(AGENPARL) – ven 30 giugno 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, June 30, 2023
This diagram provides a snapshot of where to go in a radiation emergency. Image courtesy of FEMA.
Nuclear weapons are deadly, but their worst effects are confined to a limited zone. In case the worst happens, there are easy tips to remember to minimize the risk.
“Fallout casualties are entirely preventable,” said Brooke Buddemeier, a health physicist and expert on radiation and emergency preparedness at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “Knowing what to do after an event like this can literally save hundreds of thousands of people from radiation illness or fatalities.”
But the worst destruction, where the chances of survival are least likely, is confined to a “severe damage zone,” Buddemeier said. For a 10-kiloton blast — equivalent to two-thirds of the Hiroshima bomb blast — that’s about a half-mile radius.
There are ways to enhance your chance of survival in the unlikely scenario a nuclear bomb were to hit your town. If you receive notification of an imminent attack, your first priority is to seek shelter that will protect you both from bodily harm from the blast and from the radiation in the fallout that will follow.
It’s best to hunker down in your blast shelter if you’re unsure whether it’s safe to move. At this point, fires and obstructive debris are likely to be widespread, Buddemeier said. “The most important thing is to be inside when the event occurs, either when the detonation occurs or when the fallout arrives,” Buddemeier said.
In the indirect-drive method used at the National Ignition Facility, a UV laser is fired at a cylinder called a hohlraum rather than at the hydrogen fuel. The hohlraum then emits X rays, which compress the fuel inside.
[A launch party for fusion](https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/42418/DOE-launches-inertial-fusion-energy-program?searchresult=1)
Following Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s fusion milestone last year, DOE is creating new research hubs to stimulate private-sector advances in laser-driven hydrogen fuel compression.
The Department of Energy’s Fusion Energy Sciences program announced in May that it is soliciting proposals for projects dedicated to inertial fusion energy (IFE). For decades DOE has supported research into inducing fusion by compressing small hydrogen fuel targets, but it has done so through its nuclear weapons program. Interest in funding R&D on energy generation has compounded in the wake of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s achievement last year of ignition in a laser fusion experiment.
The department expects to award a total of $45 million in grants through its solicitation, creating a series of IFE Science and Technology Innovation Hubs that will each receive between $2 million and $4 million annually over four years. DOE leaders have cautioned that it will likely take decades to determine whether IFE can be a practical power source, and its solicitation accordingly stipulates that hub proposals focus on foundational research.
The IFE initiative is part of a larger pivot the Fusion Energy Sciences program is making to pave the way for building a pilot power plant.
[Read More](https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/online/42418/DOE-launches-inertial-fusion-energy-program?searchresult=1)
LLNL and Vulcan Materials Company will use supercomputing to optimize the asphalt mixing process to reduce carbon intensity, improve production quality and reduce environmental emissions from asphalt plants. Pictured is the Vulcan Materials Company hot mix asphalt plant in Fresno, CA. Photo courtesy of Vulcan Materials Company.
[Green for clean energy](https://insidehpc.com/2023/06/does-hpc4ei-awards-3-9m-for-to-13-clean-energy-projects-announces-upcoming-rfi-solicitation/)
The Department of Energy (DOE) recently announced a $3.9 million federal investment for 13 public-private partnerships that will apply high-performance computing (HPC) to manufacturing processes and advanced materials, including a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory collaboration to decarbonize asphalt production.
These short-term, collaborative projects will address manufacturing challenges and are intended to accelerate development of clean energy technologies. Boeing, Ford Motor and General Motors are among the companies granted access to DOE supercomputers for their projects.
As a part of DOE’s High Performance Computing for Energy Innovation (HPC4EI) initiative, the selected projects will apply modeling, simulation and data analysis to projects that improve manufacturing efficiency and explore new materials for clean energy applications. This round of selections focuses on topic areas associated with HPC4EI’s HPC4Manufacturing and HPC4Materials programs.
[Read More](https://insidehpc.com/2023/06/does-hpc4ei-awards-3-9m-for-to-13-clean-energy-projects-announces-upcoming-rfi-solicitation/)
LLNL researchers are integrating technologies such as the Sierra supercomputer (left) and NIF (right) to understand complex problems like fusion in energy and the aging effects in nuclear weapons. Data from NIF experiments (inset, right) and simulation (inset, left) are being combined with deep learning methods to improve areas important to national security and the future energy sector. Image by Tanya Quijalvo/LLNL..
[Predicting ignition](https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/hpc-ai-and-cognitive-simulation-helped-llnl-conquer-fusion-ignition/)
For hundreds of Lawrence Livermore scientists on the design, experimental and modeling and simulation teams behind inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments at the National Ignition Facility, the results of the now-famous Dec. 5, 2022 ignition shot didn’t come as a complete surprise.
The “crystal ball” that gave them increased pre-shot confidence in a breakthrough involved a combination of detailed high-performance computing (HPC) design and a suite of methods combining physics-based simulation with machine learning. LLNL calls this “cognitive simulation”(CogSim).
The detailed HPC design uses the world’s largest supercomputers and its most complicated simulation tools to help subject-matter experts choose new directions to improve experiments. CogSim then employs artificial intelligence to couple hundreds of thousands of HPC simulations to the set of past ICF experiments.
These CogSim tools are providing scientists with new views into the physics of ICF implosions and a more accurate predictive capability when considering parameters such as laser energy and target-design specifications.
“It’s almost like looking into the future, based on what we’ve seen in the past about what might happen,” said Brian Spears, LLNL’s deputy modeling lead for ICF. “Our traditional design tools and experts say, ‘These are the knobs that you should adjust,’ and then the new CogSim tools say, ‘Given those adjustments and patterns from prior experiments, that looks like it’s going to be really successful..’”
[Read More](https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/hpc-ai-and-cognitive-simulation-helped-llnl-conquer-fusion-ignition/)
The Palisades fire in 2021 burned a total of 1,202 acres. Photo by Amir AghaKouchak/UC Irvine.
[California is hot stuff](https://www.azocleantech.com/news.aspx?newsID=33554)
Wildfires in California destroyed five times more areas between 1996 and 2020 than they did from 1971 to 1995. Investigators from Lawrence Livermore and other international institutions have established that human-caused climate change is to blame for nearly all of the increase in scorched terrain.
In the past six years, California has logged three of its five deadliest fires on record, and eight of its 10 biggest. Climate change supercharges these fires thanks to the drier environments it creates, but by how much is tricky to say. A paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences delivers a fuller sense of the relationship between human-caused warming and California’s wildfires.
It finds that climate change is responsible for almost all of the increase in scorched acreage during the state’s summer fires over the past 50 years. And its authors predict that the increase in burned area will only continue in the decades to come.
[Read More](https://www.azocleantech.com/news.aspx?newsID=33554)
[LLNL Report takes a break](https://www.llnl.gov/news/lab-report)
The LLNL Report will take a break for the Fourth of July holiday. It will return July 14.
[Read More](https://www.llnl.gov/news/lab-report)
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