise of variability is smaller, and the human-caused climate change signal is larger, so the signal can be much more easily distinguished.]
[Read More](https://scienmag.com/atmospheric-research-provides-clear-evidence-of-human-caused-climate-change-signal-associated-with-co2-increases/)
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm announced a plan to provide up to $45 million to support Inertial Fusion Energy R&D. Photo by Jason Laurea/LLNL.
[Funding makes fusion go ‘round](https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/department-of-energy-announces-45-million-for-inertial-fusion-energy/)
On Monday at the celebration ceremony of the historic achievement of fusion ignition at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF), the Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm announced a plan to provide up to $45 million to support Inertial Fusion Energy (IFE) research and development.
Fusion, the process that powers the sun and stars, has the potential to provide clean, safe and reliable carbon-free energy on Earth. Harnessing fusion energy is one of the greatest scientific and technological challenges of the 21st century.
Fusion requires the fuel to be heated to more than 100 million degrees (10 times hotter than the core of the sun). Practical fusion energy also requires that the burning fuel is kept at these hot temperatures long enough that energy produced by fusion exceeds the energy required to initiate and sustain the fusion reactions. The two most widely investigated approaches to fusion are Magnetic Confinement Fusion and Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF).
In the last two years, the U.S. ICF program supported by the National Nuclear Security Administration has produced two significant scientific results. In August 2021, a burning plasma was achieved on NIF with a yield of 1.3 megajoules (MJ). Then, in December 2022, NIF announced a breakthrough result where scientific breakeven (target gain>1) was achieved. More energy from the fusion reactions was produced (3..15 megajoules) than the laser energy that created the burning plasma (2..05 megajoules).
[Read More](https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/department-of-energy-announces-45-million-for-inertial-fusion-energy/)
A new plan to turn agricultural waste such as these corn husks left on the field after harvest into renewable fuel make carbon storage into reality. Image by Adobe stock.
[CO2 storage in Kern in sight](https://www.bakersfield.com/news/crc-agrees-to-bury-co2-in-kern-for-ag-waste-to-energy-plant/article_dc2386b4-ebc6-11ed-b867-2b8f3944c2c4.html)
Western Kern has landed another significant carbon dioxide storage deal with a company from the Northwest proposing to gasify ag waste and turn it into renewable fuel as part of an endeavor notable less for its scale than its pioneering spirit.
Together with a CO2 storage agreement unveiled in December with a so-called blue hydrogen company, the transaction announced last week by local oil producer California Resources Corp. doubles to 200,000 metric tons the amount of greenhouse gas CRC expects to inject annually into its proposed Elk Hills Net Zero Industrial Park.
George Peridas, director of carbon management partnerships at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory called CRC’s deal with Richland, Wash.-based InEnTec Inc. a significant step forward in a new area that could redeploy Kern County’s workforce as it transitions away from oilfield work.