Science: The US Department of Energy (DOE) will accept proposals this week for a Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB), an accelerator to make fleeting nuclei never before produced outside stellar explosions. Gelbke and colleagues want to build FRIB at Michigan State's National
Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, a facility already pursuing such work with 300 employees and an annual budget of $20 million from the US National Science Foundation (NSF). But researchers from Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois also want to host the machine. Argonne is a DOE lab with a staff of 2800 and a $530 million budget. DOE says
it will decide by year's end.
Chicago Tribune: Through the Internet, hundreds try to unlock meaning of mysterious missive
Science: To make a new collider, physicists in Japan plan to push an existing machine to its limits. Others in Italy hope to cobble one together from old parts and a bright idea
Science: The United States's last particle physics lab finds itself in turmoil, with its current experiments soon to wind down and nothing under construction to replace them. Physicists wonder whether the lab--and particle physics in the United States--will survive
Houston Chronicle: Oil and gas may be the prime mover in Houston's economy, but a growing wind power business is proving there's more than one way to spell "energy" in the Bayou City.
Houston is already home to a handful of major wind power project developers, including those owned by oil and gas giants BP and Shell, thanks in large part to the state's ample wind resources, renewable energy incentives created by lawmakers and competitive power markets.
And the industry blew this way again Monday when Danish powerhouse Vestas Wind Systems said it will open its first U.S. research and development facility here. The office will open in 2009 and grow to about 100 researchers by early 2010, not including support staff, with more positions likely to come. [From Danish wind power giant to open Houston research center | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle]
Chemical & Engineering News: To contain costs, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) laid off 440 permanent career employees, including 164 scientists, on May 22 and 23, lab spokeswoman Susan M. Houghton says. This is the first time since 1973 that the lab has laid off permanent staff, she adds.
Physics Today: The Department of Energy announced today that the Princeton University-based National Compact Stellarator Experiment has been canceled. The news was delivered in person by Raymond Fonck, DOE associate director for fusion energy sciences.
 "In late 2006, it became clear that the NCSX construction project would not be able to meet its approved baseline total project cost of $102M or its completion date of July 2009," said Undersecretary for Science Raymond Orbach in a statement. Since then the DOE, Princeton University, and thePrinceton Plasma Physics Laboratory have been reviewing options for the project and PPPL. They concluded that "the budget increases, schedule delays and continuing uncertainties of the NCSX construction project necessitate its closure," said Orbach. The new proposed cost for NCSX was $170 million and its new start date was August 2013, which would have put research at PPPL in peril, said an April 2008 Office of Science report.
"PPPL's future as a world-leading center of fusion energy and plasma sciences is more assured by a renewed focus on the successful Spherical Torus confinement concept," added Orbach. Under the existing construction proposal for NCSX, the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) would have had to close, which would have had implications for US involvement in the ITER fusion project.
"The Spherical Torus is closely related to the [ITER] tokamak, and experiments planned for the next several years in the NSTX facility promise many exciting discoveries that should directly impact our ability to understand the new plasma regimes expected in ITER," says Orbach. "Proposed upgrades for [NSTX] can keep this facility at the forefront of fusion science research... well into the future."
Las Cruces Sun-News: The cost of a planned new nuclear materials lab at Los Alamos National Laboratory is climbing. A U.S. Senate report estimates the cost at $2.6 billion—more than four times the initial estimate in 2003. The new number was included in the Senate Armed Services Committee's report on the fiscal year 2009 budget. The committee recommended cutting funding for the project because of uncertainty of what it will cost to meet safety requirements for the project proposed by the lab and the National Nuclear Security Administration. The committee's action to oppose funding for the new lab is the first of four key congressional committee votes that will determine the fate of the project.
Baltimore Sun: NASA has awarded the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Lab $750 million to develop an Solar Probe mission, which will study the streams of charged particles the sun hurls into space from a vantage point within the sun’s corona – its outer atmosphere – where the processes that heat the corona and produce solar wind occur. At closest approach Solar Probe would zip past the sun at 125 miles per second, protected by a carbon-composite heat shield that must withstand up to 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit and survive blasts of radiation and energized dust at levels not experienced by any previous spacecraft. Launch is planned for 2015, with the craft's first solar flyby just three months later - thanks to a boost from the sun's gravity.
The Sunday Times: A fusion laboratory designed to recreate the temperatures and pressures inside the sun could be built in Oxfordshire under plans being drawn up by British scientists The aim is to build the world’s most powerful lasers and use them to blast tiny pellets of hydrogen fuel to create energy. The process could, say the researchers, be a partial solution to the world’s energy crisis, offering a source of safe, carbon-free power with a minimum of radio-active waste. “The aim is to destroy matter by turning it into pure energy,” said Dr John Collier, head of the high power laser programme (HiPER) at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, which was launched last week. “This is the same process that powers the stars. Our task is to find how to control it to offer humanity a new source of energy.” HiPER, would place Britain at the forefront of research on nuclear fusion, now enjoying a global revival after decades of neglect. The Rutherford laboratory, in Harwell, Oxfordshire, is seen as the most likely site.
Knoxville News Sentinel: New Scientist magazine is reporting that problems with a super-secret material manufactured at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant are what's holding up efforts to refurbish W76 warheads, which are deployed on Trident missiles.
According to the magazine's report by Rob Edwards, the material is code-named "Fogbank" and is extremely hazardous. It is reportedly produced at Y-12's new Purification Facility, a $50 million facility that was completed in mid-2005.
Meanwhile Air Force General Kevin Chilton, head of U.S. Strategic Command, is pressing Congress to accelerate plans for a feasibility study of the Reliable Replacement Warhead (RRW) program. Chilton says that the study is crucial to advise the incoming president next year on how best to modernize the atomic arsenal.
Science Progress: Dr. Raymond Orbach, Undersecretary for Science at the DOE and C.H. Albright Jr., Undersecretary of Energy at the DOE snubbed the House Committee on Science and Technology’s Subcommittee on Energy and Environment hearing at the last moment on Wednesday, suggesting that the subcommittee unfairly changed its protocol to allow outside experts at the budget hearing, a policy not approved by the DOE.
The New York Times: If two scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory are correct, people will still be driving gasoline-powered cars 50 years from now, churning out heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — and yet that carbon dioxide will not contribute to global warming.
The New York Times: Scientists there say they have developed a way to produce truly carbon-neutral fuel and useful organic chemicals at large scale using water and carbon dioxide removed from the air as raw materials. There are plenty of schemes brewing to capture carbon dioxide, both directly from the atmosphere and from the stacks of power plants. All of them, for the moment, are costly or hard to envision at the billion-tons-a-year scale that would be needed to blunt the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere coming mainly from fuel burning.
Tri-city Herald: A couple of nuclear materials mishaps and a high-level tiff about rebidding the management contract for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory hurt the national lab operator's annual evaluation, the Department of Energy announced Thursday.
Chicago Tribune: Good budgetary news from Washington this week won't prevent layoffs of about 200 employees at Fermilab, the lab's director on Tuesday told employees who will soon be notified as to who will lose jobs.
Government Technology: New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson today unveiled New Mexico's new supercomputer -- the 3rd fastest in the world. The supercomputer, named "Encanto" which means "enchanted," is housed at Intel Corp. in Rio Rancho.
Photonics.com: With federal funding for high energy physics in the US unexpectedly reduced by $94 million for 2008, officials at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) said the lab may have to lay off about 10 percent of its work force next spring(see earlier news picks such as Fermilab to cut 200 jobs, staff forced to take unpaid days off, Budget blow to US science, Federal cuts may doom Fermilab's bid for ILC). The lab also announced this week that rolling furloughs will begin Feb. 1 for all of its nearly 2000 employees. Argonne National Laboratory said the budget shortfall has shut down its neutron-scattering facility and will mean job cuts.
Continue reading "Fermilab to Begin Furloughs on Friday" »
Daily Herald: For about a year, a team of residents, scientists and local government officials has plugged away at a task: helping Fermilab in Batavia figure out what it would take for residents to accept construction of a massive underground tube -- essentially an underground lab to study physics.
Physics Today: Fermilab Director Pier Oddone informed the laboratory's staff Thursday the implications of the proposed FY08 federal budget on the facility. Congress changed Fermilab's proposed budget from $372 million to $320 million--a cut of $52 million. The budget cuts are because of $22 billion in savings Congress had to make in order for the President not to veto the budget.
Continue reading "Fermilab to cut 200 jobs, staff forced to take unpaid days off" »
InsideBayArea.com: The Department of Energy revealed draft plans Tuesday to consolidate nuclear weapons work at eight sites, including Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories, a move that could result in a 20 to 30 percent reduction in work force and the closing of 600 buildings.
ABC7: Los Alamos National Laboratory reports about 450 people have applied to voluntarily leave their jobs at the lab. Lab employees who decide to voluntarily leave had until yesterday to submit their applications. The move is in light of a $170 million shortfall in LANL's budget, brought about by budget cuts and the transfer to a new for-profit management company to run the lab. Both LANL and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are expected to between 450-750 job cuts each over the coming year.
ABC News: Oak Ridge National Laboratory says breach could have compromised visitor information
The Associated Press: The nation's nuclear weapons laboratories need tougher safety oversight to fix a recent track record that includes dozens of lapses, accidents and near misses, according to a government report released Wednesday.
Los Angeles Times: One of the nation's premier nuclear weapons labs plans to cut about 500 jobs because of rising costs stemming from a changeover in management and potential federal budget cuts.
PublicTechnology.net: Smashing protons together is very hard to do and, when it is done, 15 petabytes of data will be generated annually and stored on tape.
CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's largest high-energy physics research establishment and approximately half of the world's particle physicists use its facilities. It has embarked on a multi-year effort to find and observe some of the most elusive particles in sub-atomic physics. To find them, CERN is building the largest and highest-energy particle accelerator in the world at its Geneva headquarters. This is the LHC, the Large Hadron Collider (protons belong to a class of subatomic particles called hadrons).
Nature: How do nuclear inspectors working for the International Atomic Energy Agency know when all is not as they are told? Geoff Brumfiel joins some inspectors-in-training as they learn the ropes at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Various: 30 feet under Chicago's suburbs, the Tevatron is colliding protons and antiprotons, smashing beams together at energies of up to 1.8 TeV (the acronym that gave the Tevatron its name). The Tevatron will soon be replaced by CERN's 14 TeV Large Hadron Collider that should easily see the Higgs Boson, one of the founding blocks of the Standard Model of particle physics. But rumors are flying around that the Tevatron's DZero detector has seen something interesting, maybe a fleeting hint of the Higgs Boson, something interesting enough to extend operations into 2009 and maybe into 2010. "It's a good story now for physics," Pier Oddone, Fermilab's director, told MSNBC's Alan Boyle last week. John Ellis for one, is not so sure that the Tevatron will see the Higgs, as he stated in a recent Nature article. Meanwhile CERN is preparing for the vast qualities of data the LHC will produce when it starts engineering trials next year. . The data generated during the project is expected to dwarf every other scientific experiment in history, amounting to 15 petabytes a year. Chris Mellor at Techworld magazine looks at how CERN will manage and analyze the vast qualities of data produced. There are also rumors flying around that experiments with the LHC will be delayed until 2009, one year later than currently scheduled due to engineering difficulties.
Photonics.com: In light of a Mars Science Laboratory budget overrun estimated at $75 million, NASA has cut off funding for some instruments, capped funding for others or eliminated them from the mission entirely. Among those no longer receiving space agency money is the ChemCam, a combination laser-telescope unit under construction at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) that is more than 90 percent complete.
Chicago Daily Southtown: In a steel warehouse on the grounds of Argonne National Laboratory, a battery in a metal case roughly the size of a filing cabinet sits wired to a computer.
Albuquerque Tribune: If Los Alamos National Laboratory were to endorse its latest law enforcement gadget with an infomercial, a booming voice might shout out the following:
"It scans, swipes, tracks GPS locations, sends data, takes pictures and even has an LED flashlight attachment."
Azom.com: The Sandia National Laboratories Pulsed Reactor (SPR) rides off into the sunset, headed toward Nevada. It leaves behind the operators who are sad to see such an important part of Sandia National Laboratories’ work and history leaving the Labs.
Nature: In April, planetary scientist Alan Stern joined NASA as associate administrator for science, putting him in charge of the agency's $5.5-billion science budget. Nature's Alexandra Witze interviews Stern about how he will juggle more than 90 space missions and 3,000 grants with focuses ranging from Earth to the distant Universe.
CERN Courier: Repairs to the magnets that have caused so much trouble at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN have passed the pressure tests that caused the unaltered magnets to lurch out of position (see an upcoming story in the September issue of Physics Today for more information about the LHC's delayed schedule).
Chicago Tribune: A proposed $500 million particle accelerator could help it land an even bigger project
CNET: At Los Alamos National Lab, scientists are working on ways to keep the world safe from weapons of mass destruction
The New York Times: For physicists, this is a summer of rumors, hope and hype as rival collaborations race to capture the legendary particle known as the Higgs boson.
Santa Fe New Mexican: Airborne releases of plutonium at Los Alamos National Laboratory could be about 59 times higher than what was officially reported during the Cold War, a health scientist told the public Wednesday evening.
Chicago Tribune: Well-known scientist returns to lead push for exotic-beam facility
Santa Fe New Mexican: Investigators have found higher than expected levels of radioactive dust in homes and businesses from White Rock to Picuris Pueblo and are calling for more aggressive monitoring of airborne contaminants — a potential health risk — in the area around Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Houston Chronicle: Los Alamos National Laboratory has delivered to the federal government the first plutonium core certified for use in nuclear warheads in 18 years.
Computerworld: Several officials at the company that manages security at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) used unprotected e-mail networks earlier this year to share highly classified information related to the characteristics of materials used in nuclear weapons.
Albuquerque Tribune: Just about every year the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee adds money for water projects and cuts the president's budget for funding nuclear weapons and facilities and thus the budgets for New Mexico's two weapons laboratories, Los Alamos and Sandia.
The California Aggie Online: Four construction and development corporations to manage lab collectively with UC
Santa Fe New Mexican: The federal government has put the brakes on a proposed billion-dollar Los Alamos plutonium lab due to concerns over rising cost estimates and congressional skepticism.
San Francisco Chronicle: The University of California kept its $1.7 billion contract to manage Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for at least the next seven years by creating a partnership with private companies and underbidding its chief competition, defense giant Northrop Grumman.
The New York Times:
THERE’S nothing unusual about grown men gathering around wide-screen TVs to watch collisions, whether between players in cleats or on skates or between cars on a racetrack.
But a group of men viewing wide-screen monitors in a control room at Brookhaven National Laboratory the other day were rooting for very different collisions, ones made by the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, or RHIC (pronounced rick).
USA Today: The world's most ambitious particle collider — which scientists hope could reveal what matter is made of — might not be fully functional until next year, months after its scheduled start-up date, officials at the European Organization for Nuclear Research said Thursday.
Scientists have been scrambling to redesign a key U.S.-built part of the collider — located in a tunnel deep beneath the Swiss and French countryside outside Geneva — that broke "with a loud bang and a cloud of dust" during a high-pressure test for the collider last month.
Officials at the organization, known by the French initials CERN, said the possible delays are the result of the magnet failure and cooling processes that have been slower than expected for the 17-mile tunnel.
The aim of the CERN experiment is to make subatomic particles — in this case protons — travel at nearly the speed of light until they collide, emitting a shower of even smaller particles that will reveal mysteries about the makeup of matter.
"It's possible now, even likely that the November date will fall off the map and we will be going straight into high energy running next spring," CERN spokesman James Gillies said. "We're mostly there, actually. There are problems happening here and there and it would be strange if there weren't at a project of this magnitude."
R&D magazine: Stanford Univ. and the U.S. Dept. of Energy are looking to ‘turn conventional wisdom on its head’ with the LINAC Coherent Light Source.
About seven months ago, the Dept. of Energy’s (DOE) Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC), Menlo Park, Calif., broke ground for the linear accelerator (LINAC) Coherent Light Source (LCLS). The project is an extremely powerful, $400-million laser, designed to photograph molecules and chemical reactions that previously were impossible to see. And, although excavation crews have not completed boring through the sandstone to complete the new tunnel for the LCLS, collaborators of the project have taken a major step into making it a reality.
Daily Press: The physics research site will offer public demonstrations Saturday, hoping that visitors find science cool.
Houston Chronicle: The names and Social Security numbers of 550 Los Alamos National Laboratory workers were posted on a Web site run by a subcontractor working on a security system for the lab.
cbs5.com: Although some activists, community members and the Tracy City Council have voiced their opposition to a proposed plan to build a national bio and agro defense facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, site 300, lab spokesman Steve Wampler said Tuesday that there is also a great deal of support for the project.
Santa Fe New Mexican: New Mexicans are very familiar with this country's leading proponent of nuclear power -- U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, a Republican from Albuquerque.
Domenici is not shy about his vision: An advanced research center at Los Alamos National Laboratory to study new technology; a fuel recycling center to take partially spent nuclear fuel and reprocess it into something that can be burned; and a burner reactor that would produce electricity from this newly processed fuel.
NPR: The cows grazing by the roads outside Geneva, Switzerland, have witnessed some pretty strange things these past few years: Trucks roll by carrying big, superconducting magnets that look like missiles, and other brightly colored pieces of scientific equipment. The pieces are all taken to warehouse-sized buildings, where they disappear down shafts that reach 300 feet into the earth.
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