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Scientists have researched fusion since the 1950s. The Energy Department is expected to announce Tuesday that scientists have reached a breakthrough in nuclear fusion in their quest to produce a technology to provide clean, unlimited and affordable power. Scientists have researched fusion since the 1950s, and the Biden administration is likely to affirm the massive, decades-long investment, according to the Washington Post reported. "To most of us, this was only a matter of time," a senior fusion scientist told the newspaper. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm is expected to make the announcement Tuesday at a media event her department is promoting...

The August test actually generated more energy than scientists predicted, and damaged some equipment. Using the world's largest laser, consisting of 192 beams and temperatures more than three times hotter than the center of the sun One adjustment that helped: Researchers made the fuel capsule about 10 percent bigger and now it's up to the size of a ball bearing. That capsule fits in a tiny gold metal can that researchers aim 192 lasers at. They heat it to about 100 million degrees, creating about 50 percent more pressure inside the capsule than what's inside the center of the sun....

The Department of Energy plans to announce Tuesday that scientists have been able for the first time to produce a fusion reaction that creates a net energy gain...It comes as the Biden administration is prioritizing fusion energy research in its climate and energy agenda.

The Department of Energy plans to announce Tuesday that scientists have been able for the first time to produce a fusion reaction that creates a net energy gain — a major milestone in the decades-long, multibillion dollar quest to develop a technology that provides unlimited, cheap, clean power. The aim of fusion research is to replicate the nuclear reaction through which energy is created on the sun. It is a “holy grail” of carbon-free power that scientists have been chasing since the 1950s. It is still at least a decade — maybe decades — away from commercial use, but the...

Preamplifiers that boost laser beams at the National Ignition Facility. (LLNL/Damien Jemison) PHYSICS ========================================================================= A major milestone has been breached in the quest for fusion energy. For the first time, a fusion reaction has achieved a record 1.3 megajoule energy output – and for the first time, exceeding energy absorbed by the fuel used to trigger it. Although there's still some way to go, the result represents a significant improvement on previous yields: eight times greater than experiments conducted just a few months prior, and 25 times greater than experiments conducted in 2018. It's a huge achievement. Physicists at the...

Sailing through the smooth waters of vacuum, a photon of light moves at around 300 thousand kilometers (186 thousand miles) a second. This sets a firm limit on how quickly a whisper of information can travel anywhere in the Universe. While this law isn't likely to ever be broken, there are features of light which don't play by the same rules. Manipulating them won't hasten our ability to travel to the stars, but they could help us clear the way to a whole new class of laser technology. Physicists have been playing hard and fast with the speed limit of...

ISC 2012For the second time in the past two years, a new supercomputer has taken the top ranking in the Top 500 list of supercomputers – and it does not use a hybrid CPU-GPU architecture. But the question everyone will be asking at the International Super Computing conference in Hamburg, Germany today is whether this is the last hurrah for such monolithic parallel machines and whether the move toward hybrid machines where GPUs or other kinds of coprocessors do most of the work is inevitable. LLNL's Sequoia BlueGene/Q super being assembled by IBM (click to enlarge) No one can predict...

The Trump administration fired the heads of three federal agencies after the election, prompting one to claim he was retaliated against for disagreeing with some policy. The heads of the agencies that oversee the nuclear weapons stockpile, electricity and natural gas regulation and overseas aid were sent packing, NPR reported. The sudden departures included Lisa Gordon-Hagerty, administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, who was forced to resign Friday. She was the first woman to oversee the agency in charge of the nuclear stockpile. Last year, she was on the president’s short list as a possible replacement for former National...

Inventors of centuries past and scientists of today have found ingenious ways to make our lives better with magnets – from the magnetic needle on a compass to magnetic data storage devices and even MRI body scan machines. All of these technologies rely on magnets made from solid materials. But what if you could make a magnetic device out of liquids? Using a modified 3D printer, a team of scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have done just that. Their findings, to be published July 19 in the journal Science, could lead to a...

When the bipartisan advocacy group United Against Nuclear Iran decided last week to mobilize opposition against the nuclear deal with Tehran, Gary Samore knew he could no longer serve as its president. The reason: After long study, Mr. Samore, a former nuclear adviser to President Obama, had concluded that the accord was in the United States’ interest. “I think President Obama’s strategy succeeded,” said Mr. Samore, who left his post on Monday. “He has created economic leverage and traded it away for Iranian nuclear concessions.” As soon as Mr. Samore left, the group announced a new standard-bearer with a decidedly...

A U.S. supercomputer has won back the crown in the never-ending battle for the world's most powerful supercomputer. Its victory is the latest milestone marking the steady climb of computing power all across the globe. The Top500 industry list gave its No. 1 ranking to the Sequoia supercomputer housed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California — a spot earned by Sequoia's ability to crunch 16.32 quadrillion calculations per second (16.32 petaflops/s). Such supercomputing power is used by the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration to simulate nuclear weapons tests for older weapons that have been sitting in the U.S. arsenal....

Scientists discover global warming linked to increase in tropopause height over past two decades LIVERMORE, Calif. -- Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have discovered another fingerprint of human effects on global climate. Recent research has shown that increases in the height of the tropopause over the past two decades are directly linked to ozone depletion and increased greenhouse gases. The tropopause is the transition zone between the lowest layer of the atmosphere -- the turbulently-mixed troposphere -- and the more stable stratosphere. The tropopause lies roughly 10 miles above the Earth's surface at the equator and five...

Climate scientists are refuting claims that raw data used in critical climate change reports has been destroyed, rendering the reports and policies based on those reports unreliable. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market advocacy group, is arguing that U.S. EPA's climate policies rely on raw data that have been destroyed and are therefore unreliable. The nonprofit group -- a staunch critic of U.S. EPA's efforts to regulate greenhouse gases -- petitioned the agency last week to reopen the public comment period on its proposed "endangerment finding" because the data set had been lost (E&ENews PM, Oct. 9). But climate scientists...

CALIFORNIA. Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher (D) was tapped this week to serve in the Obama Administration as US Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security -- the Administration's top arms control negotiator. The centrist Tauscher -- who represents the CD-10 district which includes the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory nuclear weapons/WMD research and development facility --- has been recognized as an expert on nuclear weapons issues during her seven-terms in Congress. "Keeping nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists, making sure other countries do not obtain them and, one day, I hope, ridding the world of these terrible weapons,...

An internal audit has discovered that twenty computers have disappeared from a critical counterintelligence agency tasked with protecting America's nuclear secrets. Fourteen of the computers contained classified material, marking yet another in a string of embarrassments for the Department of Energy: The office in charge of protecting American technical secrets about nuclear weapons from foreign spies is missing 20 desktop computers, at least 14 of which have been used for classified information, the Energy Department inspector general reported on Friday. This is the 13th time in a little over four years that an audit has found that the department, whose...

The Bush administration selected Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's design for a new generation of atomic warheads, two officials familiar with the decision said Friday. The decision, to be announced later in the day, came a year after the administration ordered a competition between Lawrence Livermore near San Francisco and Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because it had not been formally announced. The administration decided the design submitted by Lawrence Livermore, with engineering assistance from Sandia National Laboratories, could be built with greater confidence without underground testing because it was more closely...

GREEN LLC wanted move toward nonproliferation Federal nuclear weapons officials have rejected a bid by disarmament and renewable energy activists to manage Lawrence Livermore weapons design lab, saying the "green team" didn't fit federal plans. The team, calling itself GREEN LLC, was led by two weapons-lab watchdog groups, Livermore-based Tri-Valley CAREs and Nuclear Watch of New Mexico, who never really expected to run the sprawling bomb lab. But they were offended that the National Nuclear Security Administration said the team's proposal ran afoul of federal law and "did not demonstrate an understanding of the requirements of the solicitation where it...

For the first time in more than 20 years, U.S. nuclear-weapons scientists are designing a new H-bomb, the first of probably several new nuclear explosives on the drawing boards. If they succeed, in perhaps 20 or 25 more years, the United States would have an entirely new nuclear arsenal, and a highly automated factory capable of turning out more warheads as needed, as well as new kinds of warheads. "We are on the verge of an exciting time," the nation's top nuclear weapons executive, Linton Brooks, said last week at Lawrence Livermore weapons design laboratory. Teams of roughly 20 scientists...

Word that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will install a battery of machine guns capable of spitting out 66 rounds a second with a range of nearly a mile was met by relief by some who think the weapons will deter terrorists but fear by others who worry they'll be caught in the line of fire. The guns, which the lab unveiled to much ado Thursday but has not yet installed, are meant to protect the laboratory's cache of radioactive plutonium, which terrorists might try to steal or destroy, sending a plume over much of the Livermore Valley. The weapons, called...

LIVERMORE, Calif. (AP) - Officials at Lawrence Livermore National laboratory have added a new weapon to their armory, a high-powered gun that can fire 3,000 rounds a minute. The weapons, which are also to be installed at other facilities in the Energy Department complex, were displayed Thursday by Linton Brooks, head of the National Nuclear Security Administration. Brooks called the new weapons a way to make sure any attempt to storm the nuclear weapons lab is unsuccessful. "What we want to do is equip our protective force with the capability that will leave no doubt about the outcome," he said....