(AGENPARL) – mar 02 gennaio 2024 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. 22, 2023
At LLNL’s National Ignition Facility, 192 lasers (beamlines shown here) run
into a target chamber (highlighted in blue) and focus on a capsule containing
hydrogen isotopes.
… Achieving ignition over and over again
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-04045-8
In December 2022, after more than a decade of effort and frustration,
scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National
Ignition Facility (NIF) announced that they had set a world record by
producing a fusion reaction that released more energy than it consumed — a
phenomenon known as ignition. They have now proved that the feat was no
accident by replicating it again and again, and the administration of
President Joe Biden is looking to build on this success by establishing a
trio of US research centres to help advance the science.
The stadium-sized laser facility, housed at LLNL, has unequivocally achieved
its goal of ignition in four out of its last six attempts, creating a
reaction that generates pressures and temperatures greater than those that
occur inside the sun.
“I’m feeling pretty good,” said Richard Town, a physicist who heads the
Lab’s inertial-confinement fusion science program at LLNL. “I think we
should all be proud of the achievement.”
The NIF was designed not as a power plant, but as a facility to recreate and
study the reactions that occur during thermonuclear detonations after the
United States halted underground weapons testing in 1992. The higher fusion
yields are already being used to advance nuclear-weapons research, and also
have fueled enthusiasm about fusion as a limitless source of clean energy.
Read More https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-04045-8
Cover cropping has a relatively high potential contribution to national
soil-based CO2-removal efforts, due mainly to the large extent of land area
that can be cover-cropped without interfering with cash-crop production.
Cereal rye is by far the most widely planted cover crop currently in the
United States. 
… Carbon on a road to removal
https://apnews.com/article/carbon-capture-removal-cop28-fossil-fuels-oil-gas-2bc53c6a8df6d337c1afcabad56377e8
An agreement at the United Nations-led climate conference to transition away
from fossil fuels brought a measure of relief for climate activists, even as
many said it doesn’t go far enough. They also saw something to like in what
the agreement said about carbon capture.
The agreement approved at COP28 in Dubai said the technology could be helpful
particularly in “hard-to-abate sectors” like steel manufacturing that are
expected to have a difficult time eliminating their emissions. But it
wasn’t held up as a way to eliminate the climate impact of fossil fuels.
Carbon removal technology’s objective is to remove carbon that’s already
in the atmosphere. This already happens when forests are restored, for
example, but there’s a push to deploy technology, too. One type directly
captures it from the air, using chemicals to pull out carbon dioxide as air
passes through.
For some, carbon removal is essential during a global transition to clean
energy that will take years. For example, despite notable gains for electric
vehicles in some countries, gas-fired cars will be operating well into the
future. And some industries, like shipping and aviation, are challenging to
fully decarbonize.
“We have to remove some of what’s in the atmosphere in addition to
stopping the emissions,” said Jennifer Pett-Ridge, who leads Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory’s carbon initiative. and is lead author of a
report titled “Roads to Removal: Options for Carbon Dioxide Removal in the
United States,” which charts a path for the United States to achieve a
net-zero greenhouse gas economy by 2050.
Read More
https://apnews.com/article/carbon-capture-removal-cop28-fossil-fuels-oil-gas-2bc53c6a8df6d337c1afcabad56377e8
LLNL scientists have developed modeling tools to assess the use of a nuclear
device to protect the planet from an asteroid impact. Image courtesy of
P.Carril/European Space Agency.
… Watch out for that asteroid
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/nuclear-device-defend-planet-asteroids
Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have developed
modeling tools to assess the use of an explosive nuclear device to defend the
planet against incoming asteroids.
Sixty-six million years ago, a nearly nine-mile-wide asteroid is believed to
have collided with our planet and triggered a mass extinction event that
wiped off the dinosaurs. Humans of today might not be as mighty as dinosaurs,
but they do not want to fall to a similar fate if a similar celestial body
begins moving our way..
NASA demonstrated a possible way to avoid an impending asteroid impact with
its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) last year. The mission involved
crash-landing a spacecraft on an asteroid to cause a subtle change in its
trajectory. A strategy like this would allow an incoming asteroid to be
redirected to a path that would miss a collision with Earth.
But what if the asteroid was detected too late to have its trajectory
changed? Then, q mission would be required to blow it up into pieces before
it comes close to the planet, and this is exactly what the researchers at
LLNL tested in their simulations.
Read More
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/nuclear-device-defend-planet-asteroids
The newly established, LLNL-led IFE STARFIRE Hub seeks to accelerate
scientific accelerate inertial fusion energy science and technology
development.  
… The epicenter of fusion research
The U.S. Department of Energy recently announced that Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory will receive a $16 million boost in federal funding as
part of a national billion-dollar program accelerating inertial fusion energy
(IFE) science and technology. This effort will be carried out by the newly
established IFE Science and Technology Accelerated Research for Fusion
Innovation and Reactor Engineering (STARFIRE) Hub.
The DOE’s Livermore Lab is one of three hubs selected to receive new funding.
Tammy Ma, lead for the LLNL inertial fusion energy initiative, said the
program is a step toward realizing the DOE’s goal to commercialize fusion
energy within a decade.
“The project will begin developing the workforce of the future for inertial
fusion energy through partnerships with leading universities and innovative
new curriculum development and implementation,” Ma said.
Read More
Diamond’s face-centered cubic structure (left) can withstand 2 TPa of
pressure, even though theory predicts the body-centered cubic form (right)
should be more stable at that pressure. (grey = carbon; red = bonds that
connect atomic layers in the structure). Image courtesy of the American
Chemical Society.
… Going to extremes
Chemical bonds are part of the way chemists rationalize the behavior of atoms
in the conditions of the world around them. Sometimes they use extreme
temperatures and in other instances, they use extreme pressure.
The maximum pressures attainable in diamond anvil cells are several hundred
gigapascals, depending on the cell and the nature of the sample. To go higher
than this – albeit momentarily – researchers sometimes use shock
compression, in which a sample is rapidly compressed from all sides by
simultaneous, powerful laser pulses. This does work on the material, causing
the volume to decrease dramatically and the internal energy of the atoms or
molecules to shoot up. Often too far up: chemists are usually most interested
in the moderate temperature regime at which substances do not instantly melt
or decompose. This is especially true when their main analytical tool is
X-ray diffraction, as is the case for a sample that only exists for a small
fraction of a second.
Researchers such as those using the world’s largest laser, the US National
Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, have
pioneered an alternative technique called ramp compression. This involves a
series of carefully-shaped shocks that compress the material in stages,
allowing it to release energy from the previous compression before the next
series of shocks hits. In 2014, researchers used the NIF to ramp compress
diamond to 5TPa without melting it.
In 2021, researchers at Lawrence Livermore successfully obtained X-ray
diffraction data of a ramp-compressed diamond at 2TPa – the
highest-pressure X-ray diffraction data ever obtained – and found that it
had not undergone a phase transition.
“The explanation we came up with is that the energetic barrier to
transforming diamond to the BC8 structure is so high that, in a fast
compression at relatively low temperature, we are not able to observe that
transformation experimentally,” said Lawrence Livermore’s Federica
Coppari. She said work is still ongoing with collaborators to realize these
high-pressure phases using different pathways.
Read More
… LLNL Report takes a break https://www.llnl.gov/
The /LLNL Report/ will take a break for the holidays. It will return Jan. 12,
2024.
Read More https://www.llnl.gov/
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