Hazardous duty

Wednesday was the first day of competition in the lab's 14th annual Hazmat Challenge, in which 14 hazmat teams (mostly from New Mexico) converge deep in the woods on LANL property to run through eight elaborate simulations of varying hazardous-chemical scenarios.

LANL's emergency response division leader, Jeff Dare, said planning for the challenge begins each year in February or March, and setup for the exercises starts in May. Officials from the EPA and FEMA join lab workers in evaluating performance (full story—subscription or viewing of advertising is required).



The AIM interview: LANL's José Olivares

While originally organized for a single purpose: to design and build the atomic bomb, this Northern New Mexico advanced science center has played a key role in developing other modern technologies key to our national security.

About three years ago LANL’s Bioscience Division started working on small projects in algae — in New Mexico, with the Center for Excellence in Hazardous Materials Management (CEHMM), and on a DARPA project with General Atomics (full story).

LANL supercomputer simulates gulf spill spread

Los Alamos National Laboratories collaborates on a project using "Encanto," New Mexico's supercomputer, to show simulation of the Gulf Oil Spill (watch for yourself).




Spacequakes rumble near Earth

After THEMIS discovered the jets and quakes, Joachim Birn of the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico conducted a computer simulation of the rebounding process. Lo and behold, vortices appeared in good accord with THEMIS measurements (full story).




Computers show new strategies to avoid satellite collisions

Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and the Air Force Research Laboratory are collaborating to improve capabilities for detecting and monitoring space debris and other threats to space operations (full story).





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Labs' Research Awards Well-Deserved Honors

New Mexico's two premier national laboratories scored a "repeat" in a global competition for invention. Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories together tied their 2009 record, again winning nine prestigious R&D 100 Awards. Los Alamos took five and Sandia won four "Oscars of Innovation." This is the contest's 48th year (full story).

Lab security training facility seen as shot in the arm for local economy

The new training facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory could have a significant economic impact on the area. The $8.8 million facility, which will be completed by August of 2011, already has its first event set for September of 2011, officials say (full story).






Also in the Los Alamos Monitor:

‘Cool roofs’ coming to LANL
The roofs are part of the federal government’s goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Under a DOE program, the lab will be adding “cool roof” technologies — using lighter-colored roofing surfaces or special coatings to reflect the sun’s heat. The result? Less urban heat, more efficiencies, reduced cooling costs and offsetting carbon emissions. The announcement came Tuesday from U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu (full story).


D'Agostino: Los Alamos Plutonium Capability Top Priority

Testifying at the Senate Armed Services Committee's START hearing on Tuesday, July 20, 2010, National Nuclear Security Admistration chief Tom D'Agostino said upgrading Los Alamos National Laboratory's plutonium capabilities is among the agency's top priorities (full story).

Link to D’Agostino’s testimony

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Labs' Research Awards Well-Deserved Honors

New Mexico's two premier national laboratories scored a "repeat" in a global competition for invention. Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories together tied their 2009 record, again winning nine prestigious R&D 100 Awards. Los Alamos took five and Sandia won four "Oscars of Innovation." This is the contest's 48th year. (Full Story)



Lab security training facility seen as shot in the arm for local economy

The training facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory will be patterned after Y-12’s National Security Complex near Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and will include movable walls Photo by Los Alamos Monitor

The new training facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory could have a significant economic impact on the area. The $8.8 million facility, which will be completed by August of 2011, already has its first event set for September of 2011, officials say. (Full Story)


Also in the Los Alamos Monitor:

‘Cool roofs’ coming to LANL

The roofs are part of the federal government’s goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

Under a DOE program, the lab will be adding “cool roof” technologies — using lighter-colored roofing surfaces or special coatings to reflect the sun’s heat. The result? Less urban heat, more efficiencies, reduced cooling costs and offsetting carbon emissions. The announcement came Tuesday from U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu. (Full Story)



(From John Fleck’s New Mexico Science Blog)

D'Agostino: Los Alamos Plutonium Capability Top Priority

NNSA Administrator, Tom D'Agostino

Testifying at the Senate Armed Services Committee's START hearing on Tuesday, July 20, 2010, National Nuclear Security Admistration chief Tom D'Agostino said upgrading Los Alamos National Laboratory's plutonium capabilities is among the agency's top priorities. (Full Story) D’Agostino’s testimony


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Nuclear weapons laboratories say “fiscal realities” weigh on U.S. arsenal

Directors of the three U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories said today they are worried the nation’s fiscal troubles and a lack of political consensus may threaten their ability to maintain the stockpile of warheads. (Full story)

Links to written testimony by the three lab directors (Note: link only works internally)

Senate resumes New START hearings

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee opened its 12th hearing on the New Strategic Arms Treaty Thursday by welcoming testimony from U.S. nuclear lab directors. (Full story)

Alternative nuclear fuel is surprisingly reactive

Uranium nitride, a nuclear fuel that might one day offer a more efficient alternative to the uranium and plutonium oxides now used, has been given a boost by research that has illuminated its reactive properties….

Uranium nitrides are denser and more stable, and conduct heat better than mixed uranium-plutonium oxide fuels – properties that suggest the fuels could run cooler in reactors to generate more energy, says Jaqueline Kiplinger at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Now – working with Robert Thomson and other colleagues at Los Alamos, – Kiplinger has synthesised a molecule complex that is the first known to contain just a single, isolated uranium-nitride bond. (Full story)

Elusive terminal uranium nitride found

Researchers in the US have discovered a new way to create the elusive discrete form of uranium nitride. The compound is important because its ceramic state, uranium mononitride, is a candidate for nuclear fuels of the future. (Full story)

Uranium azide photolysis results in C–H bond activation and provides evidence for a terminal uranium nitride

Uranium nitride [U≡N]x is an alternative nuclear fuel that has great potential in the expanding future of nuclear power; however, very little is known about the U≡N functionality. We show, for the first time, that a terminal uranium nitride complex can be generated by photolysis of an azide (U–N=N=N) precursor. (Full story)

Lab nabs top tech awards; LANL has won 117 of these awards since 1978

A super high speed camera. Green explosives. A way to pull fuel from algae using sound waves. Those are a few of the projects that netted five top awards for Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists. (Full story)

High-tech gizmo takes high-speed, X-ray images of explosions

Mikro, a decade-old company…in Albemarle County, grabbed a piece of the spotlight last week when a project it was a part of won a prestigious contest for new innovations. The winning gizmo, developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, is a camera that can create high-resolution, high-speed X-ray images of explosions. It was one of 100 exceptional new devices announced as winners of R&D Magazine’s R&D 100 contest. (Full story)

Governments fund pilots to test smart grid potential

Smart grid technology, bringing end-to-end intelligence to electricity supply networks to better manage demand, has caught the imagination of governments, utility companies and consumers alike, in both developed and developing countries.

...New Mexico has attracted $30 million in funding over four years from Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), along with participation of 19 Japanese companies, the State of New Mexico government, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the US Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories. (Full story)

Mathematics could be anti-terror tool

U.S. researchers say those fighting the war on terrorism may soon have a new weapon to add to their arsenal -- mathematics….

"If you have a mathematical model that can describe the structure of a terror network -- and the model works -- then you can predict the future," says Alexander Gutfraind, a mathematician at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. (Full story)

Harry Potter exhibit opens in New Mexico

Los Alamos, N.M., is hosting the exhibit “Harry Potter’s World: Renaissance Science, Magic and Medicine” through Aug. 9. (Full story)

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Methane releases in arctic seas could wreak devastation

Methanotrophs like the ones pictured here might be able to prevent a massive "burp" of methane from the Arctic Ocean. LANL image.

Seafloor sediments beneath the Kara, Barents and East Siberian seas in the Arctic Ocean, as well as the Sea of Okhotsk and the Barents Sea in the North Pacific, have large reservoirs of the planet-warming greenhouse gas, says study coauthor Scott M. Elliott, a marine biogeochemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. (Full Story)


Green scum of the earth is redeemed

Microscopic image of green algae.

Los Alamos biofuels program lead and NAABB executive director, Jose Olivares, says the group is targeting technologies from start to finish - from logistics, to feedstock preparation, to conversion and, finally, to distribution.

Algae can be modified to produce high-value chemicals, Olivares explains. Some algae produce molecules called keratinoids that are chemical products used in foods and dyes. The feeding and care of algae is one of the most interesting areas of this research. (Full Story)



Ribbon at edge of solar system

An image of the pressure exerted on the heliosphere by the interstellar medium it passes through. LANL image.

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in Las Alamos, New Mexico have discovered a ribbon of solar material collected at the very edge of the solar system.

The High Energy Neutral Atom Imager on NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) has returned data showing the buildup of solar material at the very edge of the heliosphere. (Full Story)



Radioactive material removed from closed NYC hospital unit

Watch a YouTube movie about LANL's source recovery program

The NNSA is a little-publicized unit assigned to secure nuclear materials and prevent smuggling. It has a special global response team that can travel around the world when possible smuggling of nuclear materials is detected. NOTE: The offsite source recovery program is operated out of Los Alamos National Laboratory. (Full Story)



Lab excavates World War II-era landfill

News In Brief -- Los Alamos National Laboratory is excavating a six-acre landfill that lab legend says could even contain an entire truck used at the world's first test of an atomic bomb at southern New Mexico's Trinity Site in July 1945. (Full Story)


Explore World War II history at Los Alamos museum

The Bradbury Science Museum. LANL photo.

History was changed by what went on in Los Alamos, a town whose existence wasn't acknowledged during World War II while scientists and thousands of support workers developed the bombs that were eventually dropped on Japan. (Full Story)



Biomagnetics and Los Alamos National Security, LLC sign CRADA

Biomagnetics Diagnostics Corp. today announced the signing of a new Cooperative Research and Development Agreement with Los Alamos National Security, LLC for the development of a waveguide-based integrated optical biosensor platform for the detection of disease causing pathogens. (Full Story)



Pancakes on the plaza

Mark Shepard, a first-year volunteer with Los Alamos National Laboratory, flips pancakes on the plaza in Santa Fe, N.M., on July 4, 2010. (See the photo album here)




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Gates tours Los Alamos National Laboratory

DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Jerry Morrison

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates receives a tour from Michael R. Anastasio, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, right, June 30, 2010. (See the photos here)



Plutonium lab demolished

Two giant excavators - one equipped with a claw, the other with a cutting shear - tore through the walls and ceiling on one of Los Alamos National Laboratory's most historically significant buildings Tuesday.

The demolition, part of continuing Recovery-Act-funded cleanup of LANL's Technical Area 21, was making its way through DP West, where plutonium cores for bombs were made from 1945 through 1978. For years, it was the only such facility in the world. (Full Story - nonsubscribers may be required to view an advertisement)

Also in the Journal this week:

Sandia official aids oil spill effort

Crews aboard vessels around the drillship Discoverer Enterprise continue operations to minimize the impact from the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Reuters photo.

Mobile X-ray equipment is routinely used in oil fields, but the equipment was not sensitive enough to reveal what the engineers needed to know about the crimped pipe.

Nuclear weapon scientists routinely use powerful X-rays to study metal objects, so the team brought in experts and equipment from Los Alamos to help, Said Tom Hunter, head of the team of U.S. national lab scientists working on the problem. (Full Story - nonsubscribers may be required to view an advertisement)



Neutrino experiments sow seeds of possible revolution

Adjusting phototubes from the MiniBooNE experiment. FermiLab photo

There's about a 3 percent chance the MiniBooNE finding is a fluke. However, it matches findings, earlier refuted, from the Liquid Scintillator Neutrino Detector experiment, which operated at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico during the 1990s. (Full Story)



Scientists decode genome sequence of jute

A flowering jute plant

Agriculture Minister Matia Chowdhury, Dr Maqsudul Alam, Prof. Emeritus Dr Mohd. Zawawi Ismail, Chairman of the Board of University Sains Malaysia, and world famous genome scientist Dr Chris Detter of Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA also spoke on the occasion. (Full Story)




Excavation at Manhattan Project landfill begins

The Los Alamos National Laboratory began excavating a World War II era landfill on Thursday that could contain an entire truck used at the Trinity atomic bomb test. (Full Story)




'Next Big Idea' fest aims to spark interest among NM youth
in science, technology as future career path

Future Inventors at the Next Big Idea Festival 2009

The Next Big Idea is sponsored by Los Alamos Main Street, Los Alamos National Bank, Los Alamos National Securities LLC, Compa Industries Inc, Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation, Innovate-Educate New Mexico and New Mexico Consortium, among others. (Full Story)




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