LAB REPORT

Science and Technology Making Headlines

Dec. 15, 2023

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roads to removal

“Roads to Removal: Options for Carbon Dioxide Removal in the United States,” charts a path for the United States to achieve a net-zero greenhouse gas (GHG) economy by 2050, helping to ensure the nation’s climate security and resilience by cleaning up Earth’s atmosphere and addressing the root cause of climate change.

Carbon hits the road

The U.S. alone could remove 1 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere annually by midcentury using existing technologies.

Forests, soil and manmade solutions in their early stages of development could help get the U.S. to net zero, according to a report published this week by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory that lays out a roadmap to pull CO2 from the air.

Biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS) accounts for about 70% of the US’s carbon removal potential, or approximately 700 million tons annually, said Jennifer Pett-Ridge, lead author and a senior staff scientist at the Lab. BiCRS — pronounced “bikers” — involves collecting municipal solid waste and forestry scraps that have pulled CO2 from the air and then using them to make products like hydrogen, biogas and charcoal.

Deep decarbonization remains critical to the U.S. reaching its net-zero goals. But growing the carbon removal industry also could create more than 440,000 new jobs, report authors found. That’s about five times the number of jobs the coal industry has lost since 1990.


Nurturing fusion into the future

DOE recently funded the newly established, LLNL-led IFE STARFIRE Hub, which seeks to accelerate scientific accelerate inertial fusion energy science and technology development.  

Nurturing fusion into the future

The Department of Energy announced this week that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) will be receiving a $16 million boost in federal funding as part of a national billion-dollar program aimed at advancing fusion energy, which many advocates see as a clean energy alternative.

The DOE's LLNL is one of three hubs selected to receive new funding. Just last December, LLNL achieved fusion ignition, meaning it produced more energy from fusion reactions than the energy that was used to drive the reaction.

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. 

Fusion energy is seen by energy experts as a clean alternative that does not produce carbon, however it has been notoriously difficult to implement.


A breakthrough of the times

The hohlraum that houses the type of cryogenic target used to achieve ignition at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

A breakthrough of the times

Physicist Annie Kritcher rode a wave of optimism into 2023. Weeks earlier, she had helped the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieve a goal that had eluded laboratories around the world for decades: compressing atoms so tightly that their nuclei fuse and generating more energy than the reaction consumes.

But after reaching that experimental milestone, known as ignition, the pressure was on for a repeat performance.

The National Ignition Facility (NIF) was designed to bolster nuclear-weapons science. Advances there also could help to develop nuclear fusion as a safe, clean and almost limitless source of energy. The NIF’s successful experiment last year came as a surprise to many. Ignition had been a decade behind schedule, and some feared that it was beyond reach. As the lead designer of the main fusion experiments, Kritcher and her team immediately set out to prove that the NIF could reliably achieve ignition.

The next shot paid off. On July 30, the facility’s 192 laser beams delivered 2.05 megajoules of energy to a frozen pellet of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, suspended in a gold cylinder. The resulting implosion caused the isotopes to release energy as they fused into helium, generating temperatures six times hotter than the core of the sun. The reactions produced a record 3.88 megajoules of fusion energy.

The team followed up their July success with two more ignition shots in October, bringing the total to four successful runs out of the last six shots. They are gearing up for even higher yields next year. In doing so, scientists at the facility have unlocked research opportunities and helped to fuel a wave of optimism about the future of fusion energy.

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Researchers from LLNL and Verne

LLNL and Verne representatives with Verne's CcH2 storage system.

Cold-compressed hydrogen gets a boost

Verne and Lawrence Livermore have demonstrated a single cryo-compressed hydrogen (CcH2) system of suitable scale for heavy-duty vehicles.

With a capacity of 29kg, the Lab and Verne have tripled previous records for cryo-compressed hydrogen storage, achieving its first demonstration, meeting the energy storage needs of semi-trucks. This is the first time cryo-compressed hydrogen storage has been demonstrated at a scale large enough to be useful for semi-trucks, a milestone in high-density hydrogen storage.

Transportation contributes the largest portion of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Within the transportation sector, heavy-duty vehicles that rely on fossil fuels generate 23% of U.S. GHGs. Globally, trucks, ships and planes account for 10% of GHGs.

The energy stored within Verne’s CcH2 tank is equivalent to a 1MW-hour battery storage system and weighs only 400kg. It is expected that CcH2 can achieve 27% greater hydrogen storage density than compressed gaseous hydrogen. The system is compact enough to fit where diesel tanks are usually installed on a Class 8 truck, and it has already received interest from various industry stakeholders, such as Amazon – an investor in Verne.


NASA’s Psyche spacecraft

This illustration depicts NASA’s Psyche spacecraft as it approaches the asteroid Psyche. Once it arrives in 2029, the spacecraft will orbit the metal-rich asteroid for 26 months while it conducts its science investigation. Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU.

Getting psyched

Set 6.5 feet (2 meters) away from NASA's Psyche spacecraft on the tip of a boom, the mission's gamma-ray spectrometer (GRS) hummed to life on Nov. 6 for the first time since launch in mid-October. The GRS is one half of the Gamma-Ray and Neutron Spectrometer (GRNS) instrument on the Psyche mission.

A subset of the GRS instrument team, consisting of John Goldsten, Patrick Peplowski, Morgan Burks of Lawrence Livermore and David Lawrence, watched in awe at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory mission operations center in California as "beautiful data" poured down every five seconds from the spacecraft.

The data was collected as part of a highly orchestrated set of activities that have been carefully planned and rehearsed over the past three years. Built by Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in partnership with LLNL and with significant contributions from Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center, Psyche's GRS will play an important role in the mission's goal to determine whether Psyche — an asteroid 150 miles (240 kilometers) wide — is the fragment of an early planetesimal or a building block of a planet.

"It's the highest-resolution gamma-ray spectrometer that has ever flown in space," said Burks, a physicist at LLNL who helped design and build the gamma-ray sensor at the heart of the Psyche GRS. "The data returned already indicate it will have over twice the resolution of our prior MESSENGER instrument, which shows it will have unparalleled sensitivity for measuring the elemental composition of Psyche."

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The Lab Report is 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.