Sept. 19, 2025
This image captures a small section of Rubin Observatory’s view of the Virgo Cluster. (Image: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory)
Rubin at work
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory team in northern Chile finished installation of the giant Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) camera in the 8.4-meter diameter Simonyi Survey Telescope in March. The project had involved researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) since 2001.
The purpose of the camera is to take images of the Southern Hemisphere sky every night for 10 years. The effort will teach scientists more about dark matter and dark energy. It will also allow scientists to map the Milky Way and inventory objects, including asteroids, in the solar system.
“Over decades, Lawrence Livermore has established expertise in building large optics in support of the National Ignition Facility (NIF),” said Vincent Riot, project manager at LLNL from 2016 to 2023. Like the LSST camera, NIF required very large mirrors and optics that were extremely precise and required special mounting.
QuantaLife was sold to Bio-Rad, and many of its employees went on to start their own companies.
Building biotalent in the Tri-Valley
Within the Bay Area, the Tri-Valley has emerged as a powerhouse for life sciences. Its deeply rooted innovation ecosystem has created an environment that attracts high-growth companies in the industry, which, in turn, sparks early-stage startups. Here, it rarely takes six degrees of separation to find a connection.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Sandia National Laboratories are significant contributors, launching new technologies for commercialization and developing a pipeline of talent with specific expertise.
Bill Colston is an example of the laboratory’s impact on the Tri-Valley’s life sciences ecosystem. Colston founded QuantaLife, building on research and development work he did directing a biologic and chemical defense program at LLNL.
Klint Rose worked on the foundational technology for QuantaLife under Colston at LLNL and went on to cofound Purigen Biosystems.
“The labs have put so much energy into building systems around biosecurity that this talent pool existed,” Rose said of his choice to start Purigen in Pleasanton.
Seismic science improves the nation’s ability to monitor nuclear explosions and allow researchers to better define active faults where small earthquakes may occur.
Seismic science does double duty
For her dissertation, Louisa Barama worked on ways to characterize seismic events like tsunamigenic and deep earthquakes in near real time, using teleseismic data, calculations of radiated earthquake energy and machine learning techniques.
“Then I got this opportunity to work on an Air Force Research Lab project [led by Zhigang Peng], asking if we can use machine learning to do monitoring and detection of underground nuclear explosions,” she recalls. “I remember my advisor [Andrew Newman at Georgia Tech] said, ‘bear with me, it’s going to be different in some ways, but you’ll be mostly doing the same things.’”
“Getting into the world of nuclear monitoring was just really fascinating and cool, and we ended up having a successful project,” Barama adds. “That’s kind of what opened up opportunities for me with the current position I have as a postdoc at Lawrence Livermore National Lab.”
At LLNL, Barama has expanded the tools and techniques she uses for earthquake and explosion source characterization.
Cross-section of the target chamber in an artist’s concept of an inertial fusion energy power plant, where targets would be ignited ten times a second to generate abundant, clean energy. (Image: Eric Smith/LLNL)
A fusion tutorial
Nuclear fusion promises a green and infinitely renewable supply of energy — if we can harness it. Fusion happens all the time inside the sun. But to recreate the process on Earth, we must control incredibly hot, chaotic matter in an exceedingly dense state.
Prototypes of several different fusion-reactor designs are being tested around the world. The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, for example, uses lasers to spark fusion in a small pellet of fuel.
Nuclear fusion is the process by which two atoms combine to form a larger atom (minus a bit of mass) plus energy. The goal is to get more sustained energy out of the system than goes in.
Experiments in 2022 at NIF — the most famous inertial confinement facility — provided proof of concept. The project did release more fusion energy than its lasers used to create the reaction, but charging those lasers incurred an energy cost.
The 2022 energy flow chart released by LLNL details the sources of energy production, how Californians are using energy and how much waste exists.
Tracing the flow of energy
An energy flow chart from Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, updated through 2022, provides one of the most cogent glimpses available into the journey energy takes from its raw form into its final end-use in California. There are two main takeaways from this chart. First, the fact that they estimate only 36 percent, barely one-third of the state’s raw energy input, is realized in the form of energy services, for example: interior space heating and cooling, water treatment and pumping, industrial processes, light, computations, communications and horsepower. The rest is lost in the process of refining, electric power generation, transmission, mechanical losses to heat and friction, electricity losses in the process of battery charges and discharges and so on.
The second big takeaway from viewing California’s energy flow chart is the mix of raw energy inputs. The information from 2023 shows that 30 percent of California’s incoming fuel was natural gas, 50 percent was petroleum, and the other 20 percent came from a combination of nuclear, hydroelectric, biomass, geothermal, solar and wind.
