LAB REPORT

Science and Technology Making Headlines

Dec. 22, 2023


target chamber

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

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.


crops

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

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.


asteroid

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

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.


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.  

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.


diamond structure

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.

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LLNL Report takes a break

The LLNL Report will take a break for the holidays. It will return Jan. 12, 2024.

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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.