The Secretary of Energy and the department’s top nuclear-weapons official were to brief press at 10:00 a.m. Eastern on Tuesday about what media reported is a record-setting energy output at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The briefing was to be livestreamed.
The National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Livermore’s California campus aids with nuclear weapon design and maintenance in an age when the U.S. adheres to a voluntary moratorium on nuclear-explosive testing. The facility uses its bank of high-powered lasers to simulate the conditions of a nuclear explosion on small test pellets called targets.
As an off-label use of sorts, the Department of Energy and Livermore have touted NIF’s ability to provide insight into the physics of nuclear fusion, which many hope could one day be applied to create an efficient and clean source of electrical power.
That long hoped-for breakthrough is not the announcement Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm and the leadership of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were expected to make on Tuesday at Department of Energy headquarters in Washington, however.
As first reported by the Financial Times, Granholm and NNSA’s Jill Hruby, the administrator, and Marvin Adams, NNSA’s deputy administrator for defense programs, are expected to be on hand to discuss a recent NIF experiment that yielded 2.5 megajoules of energy from a laser-bank shot of 2.1 megajoules. That does not include all of the power that the lasers required in order to charge up for their 2.1-megajoule shot.
In a recent appearance hosted by non-government groups, Hruby said the NNSA is moving to comply with a directive in the Joe Biden administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, publicly released in unclassified form in October, to create a Science and Technology Innovation Initiative that will among other things help the agency chart a course for creating “new and replacement science facilities.”
NIF is among the NNSA’s fundamental nuclear physics experimental facilities, as are the Z Pulsed Power Facility at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M., and the Laboratory for Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester in Brighton, N.Y.
Multiple NNSA-funded institutions have proposed new or follow-on science facilities, but “[w]e currently don’t have enough money in the five-year plan to start too many of those,” Hruby said Dec 1 in a webcast presentation hosted by the Advanced Nuclear Weapons Alliance and the Hudson Institute. “NIF needs a phase two. We need to do something about Z.”