LAB REPORT

Pitching neutrinos can be easier than catching them. Because the lightweight particles stream mostly unencumbered through any matter they encounter, neutrino detectors must monitor gargantuan volumes of water or other material, ever vigilant for the signs of a rare neutrino interaction, wherever it may occur. On the other hand, the processes that create neutrinos, including certain nuclear decays and particle reactions, can be readily localized and precisely studied even in a tabletop experiment.

That’s the idea behind the BeEST (Beryllium Electron capture in Superconducting Tunnel junctions), an experiment headed by Kyle Leach of Colorado School of Mines in Golden and Stephan Friedrich at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Over the decades there have been many denominations coined to classify computer systems, usually when they were used in different fields or technological improvements caused significant shifts.

Perhaps a fair way to classify supercomputers is that the ‘supercomputer’ aspect is a highly time-limited property. During the 1940s, Colossus and ENIAC were without question the supercomputers of their era, while 1976’s Cray-1 wiped the floor with everything that came before, yet all of these are archaic curiosities next to today’s top two supercomputers. Both the El Capitan and Frontier supercomputers are exascale level machines.

Taking up 700 m² of floor space at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and drawing 30 MW of power, El Capitan’s CPUs are paired with AMD Instinct MI300A accelerators. El Capitan’s 11,136 nodes, containing four MI300As each, rely on a number of high-speed interconnects to distribute computing work across all cores.

Researchers have demonstrated that they can remotely detect radioactive material from 10 meters away using short-pulse CO₂ lasers – a distance over ten times farther than achieved via previous methods.

Conventional radiation detectors, such as Geiger counters, detect particles that are emitted by the radioactive material, typically limiting their operational range to the material’s direct vicinity. The new method, developed by a research team headed up at the University of Maryland and including authors from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, instead leverages the ionization in the surrounding air, enabling detection from much greater distances.

The study may one day lead to remote sensing technologies that could be used in nuclear disaster response and nuclear security.

The U.S. Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management (EM) is preparing to remove a building slab at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) after crews successfully removed hazards from a historic facility and demolished it late last year.

“This successful D&D means that the significant risks at three of the four highest-risk excess facilities have now been removed: Building 175, Building 280 reactor and Building 251,” said Kevin Bazzell, EM’s federal project director for LLNL and nearby Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“Safely removing one of the most contaminated buildings onsite is a huge milestone for the partnered teams of EM and laboratory staff,” Bazzell added. “We are thrilled to be a part of the building’s evolution, creating space for new mission elements and modernized infrastructure.”

Hydrogen stakeholders still need to address the cost of storage and transportation. “So far, the hydrogen supply chain has been hindered by a trade-off between compressed gaseous hydrogen — which is cheap to produce, but low in density — and liquid hydrogen — which is high in density, but expensive to densify (via liquefaction),” explains Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

“This trade-off has led to expensive distribution costs that have limited the adoption of hydrogen solutions,” LLNL adds.

The lab has been working with the California startup Verne on a modular, scalable solution that integrates compression and cooling, to yield high-density hydrogen without the high expense and energy consumption of liquefaction systems. The idea builds on research initiated in the 1990’s by LLNL scientist Salvador Aceves and his team.