(AGENPARL) – ven 16 febbraio 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, Feb. 16, 2024
The target chamber of LLNL’s National Ignition facility where researchers
achieved fusion.
… Game on
On Dec. 5, 2022, Lawrence Livermore’s National Ignition Facility achieved
ignition by creating more energy via nuclear fusion than they originally put
in. Now, a series of details focuses on how that achievement came to be, and
also highlights three subsequent ignition reactions—one of which produced
almost double the amount of energy it used.
Investments in renewable energy could be vital to combating the climate
crisis in the present day.
Although still a far-future technology, nuclear fusion is really hot right
now, both literally and figuratively. Squishing together two light nuclei
requires immensely hot temperatures (like, 100 million °C hot), and the
fusion industry is similarly sizzling. More than 40 fusion companies now
exist around the world—25 of which are in the U.S. alone.
Read More
From left: Sandia National Labs Director James Peery, NNSA Administrator Jill
Hruby, Lawrence Livermore National Lab Director Kim Budil, and Los Alamos
National Lab Director Thom Mason. Image by National Nuclear Security
Administration.
… Putting the spotlight on workforce and infrastructure
https://ww2.aip.org/fyi/nuclear-security-lab-directors-spotlight-workforce-and-infrastructure-needs
The directors of Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, and Sandia National Labs
spoke recently on pressing challenges and opportunities facing the nuclear
security enterprise, appearing together at the annual Nuclear Deterrence
Summit in Washington, DC.
The trio, which included Lawrence Livermore National Lab Director Kim Budil,
Los Alamos National Lab Director Thom Mason and Sandia National Labs Director
James Peery, recounted how the labs have grown their staffs by thousands of
people in recent years to tackle historic workloads as the U.S. modernizes
its nuclear weapons infrastructure amid a tense geopolitical environment.
Now, their focus is on retaining workers and planning for their next
generation of research facilities while juggling stewardship responsibilities
for the current warhead stockpile.
The head of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the
labs, also emphasized the scale of work underway in a keynote speech and made
the case for refreshing the labs’ research infrastructure in parallel with
rebuilding the means of weapons production.
“NNSA is being asked to do more than at any time since the Manhattan
Project,” said NNSA head Jill Hruby.
Read More
https://ww2.aip.org/fyi/nuclear-security-lab-directors-spotlight-workforce-and-infrastructure-needs
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists helped crack the case of
the “Angel of Death” in the late 1990s.
… Cracking a serial killer case

How a Nuclear Weapons Lab Helped Crack a Serial-Killer Case

Nuclear weapons laboratories don’t often help solve serial-killer cases.
But in the investigation of Efren Saldivar, data from such a lab provided the
clinching evidence that led to his conviction on six counts of murder.
As a respiratory therapist at Glendale Adventist Medical Center in
California, where he started working in 1989, Saldivar was at times tasked
with caring for terminally ill patients. One day in 1998, according to a
report from the Los Angeles Times, the hospital got a tip that someone had
“helped a patient die fast.” Hospital officials had previously
investigated Saldivar because of an internal tip about alleged misconduct —
he had a reputation for having a “magic syringe,” as one coworker
reported. Police soon became involved, calling Saldivar in for questioning.
During that session, Saldivar confessed to dozens of murders after his
employment began, and continuing up to 1997, stating that he poisoned
patients with overdoses of the paralyzing chemicals pancuronium bromide, also
known as Pavulon, and succinylcholine chloride. He was arrested immediately.
But there was little physical evidence to back up his self-incriminating
claims. And without that outside corroboration, authorities had to set
Saldivar free — a freedom during which he publicly retracted his
confession, citing his own depression and pressure from a detective as
reasons for the alleged lies.
Now left without Saldivar’s word, investigators scrambled for actual
evidence. They thought the chemical part of the confession might hold the
key: Perhaps prosecutors could prove Pavulon and succinylcholine chloride
were in his victims’ systems when they died. Police were pointed in an
unexpected direction when they were directed to Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory, some 300 miles up the California coast in the San Francisco Bay
Area.
Livermore, run by the National Nuclear Security Administration, was founded
after the end of the Manhattan Project to help develop the hydrogen bomb.
More recently, Livermore scientists’ main task is to maintain and modernize
nuclear weapons. But within its gates, the Lab also hosts the Forensic
Science Center, which conducts forensic research, mainly for
national-security cases, into chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and
explosive materials — and any combination of those that might appear in,
say, a terrorist attack, or an accident at a hazardous waste site.
Given those specialties, the center sometimes gets called on to help with
tricky law-enforcement situations. Those include both general requests, like
an analysis of different kinds of pepper spray, and specific local and
federal inquiries, like Efren’s or that of a super-sophisticated
pipe-bomber from the same period — cases in which few others are quite as
qualified to identify and trace the origins of slippery substances.
That’s the reason the Forensic Science Center is sometimes called “the
lab of last resort.” In Saldivar’s case, Livermore scientists created new
methods to identify degraded chemicals, and helped convict the man who became
known as the “Angel of Death.”
Read More https://undark.org/2024/02/09/wilo-serial-killer-nuclear-lab/
Microbe models leverage extensive genomic data to power soil carbon
simulations. Illustration by Victor O. Leshyk.
… Going underground
https://phys.org/news/2024-02-climate-secrets-soil-microbes.html
Climate models are essential to predicting and addressing climate change, but
can fail to adequately represent soil microbes, a critical player in
ecosystem soil carbon sequestration that affects the global carbon cycle.
A team of scientists including Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
(Berkeley Lab) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has developed a new
model that incorporates genetic information from microbes. This new model
enables the scientists to better understand how certain soil microbes
efficiently store carbon supplied by plant roots, and could inform
agricultural strategies to preserve carbon in the soil in support of plant
growth and climate change mitigation.
The research demonstrates the advantage of assembling the genetic information
of microorganisms directly from soil. Previously, the team only had
information about a small number of microbes studied in the lab.
Having genome information allows scientists to create better models capable
of predicting how various plant types, crops, or even specific cultivars can
collaborate with soil microbes to better capture carbon. Simultaneously, this
collaboration can enhance soil health..
This research is described in a new paper that was recently published in the
journal /Nature Microbiology/. The corresponding authors are Eoin Brodie of
Berkeley Lab, and Jennifer Pett-Ridge of LLNL, who leads the “Microbes
Persist” Soil Microbiome Scientific Focus Area project.
Read More https://phys.org/news/2024-02-climate-secrets-soil-microbes.html
The spent target assembly from LLNL’s first achievement on ignition on Dec.
5, 2022, which is reported in the cover article of the Feb. 5, 2023, issue of
/Physical Review Letters/. Photo by Jason Laurea/LLNL.
… Break on through to the other side
https://newatlas.com/energy/historic-fusion-ignition-in-lab-experiment-confirmed/
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has published an extensive paper
confirming the validity of its 2022 fusion experiment where multiple lasers
focused on a sphere of deuterium and tritium to achieve the first fusion
ignition in a laboratory.
Creating nuclear fusion is relatively easy to produce. All you need are the
conditions that place hydrogen isotope ions under the right conditions of
heat and pressure to cause them to fuse into helium. In fact, it’s so easy
that it was the centerpiece of a General Electric exhibit that ran for 10
hours a day at the 1964 World’s Fair.
The tricky bit is to achieve nuclear fusion while getting more energy out
than you put in, which is called fusion ignition. Until Dec. 5, 2022, this
had only been accomplished on Earth inside a hydrogen bomb.
On that day at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratoryy, 192 laser beams
focused on a deuterium/tritium cryogenic target, delivering 2.05 megajoules
(MJ) of ultraviolet light. The target fused and generated 3.15 MJ of energy
output.
Since then, the team of more than 1,370 researchers from 44 international
institutions who contributed to the project over decades has worked to verify
and document the results of that experiment. The newly released peer-reviewed
paper reveals how the target gain of 1.5 times was achieved and traces the
progress of the experiment back to its origin in 1972, as a proposal by LLNL
Director John Nuckolls and his colleagues, as well as the challenges faced in
achieving ignition.
Read More
https://newatlas.com/energy/historic-fusion-ignition-in-lab-experiment-confirmed/
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