LAB REPORT

Science and Technology Making Headlines

Dec. 1, 2023

Microbrial miners take on rare-earth metals

As a tech-hungry world gobbles up rare-earth elements, researchers are adapting bacteria that can isolate and purify the metals in the absence of harsh chemicals.

Rare-earth elements (REE) include those in the lanthanide series — those with atomic numbers from 58 to 71, usually shown as a pop-out beneath the main periodic table — as well as the group 3 transition metals scandium and yttrium. They are used in products such as magnets, light bulbs and electric cars, and end up in various waste streams, including mining tailings and ash from coal plants.

They are not easy to find and also difficult to purify. Researchers are investigating a possible alternative to conventional purifying avenues. Many microorganisms naturally concentrate metals, and some are already used to mine copper and gold. The discovery about a decade ago of microbes that use lanthanides for their metabolism allowed researchers to explore the feasibility of adapting the microorganisms or their components to isolate REEs.

There’s room for microbes at every step of the biomining process, said Dan Park, an environmental microbiologist and DARPA grant team member at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. For starters, many microbes secrete acids that can solubilize metals from rocks, discarded appliances and other electronic waste. Some make proteins that specifically interact with REEs, giving scientists the opportunity to isolate the elements from other metals, and perhaps even from each other.


scream model

The high-resolution E3SM earth system SCREAM model recently won the Golden Bell Prize for Climate Modeling.

SCREAMing for an award

The first Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling was presented at SC23 in Denver. The award went to a team led by Sandia National Laboratories and supported by Lawrence Livermore that had developed and run a model of the global atmosphere with unprecedentedly high resolution on Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Frontier exascale supercomputer.

The Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling “aims to recognize innovative parallel computing contributions toward solving the global climate crisis.” The model was selected based on its potential to impact climate modeling and related fields.

The E3SM model simulates critical aspects of Earth’s climate system, predicting potential impact on U.S. conditions in the coming decades, including extreme temperatures, droughts, floods, and rising sea levels.

SCREAM is a full-featured atmospheric general-circulation model developed for very fine-resolution simulations on exascale machines, incorporating state-of-the-art parameterizations for fluid dynamics, microphysics, moist turbulence and radiation. SCREAM, led by Peter Caldwell of LLNL, achieved these novel results through a close collaboration between atmospheric and computational scientists.


P15603627_WO20181_NIF&PS_ignition_updates_v6_nif-update2

LLNL has achieved fusion ignition on NIF four times to date.

Setting an even larger record

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)’s National Ignition Facility has set a new record for laser energy, firing 2.2 megajoules of energy for the first time on an ignition target. This newly-reported experiment, staged on Oct. 30, resulted in 3.4 MJ of fusion energy yield, achieving ignition and delivering the second-highest neutron yield ever achieved on NIF.

“This record laser energy level is an incredible achievement, many years in the making,” said NIF Director Gordon Brunton. “This also marks the fourth time that we have successfully demonstrated fusion ignition on the NIF. This work is foundational for the Lab’s mission, with ignition enabling unprecedented capability to support the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Stockpile Stewardship Program and potentially bringing us closer to a fusion energy future.”

LLNL achieved fusion ignition for the first time on December 5, 2022. The second time came on July 30, 2023, when in a controlled fusion experiment, the NIF laser delivered 2.05 MJ of energy to the target, resulting in 3.88 MJ of fusion energy output, the highest yield achieved to date. On Oct. 8, the NIF laser achieved fusion ignition for the third time with 1.9 MJ of laser energy resulting in 2.4 MJ of fusion energy yield.


muons team

ICMuS2 LLNL team members Drew Willard, Brendan Reagan, and Issa Tamer work on a prototype laser system that will be developed through this effort.  Photo by: Jason Laurea/LLNL.

Going deep

The ability to photograph the insides of objects has found applications from medicine to security, but what if we could peer much deeper, applying the same concept to objects as big as mountains?

A new program at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recently began work on a truck-sized device to do just that, visualizing the interiors of solids as deep and dense as 30 meters of concrete, using a technique called muon imaging.

When high-energy particles from outer space, such as those created by exploding stars, reach Earth, they shatter against the particles in our atmosphere and rain down a shower of smaller particles, such as muons, onto the surface. Something like heavy electrons, scientists think muons are one of the fundamental particles of the universe.

Because muons travel through solids, muon imaging allows scientists to non-invasively look into the interiors of large solids if these muons are subsequently captured on film.


Budil MIT

LLNL Director Kiim Budil recently spoke about the future of fusion at a recent MIT event. Photo courtesy of Justin Saglio/MIT Technology Review.

Next up: fusion future

Making a fusion power plant a reality will require a huge amount of science and technology progress. Though some milestones have been reached, many are yet to come. At a recent EmTech MIT event, Kimberly Budil, director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) spoke about the milestone event and the road ahead.  

She was at the center of the science news world last year, when researchers from the national lab achieved what’s called net energy gain, finally demonstrating that fusion reactions can generate more energy than is used to start them up. 

“This was really just a moment of great joy and vindication for all of the thousands of people who have poured their heart and soul into this pursuit over many decades,” Budil said.

Many people thought it would never work, she explained — that the Lab would never get to the level of precision needed with the lasers or get the targets perfect enough to house the reaction. “The laser is a miracle, a modern engineering miracle,” she said. And “the targets are incredible, precision works of art.” 

It’s “very, very hard to make fusion work,” Budil said. And the moment researchers achieved net energy didn’t represent the finish line, but one milestone in a series of many still to come. 

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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.