(AGENPARL) – ven 26 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 26, 2023
A color enhanced image of the inside of a NIF preamplifier support structure.
LLNL researchers used NIF to achieve ignition last December.
… The future of energy
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-future-of-fusion-energy/
Last December physicists working on fusion claimed a breakthrough. A team at
Lawrence Livermore announced it had extracted more energy from a controlled
nuclear fusion reaction than had been used to trigger it. It was a global
first and a significant step for physics — but very far from enabling
practical use of fusion as an energy source. The high-profile announcement
elicited a familiar pattern of responses to fusion research: acclaim from
boosters of the technology and dismissals from skeptics, who complain that
scientists continually promise that fusion is just 20 years away.
These fervent reactions reflect the high stakes for fusion. The world is
increasingly desperate for an abundant source of clean energy that can
mitigate the climate crisis created by burning fossil fuels. Nuclear fusion
— the merging of light atomic nuclei — has the potential to produce
energy with near-zero carbon emissions, without creating the dangerous
radioactive waste associated with today's nuclear fission reactors.
Physicists have been studying fusion power since the 1950s, but turning it
into a practical energy source has remained frustratingly elusive. Will it
ever be a significant source of power for our energy-hungry planet — and if
so, will it arrive in time to save Earth from meltdown?
“I do think fusion looks a lot more plausible now than it did 10 years ago
as a future energy source,” says Omar Hurricane, a program leader at
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where the NIF is housed. “But it's
not going to be viable in the next 10 to 20 years, so we need other
solutions.”
Read More
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-future-of-fusion-energy/
The target chamber of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National
Ignition Facility, where 192 laser beams delivered more than 2 million joules
of ultraviolet energy to a tiny fuel pellet to create fusion ignition on Dec.
5, 2022.
… Nuclear power is gridding up
https://www.kcur.org/news/2023-05-17/electricity-grid-green-energy-nuclear-fusion-power
A massive breakthrough by Lawrence Livermore scientists last year has put
renewed momentum behind nuclear — and specifically nuclear fusion — as
the future of energy.
Nuclear fission is something we’ve been doing for decades already.. It
occurs when we bombard a large atom with neutrons, forcing it to split apart
into smaller atoms. This process releases a lot of heat, which we can then
convert into electricity for nuclear submarines, weaponry and power plants.
But fusion,/ /the recent breakthrough/, /is different. “If you think about
fission as splitting atoms apart, you can think of fusion as putting atoms
together,” said Adam Stein, the director of Nuclear Energy Innovation at
The Breakthrough Institute.
This past December, researchers from LLNL’ National Ignition Facility,
located at the performed a groundbreaking experiment that used 192 lasers to
fuse two specific hydrogen isotopes together, forming one helium atom.
Stein says this is the first time we’ve ever done what is called fusion
ignition, the same chemical process that powers the sun — which is
self-sustaining in its heat generation. The trick is, these small atoms do
not want to bond, kind of like forcing two magnets together. But the result
is that more energy is produced from the reaction than went into it.
“This was what's known as net gain,” Stein says.
Theoretically, the extra energy from a fusion ignition reaction can be used
to perpetuate the reaction so it can run without any additional help from
scientists. That would be a total game-changer for energy generation in the
United States.
Read More
https://www.kcur.org/news/2023-05-17/electricity-grid-green-energy-nuclear-fusion-power
LLNL Informatics Group Leader Brian Van Essen (left) and Bronis R. de
Supinski, Chief Technology Officer for Livermore Computing, stand by the new
SambaNova artificial intelligence hardware in the Livermore Computing Center.
Photo by GarryMcLeod/LLNL.
… Go CogSim go
SambaNova Systems, the company that was first to market with domain-specific,
pre-trained foundation models to underpin generative AI, and Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), are scaling up their collaboration to
bring SambaNova spatial data flow accelerator into LLNL’s Computing Center.
This solution upgrades LLNL’s cognitive simulation program by improving the
speed and accuracy of scientific research.
LLNL is a leading federal research institution that leverages high
performance computing (HPC) across its research. Increasingly, the
institution has studied how deep neural network hardware architectures can
accelerate traditional physics-based simulations as part of the National
Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA’s) Advanced Simulation and
Computing program.
Computer modeling and experimentation are essential to scientific research.
Models simulate natural phenomena and experiments, which provide data to
understand underlying principles. However, they face two fundamental
challenges. First, even the most complex models do not achieve sufficient
fidelity to simulate reality. Second, modern experiments regularly generate
overwhelming amounts of data. To address these issues, LLNL researchers are
working on cognitive simulation (CogSim), leveraging the SambaNova systems to
improve the fidelity of models as well as to manage the growing volumes of
data.
“Multi-physics simulation is complex,” said Brian Van Essen, computer
scientist at LLNL and Informatics Group Lead. “Our inertial confinement
fusion (ICF) experiments generate huge volumes of data. Yet, connecting the
underlying physics to the experimental data is an extremely difficult
scientific challenge. AI techniques hold the key to teaching existing models
to better mirror experimental models and to create an improved feedback loop
between the experiments and models. The SambaNova system helps us create
these cognitive simulations.”
Read More
High school students from Livermore and Tracy work against the clock to
decipher a PIN code to unlock a safe deposit box at the Altamont Connection
Girls Who Code event earlier this month. Photo by Randy Wong/LLNL.
… Science in action

Girls Who Code ‘Altamont Connection’ Brings Students from Livermore and Tracy to the Lab

High school students from Livermore and Tracy visited Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory (LLNL) earlier this month for a first-of-its kind event
bringing the two cities’ Girls Who Code (GWC) programs and others together
on-site for group activities and tours under a new “Altamont Connection”
moniker.
The event, which included tours of the National Ignition Facility, Discovery
Center and Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory, gave about a dozen students
from the two school districts the opportunity to see science in action and
interact face-to-face with Lab computer scientists and mentors they’d
engaged with throughout the school year.
“These students have been working all year on coding in these afterschool
clubs, and now they get to come and meet other kids that also have been doing
that same work,” said Dean Reese, director of STEM curriculum for the Tracy
Unified School District. “They’re building a network with other
like-minded kids in this region, and they’re getting access to national
laboratory science and understanding what this great lab is doing. They are
seeing role models in their field and interacting with interns that then
became employees of the Lab. I think that gives them an example of what’s
possible.”