LAB REPORT
Science and Technology Making Headlines
Jan. 19, 2024
Power play
The U.S. electrical grid, sometimes called the world’s greatest machine, remains vulnerable to malicious actors due to a combination of age, complexity and increasing operational connectivity. Defending it has become a significant priority for security agencies across the U.S. government.
The ability to take control of a local distribution system poses significant threats to health and safety, but that extreme example is just one form a cyberattack might take. Threats run the gamut from inconvenient to catastrophic.
“When we’re talking about a cyberattack, this could be anything from a kid in the parents’ basement who’s messing around, to organized crime groups, to highly sophisticated nation-state attacks — those are very different types of attacks,” said Nate Gleeson, program leader for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
LLNL’s mission focuses on security and defense issues, with cybersecurity now high on its priorities list. The facility’s Skyfall laboratory (yes, named for the James Bond film) has become a critical resource for helping LLNL’s researchers better understand and protect against grid-threatening attacks. The facility connects real-world equipment, including a grid-scale power substation, with high-performance computers to model how transmission and distribution systems might respond to a broad range of power irregularities caused by bad actors (or just really bad weather).
“The Skyfall laboratory allows us to merge our high-performance computing simulation capabilities with the actual hardware that is being used on the electric grid,” Gleeson said, describing work his group carried out to help California utilities understand the possible damage cyber criminals could cause to the state’s power system.
Tracking the stream of cancer cells
Biomedical engineers at Duke University and Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL) have significantly enhanced the capabilities of a computational model that simulates the movement of individual cancer cells across long distances within the entire human body.
Called “Adaptive Physics Refinement (APR),” the approach captures detailed cellular interactions and their effects on cellular trajectory, offering invaluable insights into the travels of metastatic cancer cells.
Deciphering the dynamics of how cancer cells navigate through the body’s blood vessels remains a critical and complex issue in cancer studies, crucial for early detection and potential targeted treatment. Studying these processes in living patients, however, is not feasible, and instead requires advanced computational models to simulate cancer cell dynamics. The team has created advancing computational methods that explore these fundamental processes for over a decade. But even supercomputers have their limits.
To calculate the trajectory of a single cancer cell, models must capture its microscopic interactions with the surrounding red blood cells. The human body, however, contains around 25 trillion red blood cells and five liters of blood. Using today’s largest supercomputers, state-of-the-art models can only recreate a region containing 1% of this volume at cellular resolution — a limited domain that still includes several hundred million red blood cells.
To skirt this issue, a large team with collaborators from LLNL and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL, has taken a new approach. Extending the lab’s existing algorithm to include interactions with millions of neighboring red blood cells, APR creates a high-resolution window that tracks the cell of interest as it moves through the vasculature.
Beating asteroids to the punch
Last year, a NASA mission proved that humans could change an asteroid’s course by crashing into one with a spacecraft. But if an impact alone is not enough, we do have at least one alternative option: nuking it.
A new study, released after NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission successfully moved an asteroid moonlet, shows how a nuclear device could redirect an errant space rock coming to Earth.
“If we have enough warning time, we could potentially launch a nuclear device, sending it millions of miles away to an asteroid that is headed toward Earth,” said Mary Burkey, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Planetary defense researchers are actively investigating the very possibility of fending off an impending asteroid with a nuclear detonation. As part of that research, Burkey and colleagues developed a new model that simulates what a nuclear detonation’s high-energy X-ray emissions will do to an asteroid.
On paper, nuking an asteroid has advantages over a mission like DART. The biggest is energy: Nuclear devices are capable of producing more energy per mass than any human technology. And because space launches must always minimize mass, a nuclear warhead can deliver a far more powerful punch than a DART-like spacecraft can ever manage.
Biomass is where it’s at
Biomass can fight climate change, but only if you do it right. To build a net-zero economy by 2050, biomass needs to come from only those sources that are truly carbon-negative. As many industries, including carbon removal, turn to biomass to help fight climate change, sustainable sourcing will be critical.
The molecular structure of biomass contains a lot of carbon that originates from absorbed atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). This means that biomass has high carbon removal potential when it is used to make products, such as hydrogen or fuels, and is paired with a method for durable carbon sequestration.
Biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS) can provide decarbonization benefits both by producing products that replace fossil fuels and by producing carbon that can be stored. Whereas some plans for biomass energy prioritize energy generation, BiCRS prioritizes carbon removal and produces byproducts that can be used for energy.
According to Lawrence Livermore National Lab’s “Road to Removal” report, the amount of CO2 removal that can be achieved by 2050 in the U.S. using a sustainable biomass supply is estimated to be 884 million tons per year, equivalent to the amount of CO2 emitted by about 200 million cars each year.
The fusion future is looking bright
To say 2023 was a big year in the world of fusion research would be an understatement.
After achieving fusion ignition in late 2022, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's (LLNL) National Ignition Facility (NIF) repeated the feat in late July, and then twice again in recent months, bringing to four the total number of times they've managed to generate more energy from a small pellet of fusion fuel than they put in.
We're finally on the path to fusion energy, however, we're still likely a long way off from production fusion reactors.
With the Department of Energy recently releasing $42 million in funds for fusion energy research divided between LLNL, Colorado State University and the University of Rochester, the fusion forecast is calling for some breakthroughs.