(AGENPARL) – ven 08 dicembre 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, Dec. 8, 2023
The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
where fusion experiments with lasers take place.
… Livermore recieves funds to launch fusion hub

3 Laser Fusion Research
The U.S. Department of Energy is creating three research hubs in the hopes of
harnessing miniature laser-driven thermonuclear explosions for future power
plants, officials announced on Thursday.
The three hubs — based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
California, Colorado State University and the University of Rochester in New
York State — will share a total of $42 million over four years.
The research effort will be “focused more on the underlying technologies
needed for any inertial fusion system,” said Scott Hsu, the lead fusion
coordinator at the Department of Energy.
Most fusion energy research to date, and most of the department’s fusion
science budget, has focused on reactors that use powerful magnetic fields to
contain super-hot hydrogen until the nuclei collide and combine. But a
successful experiment

last year at the National Ignition Facility, or NIF, at Livermore highlighted
a different approach — firing powerful lasers at a single pellet of
hydrogen, squeezing its atoms together to generate a flash of fusion.
Read More

3 Laser Fusion Research
Lab Director Kim Budil met with Ohio State students and answered their
questions. Photo courtesy of Ohio State University.
… Gaining insight from a leader
https://news.osu.edu/livermore-national-laboratory-director-shares-career-insights-with-ohio-state-students/
Kim Budil, director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), visited
The Ohio State University’s Columbus campus recently and shared insights
about the Laboratory’s cutting-edge work in addressing national security
concerns.
Budil is the first woman to lead LLNL, where she manages a workforce of
approximately 8,400 employees and oversees an annual operating budget of $3
billion. Founded in 1952 and located in Livermore, California, LLNL employs
innovative science and technology to address nuclear proliferation,
terrorism, climate change and other national security threats.
“Informal leadership roles are really an important part of what got me to
where I am today. And that includes things like being on committees or
outside activities,” Budil said. “I headed up our women in science and
engineering group. I chaired the parent advisory council at our children’s
center. Each of those gave me a chance to learn part of what it takes to lead
people.”
Read More
https://news.osu.edu/livermore-national-laboratory-director-shares-career-insights-with-ohio-state-students/
Government and industry have recently moved to making software available to
everyone. Image by Adobe stock.
… Opening software to the masses

Public and Private Sectors Team up to Solve HPC Software Problem 

Software implementation in high-performance computing is getting more
fragmented as organizations opt for tools in their walled garden
environments. 
However, a new organization formed under the Linux Foundation could bring
some order to the chaos. The non-profit at Supercomputing 2023 announced its
intent to create the High-Performance Software Foundation (HPSF), which will
encourage developing and sharing development tools for massive computing
resources. 
Public-private participation also should boost software innovation through
collaboration. 
U.S. national labs, including Lawrence Livermore, that are part of the
Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project are joining the project
and will make contributions, said Lori Diachin, project director at the DOE.
HPC began in the 1940s and has fragmented over time due to limited access to
computing resources because of security concerns, researchers from Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory and the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications said in a research paper published this year.
Read More

Public and Private Sectors Team up to Solve HPC Software Problem 

This dramatic image of NIF beamlines entering the lower hemisphere of the NIF
target chamber, as seen from the ground floor of the target bay. 
… Fusion is an international endeavor
The US and the UK have announced a “major new partnership” in fusion
technology, advancing the “shared goal of ending the climate crisis”,
officials said. The agreement came from the US Department of Energy and the
UK’s Department for Energy Security and Net Zero during a meeting in
Washington last month.
Thousands of scientists and engineers have been working for decades on
nuclear fusion, which attempts to replicate how atoms fuse together to power
the sun and other stars, producing vast amounts of energy that can be turned
into electricity.
A major breakthrough was announced in late 2022 after a team from the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the first time achieved a “net
energy gain” – producing more energy in a fusion reaction than was used
to ignite it.
The major selling point of fusion is that, unlike other nuclear reactions, it
doesn’t create radioactive waste.
The new US-UK partnership will see fusion scientists on both sides of the
Atlantic collaborate on R&D, share knowledge and access to facilities in an
attempt to make fusion commercially viable.
Read More
LLNL’s Ibo Matthews and Frank Graziani have been selected as 2023 American
Physical Society fellows.
… A selection by peers
https://www.independentnews.com/news/livermore_news/livermore-lab-scientists-named-american-physical-society-fellows/article_bad4338c-88f6-11ee-9489-dfb948a689d2.html
Two Lawrence Livermore National Lab scientists received international
recognition last month for their contributions to physics.
The American Physical Society (APS) named Manyalibo “Ibo” Matthews,
division leader of the LLNL Materials Science Division, and Frank Graziani,
director of the LLNL High Energy Density Science Center, as 2023 APS fellows
through their peer-election process.
Matthews was selected “for pioneering research in optimizing metal 3D
printing and laser materials processing,” in which very thin layers of fine
metal powder are deposited and selectively melted by a laser to build up a
desired shape.
Matthews joined the lab in 2006, where he has served as a program group
leader in LLNL’s National Ignition Facility, in addition to his work in the
Materials Science Division.
Graniani said that he joined LLNL when Vasco Road had no houses, Dublin was
almost nonexistent and traffic along the I-580 was thin. His interest in high
energy density science led him to study the interiors of giant planets, the
fusion reactions of stars and the inertial-confinement fusion capsules of
NIF.
Read More
https://www.independentnews.com/news/livermore_news/livermore-lab-scientists-named-american-physical-society-fellows/article_bad4338c-88f6-11ee-9489-dfb948a689d2.html
Engineers working on the Scorpius test equipment at Sandia National
Laboratories. Image courtesy of Craig Fritz/Sandia.
… Underground is a blast
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/underground-lab-x-rays-test-nuclear-stockpile
Three national defense labs, including Lawrence Livermore, are engaged in the
process of building a test site, one thousand feet under the ground in
Albuquerque, New Mexico, that will send powerful X-rays and verify the
reliability of the country’s nuclear stockpile.
The U.S. nuclear program heavily relied on actual testing of warheads to
determine if its stockpile could serve as a deterrent when called upon. This,
however, changed in 1992, after then-President George H.W. Bush signed a law
calling for a moratorium on nuclear testing.
Since then, the nation has relied on computer-based modeling to determine the
performance of its 3,750-warhead-strong nuclear stockpile. Thirty years on,
the U.S. is well aware that the models are only as good as the data used to
make them and its current simulations rely on data collected by exploding
surrogate material instead of plutonium.
Plutonium displays six different crystal structures between room temperature
and melting and an additional seventh when pressure is slightly elevated. Out
of these, three structures are unique to plutonium and no surrogate material
can replicate them. Along with Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore national
laboratories, Sandia is building a $1.8 billion project, dubbed Scorpius,
that will use X-rays to check plutonium compressed to levels just before it
reaches criticality – the point where it would result in a nuclear explosion.
Read More
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/underground-lab-x-rays-test-nuclear-stockpile
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