(AGENPARL) – Fri 16 May 2025 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,
Cross-section of the target chamber in an artist’s concept of an inertial
fusion energy power plant, where targets would be ignited ten times a second.
(Image: Eric Smith)
Fusion power plants: time and work required
https://fortune.com/2025/05/07/nuclear-fusion-energy-ai-sam-altman-helion-pacific-commonwealth-timelines/?mth456
In 2009, the National Ignition Facility (NIF), at Lawrence Livermore National
Lab in northern California, came online. NIF’s method for fusion is
fundamentally different from tokamaks: A tiny spherical pellet of fusion fuel
— hydrogen — is compressed using the most powerful laser system in the
world for a few nanoseconds, producing a burst of energy.
Power plants generally produce around 500 megawatts of power, give or take a
factor of two. To achieve that figure, a power plant based on NIF would need
to reliably implode a fuel target around once a second, every second, for
days, months, and years on end. But in the three years since NIF first
achieved ignition, it’s repeated the feat exactly five more times.
“Sometimes you’ll hear folks say that the science behind fusion is
solved, it’s all just an engineering problem. I disagree with that
statement,” says Tammy Ma, one of the lead NIF scientists. “The science
of fusion is not solved….NIF is the most successful fusion experiment to
date, but we don’t get ignition every time… The magnitude of the
challenges remaining mean it will still take considerable work, and some
time, to solve.”
Read More
https://fortune.com/2025/05/07/nuclear-fusion-energy-ai-sam-altman-helion-pacific-commonwealth-timelines/?mth456
LLNL technician Ty Nguyen works on installation and maintenance of El
Capitan’s compute blades. (Photo: Garry McLeod)
Dreaming of El Capitan
https://www.independentnews.com/news/livermore_news/new-llnl-supercomputer-aids-researchers-in-modeling-testing-nation-s-nuclear-stockpile/article_7b4ee640-f674-4356-a2dc-9a045d247738.html
El Capitan, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, is currently
contributing to research about the nation’s nuclear capabilities at
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL), as well as Sandia National
Laboratories in Livermore and New Mexico, and Los Alamos in New Mexico. It is
also drawing student interns from local colleges and universities, including
Livermore’s Las Positas College.
El Capitan is just a few months into its work. The supercomputer facilitates
simulations that model and test the nation’s nuclear stockpile. The efforts
are conducted by teams at all three laboratories.
“People are running simulation codes to ensure the reliability of complex
systems,” said Urwah Mir, a development/operations engineer at LLNL. “El
Capitan is the best fit for this job, because it can simulate complex
workloads at a massive scale.”
The dream of developing and refining an instrument like El Capitan is a
primary reason that interns come to work at U..S. Department of Energy labs.
“I started out as a Las Positas student and served as a summer intern at
Livermore Lab,” Mir said.
Read More
https://www.independentnews.com/news/livermore_news/new-llnl-supercomputer-aids-researchers-in-modeling-testing-nation-s-nuclear-stockpile/article_7b4ee640-f674-4356-a2dc-9a045d247738.html
LLNL ecologist Joe Shinn tests a sugar beet leaf with a diffusion porometer..
(Credit: LLNL, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today
Collection)
Science with sugar beet leaves
https://www.aip.org/library/ex-libris-universum/2025-may-photos-of-the-month
Astrobiology, oceanography, climate science, ecology, medicine, and so many
other branches of science either intersect with the physical sciences or
impact it in some way. And then of course there’s how discoveries in the
physical sciences, like nuclear weapons, have impacted humans and their
environment. Everything is connected! So, this month let’s take a tour
through many of the ways physics touches on biology, ecology, climate and
atmospheric science, medicine, and the environment.
In this photo, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory ecologist Joe Shinn
tests a sugar beet leaf with a diffusion porometer, an instrument designed to
measure how the plant reacts when subjected to gaseous pollutants. Plants
inside the chamber are fumigated with various gases to determine the
potential effect of emissions which might be released from geothermal power
facilities in southern California’s Imperial Valley. Joe Shinn was an
Environmental Scientist and Deputy Division Leader for Environmental Sciences
at Lawrence Livermore from 1973-2003.
Read More
https://www.aip.org/library/ex-libris-universum/2025-may-photos-of-the-month
LLNL Director Kim Budil (left) and John S. Foster Jr. examine Foster’s
100th birthday cake, featuring photos of his life, during a celebration in
2022.
Johnny Foster, a radical but realistic innovator
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2025/05/07/john-foster-dead-nuclear-physics/
John S. Foster Jr., a physicist who helped develop the U.S. nuclear arsenal
and shaped national security in the Johnson and Nixon administrations,
guiding billions of dollars in research and development as a top Defense
Department official, died April 25 at his home in Santa Barbara, California.
He was 102.
A second-generation physicist who espoused what he called a “radical but
realistic” approach to scientific innovation, Dr. Foster grew up in
Montreal, where his father ran a radiation laboratory at McGill University
and introduced him to Nobel Prize-winning physicists Niels Bohr and Ernest
Lawrence, the founder of what is now Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
in California.
Located 40 miles east of San Francisco, the federally funded lab is where
much of the country’s nuclear stockpile was developed and conceived. Dr.
Foster launched his career at the lab with backing from Lawrence, helping
devise more compact, high-yield nuclear weapons in the early years of the
Cold War.
Read More
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2025/05/07/john-foster-dead-nuclear-physics/
Quantum mechanics simulations reveal the impact of temperature on energy
conversion efficiency in electrochemical cells. (Image: Liam Krauss/LLNL
Grand Challenge Graphics Support)
Looking at leaky fuel cells
https://techxplore.com/news/2025-05-hot-topic-temperature-energy-loss.html
By splitting water molecules, fuel cells can turn electricity into hydrogen
fuel. Running in the opposite direction, they consume hydrogen fuel to
cleanly power multiple sectors. Typically, heat is a key ingredient for
achieving high energy conversion efficiencies that can beat out
combustion-based engines.
But like a dripping pipe, fuel cells can leak efficiency. In a study
published in PRX Energy, scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory (LLNL) Quantum Simulation Group revealed how high operating
temperatures could increase electrical leakage in a widely studied fuel cell
material.
“Traditionally, models don’t fully account for temperature-induced
vibrations,” said Shenli Zhang, LLNL physicist and first author of the study.
“But our calculations show that this effect is far from negligible —
especially for operation temperatures above 600 Kelvin that are typical for
these cells.”
Read More
https://techxplore.com/news/2025-05-hot-topic-temperature-energy-loss.html
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