The latest research news in Physics for the media
NewswiseHere are some of the latest articles we've posted in the Physical Science channel.
Here are some of the latest articles we've posted in the Physical Science channel.
Sandia National Laboratories marked a major milestone when the Nuclear Security Enterprise successfully produced the first completely refurbished bomb for the B61-12 life extension program in November 2021. More than 5,000 employees have worked on the B61-12 life extension program at Sandia during the last decade. As part of the program, Sandia worked to refurbish, replace or reuse about 50 different components and sub-systems that make up the B61-12.
Dr. James N. Miller, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and an expert in nuclear deterrence, missile defense, cyber conflict and space policy, has been named as the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory’s (APL) Assistant Director for Policy and Analysis.
More than 50 current employees and recent retirees from ORNL received Department of Energy Secretary’s Honor Awards from Secretary Jennifer Granholm in January as part of project teams spanning the national laboratory system.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy has recently selected three Argonne scientists, Robert Hill, Bo Feng and Meimei Li, to principal roles in ushering in the next generation of nuclear reactors that could fill a crucial energy niche.
Geoscientists from Berkeley Lab and two other U.S. Department of Energy National Laboratories, Sandia and Los Alamos, are collaborating on the HotBENT project. This international field experiment is evaluating how well the natural, clay-based material (bentonite) placed around canisters of buried, high-level nuclear waste retains its safety functions when exposed to simulated long-term heating.
This is an edited transcript of Argonne’s June 29 Instagram Live interview with Dr. Kathryn Huff, the principal deputy assistant secretary and acting assistant secretary in the Office of Nuclear Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
This is an edited transcript of Argonne’s June 29 Instagram Live interview with Andrew Breshears, a principal nuclear chemist at Argonne.
A novel method to 3D print components for nuclear reactors, developed by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been licensed by Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation.
A major milestone has been achieved with the recent delivery of the first production unit (FPU) of the B61-12, meaning the refurbished bomb is on track for full-scale production in May 2022.
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced $9.25 million for research in the behavior and properties of structural materials under molten salt reactor conditions, via collaborations that enable effective use of DOE’s high performance computers.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge, Brookhaven and Idaho national laboratories and Stony Brook University have developed a novel approach to gain fundamental insights into molten salts, a heat transfer medium important to advanced energy technologies.
In March 2011, the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant was damaged by a powerful earthquake and tsunami, causing nearby lakes to be contaminated with radioactive cesium-137.
Scientists from Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories have just begun the third phase of a years-long experiment to understand how salt and very salty water behave near hot nuclear waste containers in a salt-bed repository.Salt’s unique physical properties can be used to provide safe disposal of radioactive waste, said Kristopher Kuhlman, a Sandia geoscientist and technical lead for the project.
Two PNNL interns are behind recent innovation in real-time testing and continuous monitoring for pH and the concentration of chemicals of interest in chemical solutions; outcomes have applicability not only to nuclear, but to industries.
Sandia National Laboratories launched three sounding rockets in succession on Wednesday to hasten development of 23 technologies for the nation’s hypersonic modernization priority, including the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike and the Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon programs.
More than 10 years ago, the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami damaged the Fukushima Dai-ichi Nuclear Power Plant, resulting in a massive release of radioactive material into the environment.
Researchers from the University of Bristol are leading activities with Ukrainian researchers and engineers at the Chornobyl (Chernobyl) Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) to carry out pioneering radiation mapping research inside parts of the damaged building.
The largest missile ever to launch from Sandia National Laboratories' Kauai Test Facility in Hawaii has shown the storied test range is still growing to meet the testing needs of advanced weapons systems.
A multidisciplinary team of scientists has used the National Synchrotron Light Source II (NSLS-II), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User facility located at the DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, to investigate how high-temperature molten salts corrode metal alloys.
The Compact Advanced Tokamak (CAT) concept uses physics models to show that by carefully shaping the plasma and the distribution of current in the plasma, fusion plant operators can suppress turbulent eddies in the plasma. This would reduce heat loss and allow more efficient reactor operation. This advance could help achieve self-sustaining plasma and smaller, less expensive power plants.
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists and collaborators proposed a new mechanism by which nuclear waste could spread in the environment. The new findings, that involve researchers at Penn State and Harvard Medical School, have implications for nuclear waste management and environmental chemistry.
When compounds in spent nuclear fuel break down, they can release radioactive elements into the ground and water. Scientists know that one fuel compound, neptunium dioxide, reacts with water, but they do not fully understand the process. This new study found that neptunium tends to dissolve where grains of the material come together, and larger grains are less likely to dissolve.
Nuclear war would cause many immediate fatalities, but smoke from the resulting fires would also cause climate change lasting up to 15 years that threatens worldwide food production and human health, according to a study by researchers at Rutgers University, the National Center for Atmospheric Research and other institutions.
Z machine celebrates its colorful history at Sandia
A PNNL report reflects nearly 10 years of dedication bringing together experts, including local communities and tribes, to effectively plan for the safe and uneventful removal of radioactive waste from nuclear power plant sites.
A number of new nuclear reactor designs, such as small modular reactors and non-light water reactors, have been developed over the past 10 to 15 years. In order to help the Nuclear Regulatory Commission evaluate the safety of the next generation of reactors, fuel cycle facilities and fuel technologies, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have been expanding their severe accident modeling computer code, called Melcor, to work with different reactor geometries, fuel types and coolant systems.
Before the Nazis could develop nuclear technology, Allied forces captured the uranium cubes central to Germany’s research. The fate of most is unknown, but a few are thought to be in the U.S. Scientists developing methods to confirm the cubes’ provenance will present their results at ACS Fall 2021.
Expert Q&A: Do breakthrough cases mean we will soon need COVID boosters? The extremely contagious Delta variant continues to spread, prompting mask mandates, proof of vaccination, and other measures. Media invited to ask the experts about these and related topics.
Achieving fusion ignition – the process that powers the sun, stars and thermonuclear weapons – has been a decades-long goal for inertial confinement fusion research. On Aug. 8, 2021, an experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) made a significant step toward ignition, achieving a yield of more than 1.3 megajoules (MJ). This is enabled by focusing laser light from NIF - the size of three football fields - onto a target the size of a BB that produces a hot-spot the diameter of a human hair, generating more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power for 100 trillionths of a second. This advance puts researchers at the threshold of fusion ignition, an important goal of the NIF, and opens access to a new experimental regime.
Sandia National Laboratories and its nuclear security enterprise partners recently completed the first production unit of a weapon assembly responsible for key operations of the W88 nuclear warhead.
Bradley Wallin has been named Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL’s) principal associate director (PAD) for Weapons and Complex Integration (WCI), Lab Director Kimberly Budil announced today. In this role, Wallin will lead the Laboratory's nuclear weapons program in its responsibilities to support U.S. strategic deterrence by assuring the safety, security and effectiveness of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile and by providing the science, technology and engineering capabilities and experts required to enable and advance this essential responsibility.
Nuclear power plants produce about 20% of the United States’ electricity. In order to increase the amount of carbon dioxide-free energy these plants can yield, improvements in efficiency and safety must be made. With support from $1.5 million in grants from the Department of Energy (DOE), researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute will lead projects aimed at upgrading nuclear power plants with those goals in mind. The grants are part of more than $61 million in awards recently announced by the DOE to support nuclear energy research.
LOS ALAMOS, N.M., Aug. 2, 2021- As the HPC community enters an era in which computation can be offloaded to storage devices, it is important to explore the mechanisms for using and programming these processing offloads.
A team of Sandia National Laboratories engineers developed a new testing capability in support of its nuclear weapons mission. The team completed their first combined-environments test on a full-scale weapons system at the Sandia Superfuge/Centrifuge complex in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Ten years after one of the largest nuclear accidents in history spewed radioactive contamination over the landscape in Fukushima, Japan, a University of Georgia study has shown that radioactive contamination in the Fukushima Exclusion Zone can be measured through its resident snakes.
Federal and industry-matched funding will move 11 PNNL technologies closer to commercialization where they will help bolster U.S. competitiveness.
Scientists are developing new techniques to make the most of limited data in the national security space, using explainable artificial intelligence to extract more meaning from the information in hand.
The escalating effects of climate change are evident across our country, from the damaging 2020 western wildfire season to February’s southern deep freeze. The need has never been greater for a national strategy that combines the long-term goal of a 100% clean energy future with immediate, science-driven actions to help all communities overcome the effects of climate change.
A cross-divisional effort at Argonne aims to advance portable nuclear reactor designs for places like military bases and remote communities.
A research collaboration between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Air Force Institute of Technology investigates how the neutron energy output from a nuclear device detonation can affect the deflection of an asteroid. Scientists compared the resulting asteroid deflection from two different neutron energy sources, representative of fission and fusion neutrons, allowing for side-by-side comparisons. The goal was to understand which neutron energies released from a nuclear explosion are better for deflecting an asteroid and why, potentially paving the way for optimized deflection performance.
Americans used approximately 7 percent less energy in 2020, due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to energy flow charts released by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
Experts at Sandia National Laboratories just began their second year of a project to capture important, hard-to-explain nuclear waste management knowledge from retirement-age employees to help new employees get up to speed faster.
A new study in the journal Risk Analysis suggests that countries representing more than 80 percent of potential growth in low-carbon electricity demand—in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa—may lack the economic or institutional quality to deploy nuclear power to meet their energy needs. The authors suggest that if nuclear power is to safely expand its role in mitigating climate change, countries need to radically improve their ability to manage the technology.
Researchers looking at miniscule levels of plutonium pollution in our soils have made a breakthrough which could help inform future 'clean up' operations on land around nuclear power plants, saving time and money.
The events following the Fukushima disaster, a decade ago, drew upon Berkeley Lab’s long-standing expertise in radiation measurements and safety, and led to the creation of long-term radiation-monitoring programs, both locally and in Japan, as well as a series of radiation surveys and technology demonstrations including drone- and helicopter-based surveys, and vehicle-based and hand-carried measurements.