LAB REPORT

Science and Technology Making Headlines

Feb. 16, 2024


NIF target chamber

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.

AIP scilight

LLNL Lab Directors 2024

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

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.

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FSC materials sciencentist

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists helped crack the case of the “Angel of Death” in the late 1990s.

Cracking 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.”


Microbe Models

Microbe models leverage extensive genomic data to power soil carbon simulations. Illustration by Victor O. Leshyk.

Going underground

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.


NIF target assembly

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

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.

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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.