LAB REPORT

It makes sense that a technical achievement straight out of science fiction took place in a facility so futuristic that it was once used as a backdrop in a Star Trek movie.

But in this Hollywood-worthy chamber at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory outside San Francisco, researchers not only turned a one-time technological fantasy into reality, they also helped accelerate a full-on race to scale and monetize what some have dubbed the “holy grail” of clean energy: fusion.

As huge as the lab’s accomplishment of ignition was, however, it was just the beginning of a new set of challenges. The researchers turned their focus to replicating the achievement and getting ever more energy out of the fusion reaction. To help with those efforts, they now have the benefit of another technological marvel: the world’s fastest supercomputer just a stone’s throw away.

Lawrence Livermore National Security, which manages the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has awarded $220,000 in grants to 44 community organizations.

The Community Gift Program was launched in 2008 and benefits nonprofits that serve children in Alameda, Contra Costa, Santa Clara and San Joaquin counties.

Grants focus on efforts to promote literacy, science, technology, engineering and math education, and cultural arts. They averaged $5,000 each.

Alta Resource Technologies uses custom-designed proteins that act like microscopic robots to separate high-purity rare earth elements and other critical minerals with unprecedented selectivity and cost-effectiveness. This could dramatically reduce the environmental footprint of mining while expanding access to essential raw materials.

The advanced biochemistry platform leverages technology licensed from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory co-developed with collaborators including researchers at Pennsylvania State University. Alta aims to increase supplies of rare earth elements like neodymium and dysprosium – essential for electric vehicle motors, wind turbines, and defense technologies – by cost-effectively separating them from abundant low-grade sources and end-of-life products that cannot be processed using conventional methods.

The world's most powerful supercomputer was officially dedicated in California Thursday, with the CEOs of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise and AMD on hand to celebrate their handiwork.

El Capitan — as the $600 million supercomputer is known — will handle an array of classified tasks aimed at securing the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons and run a variety of other unspecified simulations.

El Capitan and a smaller sibling designed for unclassified work sit inside a large data center inside Lawrence Livermore National Labs, roughly 30 miles northeast of Silicon Valley. That smaller sibling, Tuolumne, is similar in design to El Capitan, but just one-tenth the size. It's still powerful enough to rank 10th among the world's most powerful supercomputers.

After the energy sector, cement production is the second largest industrial contributor of global greenhouse gas emissions, mainly due to limestone calcination – a process that releases large amounts of carbon dioxide.

Now, a collaboration between scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Northwestern University has put forward a method they say is capable of achieving gigaton-scale carbon reductions. Their approach accelerates the weathering of calcium silicates sourced from basalt, recycled concrete and industrial waste, then uses carbon dioxide to produce calcium carbonate, eliminating the need for limestone decomposition.