Recently in US national labs Category

Nature News: Last week, US particle physicists staked their claim in a daring new venture to develop the next generation of accelerators by proposing the world's first muon collider.

The collider could overtake two more-mature concepts, each of which plan to smash together electrons and positrons that have been accelerated through long, straight tunnels.

But some physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, are concerned about the expense and feasibility of the linear colliders, and question whether they would push the boundaries of physics beyond what the Large Hadron Collider is expected to achieve.

They are now trying to rally enthusiasm for a collider that smashes muons, a particle that is about 200 times more massive than the electron.

Related Link
Next-generation atom smashers: Smaller, cheaper and super powerful Wired.com

Slate Magazine: Communicating the dangers of nuclear waste to unfathomably remote descendants may seem like a topic best left to third-drink philosophers in dorm rooms.

It's actually been left to the US Department of Energy.

According to government guidelines, DoE must plan for the continuing safety of nuclear waste sites over the next 10 millenniums.

So in 1991, the department (through Sandia National Laboratories) hired 13 linguists, scientists, and anthropologists at a cost of about $1 million to devise a conceptual plan for a 10,000-year marker system.

The summary report, dryly titled "Expert Judgment on Markers To Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion Into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant," was published in 1993.

The report takes seriously the quixotic goal of warning far-off civilizations and ultimately proposes a system as elaborate as it is futile says Slate's Juliet Lapidos.

Science Progress: When Mary Ann Mason was graduate dean at the University of California, Berkeley, a frequent question she heard from women graduate students was "when is a good time to have a baby?"

For women in academic science careers, the conventional wisdom was that waiting until she had achieved tenure was the best approach.

In 1985, the national average age of scientists winning tenure was 36. But by 2003, it was over 39.

"So it's increasingly poor advice to wait until you get to tenure," she says.

Her belief is that women researchers should be able to have children whenever they want, and her new report, co-authored with colleagues Marc Goulden and Karie Frasch, explains the work-family policies that are driving women out of the academic pipeline.

Their data, taken from extensive surveys of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers within the University of California system, shows that work-life issues, and particularly decisions about when to get married and when to have children, account for the most significant loss of academic scientists in the pipeline between PhD and tenured positions.

"The leak is almost entirely, or least due primarily to family formation," said Mason, who is currently a professor and co-faculty director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic, and Family Security at the UC Berkeley.

Science Progress has a podcast discussing these issues with the authors of the study.

latimes.com: A big earthquake and resultant fire could trigger potentially deadly releases of radioactive materials from Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico due to "major deficiencies" in the nuclear weapons lab's safety planning, federal safety experts warned Tuesday.

The warning from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board was sent to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, urging him to "execute both immediate and long-term actions."

Various: No one knows for sure what is buried in the Manhattan Project-era dump at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico says the New York Times.

...At the very least, there is probably a truck down there that was contaminated in 1945 at the Trinity test site, where the world’s first nuclear explosion seared the sky and melted the desert sand 200 miles south of here during World War II.

But now a team of workers is using $212 million in federal stimulus money to clean up the 65-year-old, six-acre dump, which was used by the scientists who built the world’s first atomic bomb.

They are approaching the job like an archeological dig—only with even greater care, since some of the things they unearth are likely to be radioactive, while others may be explosive...

Cheryl Rofer, a former Los Alamos scientist points out that some of the extra care concerning explosives may be unwarranted. LANL used to blow up old explosives on a frequent basis in the area close to the dump, and Rofer suspects that:

...that the 1970s interview contained a comment by the old-timer that they disposed of explosives out there. The interviewer, accustomed to the practice of burying things in pits, took this to mean that the explosives were buried and wrote that down. The Los Alamos environmental restoration program, and now the New York Times, live with that to this day.

NPR: NASA is running out of the special kind of plutonium needed to power deep space probes, worrying planetary scientists who say the US urgently needs to restart production of plutonium-238.

But it's unclear whether Congress will provide the $30 million that the administration requested earlier this year for the Department of Energy to get a new program going.

NPR: Steven Chu is an optimist. The secretary of energy, who won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997, believes science can solve many of the nation's energy challenges.

"Scientists by their nature are very optimistic," he said. "We learn about Newton, about Maxwell, about Einstein. And yet you want to do some science that can contribute on the shoulders of those giants—you've got to be pretty optimistic.

"That doesn't mean I'm a cockeyed optimist," he cautioned. "You've still got to come up with the goods."

Chu knows cleaner coal, new nuclear power plants, more renewable energy will take time. In a conversation with NPR's Steve Inskeep, he lays out ambitious plans for the country's energy future.

Naturejobs: Scientists, postdocs, and students planning to travel to the US to work or study need two things before applying for a visa: time and patience.

Despite recent efforts by federal agencies to improve and accelerate the visa-application process—including adding staff and setting shorter waiting times—it still needs legislative and regulatory reform, say those who are familiar with the system. Many consider it to be a labyrinthine muddle of requirements and regulations. Delays of up to half a year are not uncommon, even with the processing improvements brought in to clear the backlog and speed procedures after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 forced a visa clampdown.

CNET News: New research being developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, could reduce the size of proton accelerator machines from that of a football field to that of a traditional X-ray machine.

The smaller size and cost could increase the availability of proton therapy treatments.

Related Link
Electromagnetic and Thermal Simulations for the Switch Region of a Compact Proton Accelerator

Various: NOνA is a collaboration of 180 scientists and engineers from 28 institutions which plans to study neutrino oscillations using the existing NuMI neutrino beam at Fermilab. The NOνA experiment is designed to search for oscillations of muon neutrinos to electron neutrinos by comparing the electron neutrino event rate measured at the Fermilab site with the electron neutrino event rate measured at a location just south of International Falls, Minnesota, 810 kilometers distant from Fermilab. If oscillations occur, the far site will see the appearance of electrons in the muon neutrino beam produced at Fermilab.

As the Washington Post describes it in this story:

Scientists are playing an exotic game of pitch and catch between Illinois and Minnesota. Their catcher's mitt is solid iron, weighs 5,500 tons, and is parked in northern Minnesota in an abandoned iron mine. With millions of dollars from the federal stimulus package, construction crews are now building a second mitt near the Canadian border. It's even heavier, some 15,000 tons, and is made of 385,000 liquid-filled cells of PVC plastic.

Five hundred miles to the south is the pitcher: Fermilab, a sprawling U.S. government laboratory west of Chicago where physicists do violent things with tiny particles.

2009 AIP Industrial Physics Forum: Joseph Lykken of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory describes the many ways in which particle accelerators are used today, and what we will expect the next generation of accelerators to do.

San Francisco Business Times: Lawrence Livermore and Sandia National Laboratories—longtime secretive federal agencies working on classified weapons programs—are about to throw open their doors to the private sector.

The labs are pursuing better ways of commercializing their technology with other-than-weapons applications. They are partnering with the private sector in new ways and pushing for an open campus on 50 acres to help the labs better collaborate with the best and brightest.

In addition, the two Livermore-based labs are working with the local business council, consulting with MBA students, and launching a formal “hub” program to partner with the transportation industry.

The shift could mean a transformation of the role the labs play in the Tri-Valley and the Bay Area economy, creating an economic engine with tech transfer capabilities that rival those of University of California, San Francisco and UC Berkeley.

Various: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Bevatron, built by the Atomic Energy Commission—the forerunner of the Department of Energy—in the early 1950s, is slowly being demolished thanks to $74 million of stimulus funding. Soon, by 2011, all traces of it will be gone reports Wired magazine.

LBNL has a flicker photo galley of the Bevatron, some of which are posted below.

The 10,000 ton Bevatron is a weak focusing synchrotron that was closely watched by Physics Today, both during construction and for the scientific results it produced.

Paul Dirac had predicted the existence of antimatter in the 1930s and the Bevatron's mission—as the most powerful accelerator in the world—was to discover the antiproton (which it did) and explore the fundamental physics behind hadrons using beams of 6.2-GeV protons.

The Bevatron had a number of upgrades during its lifetime in an attempt to regain its status as one of the most powerful synchrotrons in the world, and to continue to do interesting science.

In 1960 the Bevatron had a three-year upgrade which cost more than the initial construction ($9.6 million) and increased the intensity of the proton beam by a factor of four. In 1967, metal fatigue shut the Bevatron down for three months while repairs were made. In the early 1970s the accelerator switched to nitrogen ions, which were more energetic than the protons initially used in the accelerator, and made the Bevatron more attractive to the biological sciences.

By linking parts of the Bevatron with other equipment at LBNL— the SuperHILAC serving as the injector and the Bevatron as an accelerator—the Bevalac accelerator was created in 1974 which led to a completely new field of research: relativistic heavy-ion reactions. This time carbon-12 ions were injected into the ring (reaching 2.1 GeV), which regained LBNL's reputation of having the most powerful heavy-ion accelerator in the world.

Improvements to the Bevalac continued well into the 1980s. In 1982 new upgrades, which included a new vacuum system for the Bevatron, allowed the Bevalac to accelerate uranium ions.

In science, research at the Bevatron led to at least four Nobel Prizes, one for the discovery of the antiproton by Emilio Segré and Owen Chamberlain.

The Bevatron's beam was finally turned off in 1993 by one of the people who built it: Edward Lofgren.

Related Physics Today articles
Bevatron Launched (1954)
During the next three years (1961)
The Bevatron Reactivated (1963)
Bevatron Shut Down 3 Months: Metal Fatigue in Alternator (1967)
Long-lived kaon shows no 2-muon decay (1971)
Two accelerators switch to nitrogen ions (1971)
Conflicting evidence for K-meson decay (1972)
Bevalac makes a successful debut (1974)
Bevalac accelerates uranium (1982)
Probing Dense Nuclear Matter in the Laboratory (1993)

Los Angeles Times: A decade-long effort to refurbish thousands of aging nuclear warheads built more than 20-years-ago has run into serious technical problems that have forced delays.

The $200-million-a-year refurbishment program involves a type of warhead known as the W76, which is used on the Navy's Trident missile system and makes up more than half of the deployed warheads in the US stockpile.

In February, the Energy department's National Nuclear Security Administration announced that the "first refurbished W76 nuclear warhead had been accepted into the US nuclear weapons stockpile by the Navy."

But no delivery was ever made. The warhead is still in pieces at the Energy Department's Pantex plant in Amarillo, Texas, according to an engineer at the facility.

The hold-up in deploying the warhead is not connected to any missing expertise regarding how to build a nuclear device, but how to manufacture one of the other warhead components. Delays in the program could extend the refurbishment program by another 10 years.

The Daily Telegraph: Steven Chu, the US Energy Secretary, has proposed fitting white roofs to buildings in over to save energy and money on air conditioning by deflecting the sun's rays.

More pale surfaces could also slow global warming by reflecting heat into space rather than allowing it to be absorbed by dark surfaces where it is trapped by greenhouse gases and increases temperatures.

In a wide-ranging discussion at the three-day Nobel laureate Symposium in London, Chu described climate change as a "crisis situation", and called for a whole host of measures to be introduced, from promoting energy efficiency to renewable energy such as wind, wave and solar.

Chu's comments are backed up by research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory which suggests white roofs can cut energy bills by 20%.

New York Times: The $3.5 billion National Ignition Facility, which houses the world's most powerful laser, as well as the largest optical instrument ever built, will be officially opened on Friday.

The project's director, Ed Moses, said that getting to the cusp of ignition (defined as the successful achievement of fusion) had taken some 7,000 workers and 3,000 contractors a dozen years, their labors creating a precision colossus of millions of parts and 60,000 points of control, 30 times as many as on the space shuttle.

In February, NIF test fired the192 lasers--made of nearly 60 miles of mirrors and fiber optics, crystals and light amplifiers--into its target chamber. Inside the chamber a small fleck of hydrogen fuel, smaller than a match head, was pulverized for the first time.

Compressed and heated to temperatures hotter than those of the core of a star, the hydrogen atoms will fuse into helium, releasing bursts of thermonuclear energy.

But raising its energies still further to the point of ignition could take a year or more of experimentation and might, officials concede, prove daunting and perhaps impossible.

Physics Today: Herbert Frank York (24 November 1921-19 May 2009), an eminent nuclear physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, provided decades of advice to government on science and arms control issues, and founding chancellor of the University of California, San Diego (1961-1964) died on Tuesday at Thornton Hospital in San Diego after a long illness. He was 87.

UC San Diego Chancellor Marye Anne Fox said, "Herb was not only a leader of UC San Diego, he also was a world leader and had a global impact. During his exceptional, long-standing career, he was the 'first' in many of the positions he held. Herb York made this campus and this world a better place. We will forever be grateful for his leadership and vision."

Harold Brown, Secretary of Defense under President Carter and one of York's closest friends, said, "Herb York's life was an unsurpassed record of achievement in science, education and national security. He played the leading role in creating a series of innovative and crucial institutions--a nuclear laboratory, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, a UC campus, the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. In the national government, in California, and in international meetings and negotiations, he was dedicated to peace while being realistic about security needs. Beyond the public record, all of us who knew him as a friend appreciated his omnivorous interest in the world around him, dedication to his family, great sense of humor and zest for life; for us, the loss is both intensified and redeemed by our recognition of the model he provided."

"Herb and I have been friends since 1948 and our lives have been intertwined ever since," said Marvin Goldberger, former dean of UC San Diego's Division of Natural Sciences and former president of Caltech. "By the time Herb was only 28 years old, he had been appointed director of the Livermore Laboratory. That was the start of Herb's career of public service at the highest levels of government and academe. He was an effective voice for science within the White House and enormously effective as the first chancellor of UC San Diego."

Mark Thiemens, dean of UC San Diego's Division of Physical Sciences, noted "Herb is one of the most remarkable and influential scientists I have ever met. Whenever I pick up a book on the history of science policy in the United States, a history of the Manhattan Project, or a history of fundamental physics, Herb is featured prominently. He played an integral role in creating our nation's science agencies--the NSF, NASA and the Department of Energy--as well as an integral role in developing UC San Diego into a world renowned university."

Speaking for the family, York's oldest daughter, Rachel, said, "We are so grateful that Dad died in the embrace of the university he loved so very much, and was so very proud of."

UC's long association with York

York first came to the UC system in 1943 when he was recruited to join the staff of the University of California Radiation Laboratory (UCRL) at Berkeley. Under the auspices of the UCRL, York was dispatched to work on the top-secret Manhattan Project, where a group of scientists designed the first atomic bomb - the bomb detonated over Hiroshima, Japan.

In a memoir, York wrote that his contribution to the bomb's development had not been all that profound, but that he still felt triumphant: "Not only did we complete the project, but we ended the war."

Ending the war, or better yet, not starting one, was eventually to become a cause York advocated the better part of his life.

York received his B.S. and M.S. degrees, both in the same year, at the University of Rochester. At the end of World War II, York returned to UC Berkeley as a graduate student, received a doctorate in physics in 1949, stayed on as research physicist, then joined the physics department in 1951 as an assistant professor. Life in academia was short-lived, as once again he was recruited to a more urgent mission. From July 1952, to March 1958, York initiated and directed the UC Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, overseeing research programs which included development of the hydrogen bomb and other classified programs under the sponsorship of the Atomic Energy Commission.

In March of 1958, York became the first chief scientist of the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon, Washington, DC In December of that year, President Eisenhower appointed him the first director of Defense Research and Engineering, serving as civilian supervisor of missile and space research.

It was during these duties in the 1950s that York's belief that ending a war was done most effectively by not starting one sharpened, and turned him emphatically to arms control and to a nuclear test ban as a first step. "I was the only senior official who thought it (arms control and nuclear test ban) was a great idea," York later said. "Others were tolerant of it, but the majority thought it was really dumb."

York returned to academia in 1961 when UC established a campus in La Jolla. UC President Clark Kerr turned to York as someone with a solid record of administration and good rapport with the Board of Regents. York was named chancellor 17 February 1961, and assumed office in July that year.

In his slightly more than three years as UCSD chancellor, York worked with faculty committees planning to expand the campus. Though pleased with the tangible progress, York was less than gratified by the bureaucratic system of committee-based decision making and resigned in November of 1964 to return to teaching as a professor of physics, later chairing the Physics Department and serving as dean of graduate studies, 1969-1970.

An interest in arms control

York also was continuing in various capacities for the US government. He served as a member of the first General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament, 1962-69; headed the US delegation to a UNESCO conference in 1965 on the application of science and technology; served as a member of the US delegation to Soviet-American Arms Control Talks, 1978-79, and served as US ambassador and chief negotiator for the Comprehensive Test Ban negotiations in Geneva, Switzerland, 1979-81.

Opposition in both the United States and the Soviet Union scuttled the Geneva negotiations, and York later related his disappointment, but not surprise, saying that at that time: "The world situation just wouldn't support it."

In 1969, York started a long association with Pugwash Conferences on Science & World Affairs, by attending his first private meeting with Soviet counterparts to discuss arms control issues. "It is truly no understatement to say that Herb was one of the giants of the American national security and arms control communities," says Pugwash Executive Diretor Jeffrey Boutwell, "and few people embodied as he did the highest standards of intellectual rigor and passionate engagement for seeking what was best for our country and the world community."

Sandy Butcher, the official Pugwash historian, agrees by pointing to a 1971 quote from York, "[O]ur final goal must remain the ideal of general and complete disarmament.... Any reasonable extrapolation of history tells us that if we keep all those weapons around they will be used. While no one can say how to get from the present situation all the way to total nuclear disarmament, it is clear that throwing weapons away heads us in the right direction and building more weapons, be they MIRVs, ABMs, or SS-9s, heads us in the wrong direction. We have fussed too much and too long about fine structure. We must begin to focus on directions rather than details." (A Little Arms Control Can be a Dangerous Thing, War/Peace Report, August/September 1971, pp. 3 - 7).

Presidential Adviser

York also was adviser to six US presidents on arms and armament, and served on the President's Science Advisory Committee and the scientific advisory boards of the Army and the Air Force.

The scholar and university administrator again served as chancellor of UC San Diego on an interim basis from 1970 to 1972. In contrast to his first term as founding chancellor, before the first students had even been accepted, York relished the short interim chancellorship made sweeter by the fact that "we had real students, and it was a real university."

Following the second chancellorship, York taught physics and served as director of the Program in Science, Technology and Public Affairs, 1973-88. In 1983 York founded and directed the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC), which conducts research and seminars on conflict resolution and promotes international efforts to avoid war. In 1989 he became director emeritus.

He also served as advisor to the president of UC and the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories on the future of the nuclear labs.

Richard Atkinson, president emeritus of the University of California and former UC San Diego Chancellor, said, "Herb played a key role in the development of nuclear weapons and more importantly, in defining the nation's policy on such weapons. As the first chancellor of UC San Diego he set the standard for excellence and the university's subsequent development as a great research university. His contributions at the national level and in San Diego are truly legendary."

Among his numerous awards were:

   * The 2000 Clark Kerr Award for Distinguished Leadership in higher education, the highest honor bestowed by UC Berkeley's Academic Senate.

   * The 2000 Enrico Fermi Award for his efforts and contributions in nuclear deterrence and arms control agreements, presented by President Clinton in Washington DC The Fermi Award is the government's oldest science and technology award honoring lifetime achievement.

   * The 2000 Vannevar Bush Award for leadership in the arms control movement and work in nuclear energy, presented by the National Science Board, the policymaking arm of the National Science Foundation.

   * Also, the American Physical Society's Leo Szilard Award, 1994; the Federation of American Scientists' Public Service Award, 1993, and the Atomic Energy Commission's Ernest O. Lawrence Memorial Award, 1962.

York was the author of six books: Arms Control (Readings from Scientific American, 1973); The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller and Superbomb (1976); Race to Oblivion: A Participant's View of the Arms Race (1978); Making Weapons, Talking Peace: A Physicist's Journey from Hiroshima to Geneva (1987); A Shield in Space? Technology, Politics and the Strategic Defense Initiative (1988); and Arms and the Physicist (1994).

He is survived by his wife of 61 years, Sybil, whom he met at Berkeley, and three children: Rachel York, Dr. Cynthia York, David Winters, and four grandchildren.

Arrangements for a memorial service at UC San Diego are pending.

In lieu of flowers, the York family suggests donations in Herb's memory be made to the "Herb York Memorial Fund. "Donations can be made online at www.givetoucsd.ucsd.edu by indicating in the comment section Herb York Memorial Fund.

Related Links
Herbert York dies at 87; scientist and arms-control leader LA Times
Herbert York, 87, Top Nuclear Physicist Who Was Arms Control Advocate, Dies New York Times

Steven Chu: Yucca Mountain as a repository is off the table. What we're going to be doing is saying, let's step back. We realize that we know a lot more today than we did 25 or 30 years ago. The NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] is saying that the dry cask storage at current sites would be safe for many decades, so that gives us time to figure out what we should do for a long-term strategy. We will be assembling a blue-ribbon panel to look at the issue.

[We're] looking at reactors that have a high-energy neutron spectrum that can actually allow you to burn down the long-lived actinide waste. [Editor's note: Actinides include plutonium, which can be dangerous for 100,000 years.] These are fast neutron reactors. There's others: a resurgence of hybrid solutions of fusion fission where the fusion would impart not only energy, but again creates high-energy neutrons that can burn down the long-lived actinides.

But the US$500-million plan has found one of its most difficult tasks on the surface. It has struggled to meet goals to work with local Native Americans, whose cooperation is vital to keeping the project on track. A federal review this year questioned whether DUSEL would create educational and outreach opportunities for local tribes; if not, it could face lawsuits, delays, or other major problems.

Two weeks ago, Chu said that "the total price tag will be about $25 billion." But Barry Barish, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who directs the ILC Global Design Effort, says that figure is likely an overestimate and that the US would pay only a fraction of the total anyway. He worries that when Department of Energy (DOE) officials quote such huge numbers, they undermine the project's chance of winning congressional support. "If it turns off all dialogue [with other officials] then it hurts us," Barish says. Still, Barish says he's optimistic that Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, will approach the project with an open mind.

The New York Times: Good news at the Brookhaven National Laboratory has been piling up fast in recent months. In the midst of a recession, the lab here is launching huge new projects and generating hundreds of jobs.

Associated Press: The primary US lab for renewable energy will receive $110 million in federal stimulus funds and another $83 million will go toward wind energy and other alternative power and efficiency projects, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Wednesday.

One key stumbling block for an ICF energy reactor is laser technology. NIF managers hope to perform about two shots a day because of the time needed to let optical elements cool down, check for damage, replace any damaged parts, and install a new fuel capsule. At that rate, with each shot producing fusion burns of 20 megajoules--its initial target--NIF will barely generate enough power to keep a single light bulb glowing. According to Steven Cowley, director of the Culham Science Centre, Britain's fusion research lab near Oxford, "laser fusion has all the problems of magnetic fusion, but ICF also has to find a laser that can fire many times per second and is 20% to 30% efficient, plus how to make fuel pellets at low cost."

San Francisco Chronicle: After more than a decade of work and an investment of $3.5 billion, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory say they have created a super laser that will enable them to build a miniature sun within the lab in the next two years.

"Leadership in science remains vital to America's economic prosperity, energy security, and global competitiveness," said Chu at a lunchtime press conference. "These projects not only provide critically needed short-term economic relief but also represent a strategic investment in our nation's future. They will create thousands of jobs and breathe new life into many local economies, while helping to accelerate new technology development, renew our scientific and engineering workforce, and modernize our nation's scientific infrastructure."

The money will mainly be directed to the 10 national laboratories run by DOE. The package also provides substantial support for both university- and DOE-based researchers, working on problems in fields ranging from particle and plasma physics to biofuels, solar energy, superconductivity, solid-state lighting, electricity storage, and materials science, among others.

The news came days after the Obama administration announced that current BP chief scientist Steve Koonin will serve as undersecretary of science at DOE. He would replace Ray Orbach once the position receives Senate confirmation.

Included among the approved projects are the following:

• $150 million to accelerate ongoing construction on the National Synchrotron Light Source-II at Brookhaven National Laboratory, in Upton, New York.

• $123 million for major construction, modernization, and needed decommissioning of laboratory facilities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL); and Brookhaven National Laboratory.

• $65 million to accelerate construction of the 12-Billion Electron Volt Upgrade of the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF) in Newport News, Virginia.

• $277 million for Energy Frontier Research Centers, to be awarded on a competitive basis to universities and DOE National Laboratories across the country. These centers will accelerate the transformational basic science needed to develop plentiful and cost-effective alternative energy sources and will pursue advanced fundamental research in fields ranging from solar energy to nuclear energy systems, biofuels, geological sequestration of carbon dioxide, clean and efficient combustion, solid-state lighting, superconductivity, hydrogen research, electrical energy storage, catalysis for energy, and materials under extreme conditions.

• $90 million for other core research, providing support for graduate students, postdocs, and PhD scientists across the nation.

• $69 million to create a national scale, prototype 100-gigabit per second data network linking research centers across the nation.

• $330 million for operations and equipment at Office of Science major scientific user facilities, including ORNL's Spallation Neutron Source; the Nanoscale Science Research Centers, located at five national laboratories nationwide; the ARM Climate Research Facility; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory; and Linac Coherent Light Source at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SNAL).

In addition, the Recovery Act funding provides $125 million for needed infrastructure improvements across nine DOE national laboratories: Ames Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, LBNL, ORNL, PNNL, SNAL, and TJNAF.

Related Links
Further information

Photonics.com: High-frequency sounds have been converted into light for the first time, according to scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Chicago Tribune: A University of Chicago physicist and senior administrator at Argonne National Laboratory has been named its next director. Eric Isaacs—who currently serves as Argonne's deputy laboratory director for programs—will start his new job in May, replacing current director Robert Rosner, 61.

The Washington Post: The nation's nuclear weapons laboratories would be spun out of the Energy Department and become the center of an independent Agency for National Security Applications under a proposal to be released today by a bipartisan task force formed by the Stimson Center, a research organization devoted to security issues.

The water level at Homestake is down 254 feet since the high-water mark was reached last August.

Homestake is 8,000 feet deep. Mining stopped in 2001, and the underground pumps were turned off just before Homestake was sealed shut in 2003. Water was slowly filling the mine until last year. Now, the South Dakota Science and Technology Authority is pumping water out to reopen Homestake as an underground laboratory, with experiments as deep as 4,850 feet underground

The sample dates to 1944 and is a relic from the infancy of the US nuclear weapons programme.

A team from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory used nuclear forensic techniques to date the sample and track down its origins.

Details appear in the latest edition of the journal Analytical Chemistry.

MSNBC: New Mexico's US senators oppose the idea of moving the nation's nuclear weapons complex from the Department of Energy to the Department of Defense.

The last of the project's 6,206 optics units -- the mostly glass and crystal components that focus the lasers onto a tiny target -- was installed on 26 January.

Related Physics Today Article
The Chinese nuclear tests, 1964–1996 by Thomas C. Reed

Physics Today: President-elect Obama's transition team is expected to shortly announce that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu will be nominated as secretary of energy, while Lisa Jackson, a former environmental policy official in New Jersey, has been picked to head the Environmental Protection Agency. Carol Browner, who led the EPA under President Clinton, will fill a new White House "energy czar" role. The announcements came from Democratic officials on Wednesday night.

Chu, who will be the first Nobel Prize winner to be appointed to the US cabinet, is the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and has played a key role in moving the lab in the direction of specializing in renewable energy, particularly in the field of new fuels for transportation. LBNL is experimenting with making biofuels from different types of biomass, using algae in fermentation tanks to make fuel, and applying solar energy to convert water and carbon dioxide to fuels. "[President-elect Obama] certainly needs somebody who can focus on the science and energy policies and I can't think of a better guy than Steve," says Mike Lubell from the American Physical Society.

Originally his father wanted him to be an architect as "the competition in physics was too strong." Chu did both his graduate and postdoctoral research at UC Berkeley. He then spent nine years at Bell Labs before joining Stanford University's physics department where he remained between 1987-2004. He shared the 1997 Nobel Prize with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and William Phillips for cooling and trapping atoms with lasers.

During the presidential campaign, Obama said he would invest $150 billion over 10 years in clean energy and proposed requiring that 10 percent of electricity in the United States comes from renewable sources by 2012. Chu, has been one of the most public faces of promoting renewable energy. At the National Clean Energy Summit held in August, Chu said "I think political will is absolutely necessary. But we need new technologies."

Chu is also one of the co-authors of the 2006 National Academy of Sciences' report Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future, in which he lobbied for the creation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) at the Department of Energy as a way of funding risky hich-tech technologies to solve the US energy crisis. ARPA-E, although legislation creating its existence has passed into law, has yet to be receive a budget as the proposal is not supported by the Bush administration. Chu's appointment increases the likelihood that the ARPA-E will finally be created.

The largest part of the Department of Energy's budget however, goes towards maintaining the nuclear weapons stockpile. It is too early to say what the implications are for Chu's appointment to the long term future of the three main nuclear weapons labs at Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia. According to the Wall Street Journal, Chu is likely to focus his attention on the Energy Department's core missions: basic science, nuclear weapons and cleaning up a nuclear-weapons manufacturing complex contaminated since the Cold War.

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Chicago Daily Herald: Fermilab's latest art exhibit, "Intersections: The Art and Science of Light," is on display now at the Batavia facility.

This news story will be updated throughout the day.

At a press conference this morning 87-year-old Nambu said he was awakened by a telephone call from the academy. "I was surprised and honored. I didn't expect it. I've been told for many years that I was on the list (to get the award)," he said. "I had almost given up."

Nambu moved to the United States from Japan in 1952 and has worked at the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, where he has worked for 40 years.

In Japan, 64-year-old Kobayashi at his own press conference said "It's an honor to receive the prize for my work from long time ago."

In a separate news conference at his university, 68-year-old Maskawa said, "As a scientist, I'm not thrilled by the prize."

"I was happier when our findings were acknowledged [by the community] around 2002. The Nobel prize is a rather mundane thing."

In a review of Jeremy Bernstein's "The Tenth Dimension: An Informal History of High Energy Physics" (August 1989, page 65) Robert March recommends the book for giving Makoto "Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa the recognition they deserve, but rarely get, for anticipating the discovery of the third generation in their model of CP violation". After today that recognition will be widely known.

Passion for symmetry

The fact that our world does not behave perfectly symmetrically is due to deviations from symmetry at the microscopic level.

As early as 1960, Yoichiro Nambu formulated his mathematical description of spontaneous broken symmetry in elementary particle physics. Spontaneous broken symmetry conceals nature’s order under an apparently jumbled surface. It has proved to be extremely useful, and Nambu’s theories permeate the standard model of elementary particle physics. The model unifies the smallest building blocks of all matter and three of nature’s four forces in one single theory.

The spontaneous broken symmetries that Nambu studied differ from the broken symmetries described by Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa. These spontaneous occurrences seem to have existed in nature since the very beginning of the universe and came as a complete surprise when they first appeared in particle experiments in 1964. It is only in recent years that scientists have come to fully confirm the explanations that Kobayashi and Maskawa made in 1972. It is for this work that they are now awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics. They explained broken symmetry within the framework of the Standard Model, but required that the Model be extended to three families of quarks. These predicted, hypothetical new quarks have recently appeared in physics experiments. As late as 2001, the two particle detectors BaBar at Stanford, USA and Belle at Tsukuba, Japan, both detected broken symmetries independently of each other. The results were exactly as Kobayashi and Maskawa had predicted almost three decades earlier.

A hitherto unexplained broken symmetry of the same kind lies behind the very origin of the cosmos in the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago. If equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created, they ought to have annihilated each other. But this did not happen, there was a tiny deviation of one extra particle of matter for every 10 billion antimatter particles. It is this broken symmetry that seems to have caused our cosmos to survive.

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The Asymmetry Between Matter and Antimatter February 2003, page 30
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At Last We Have an Undisputed Observation of `Direct' CP Violation in Kaon Decay May 1999, page 17
Two Experiments Observe Explicit Violation of Time-Reversal Symmetry February 1999, page 72
Broken Symmetry: Selected Papers of Y. Nambu (Review) October 1996, page 72
The Tenth Dimension: An Informal History of High Energy Physics (Review) August 1989, page 65
Pions to Quarks: Particle Physics in the 1950s November 1988, page 56
Flavor SU(3) Symmetries in Particle Physics April 1988, page 29
CERN Experiment Clarifies Origin of CP Symmetry Violation October 1988, page 17
Neutral B Mesons Show Surprisingly Large Flavor Mixing August 1987, page 17

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Various: The FBI has released details about its case against accused researcher Bruce Ivins, who killed himself last week after being told he would be prosecuted as the prime suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks. A number of websites have provided some analysis of the FBI's case. The Smoking Gun has collated the highlights to the prosecution's case. Meryl Nass, a noted anthrax researcher, writes on her blog Anthrax Vaccine that “What came out today was another pastiche of innuendo and circumstantial evidence, with an awful lot of holes.”

Nass raises the following main questions:

1. Ivins had just been immunized against anthrax. He was required to have yearly immunizations, and some anthrax scientists have chosen to be vaccinated every six months for safety, since the vaccine’s efficacy is weak — and Ivins had proven its weakness in several animal models. In his career he had probably received about 33 separate anthrax vaccinations.

2. Earlier in the week, anonymous officials at the FBI leaked to the press that the envelopes came from the specific post office he frequented. Today the affidavit states it is "reasonable to conclude" they were purchased in Maryland or Virginia.

3. Choosing a strain that would direct suspicion at Ivins. The perpetrator(s) were tremendously careful to leave no clues vis a vis the envelopes. For example, block lettering was used, which is the hardest to identify with handwriting analysis. Second, stamped envelopes were chosen to avoid using saliva. Third, there were no fingerprints on anything.

Why would the person(s) who took such care select an anthrax strain that would focus suspicion on himself? In 2001, strain analysis was possible. It had been discussed many times as a forensic tool for biowarfare, including in a paper Nass wrote in 1992, which Ivins had read, and in which Nass thanked him for his contributions.

4. Ivins was the “sole custodian” of the strain. But the strain was grown in 1997, and more than 100 people had access to it over that four year period. Having received a sample, or obtained it surreptitiously, they would be “custodians” of it too.

Nass also points out that the FBI report does not explain how the anthrax was weaponized, nor can explain how Ivins created it. The FBI also cannot explain how the letters were mailed from Princeton. "Either Ivins had an alibi or he didn't.... If Ivins cannot be placed in New Jersey on those dates, he is not the attacker, or he did not act alone," says Nass.

Update: 8/19/2008. The FBI release some of the evidence related to their investigation. NPR's David Kestenbaum provides some details of the case, along with New York Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and Nicholas Wade. Although some of the techniques have been reviewed, the research has yet to be independently verified by experts not associated to the case. Richard O. Spertzel, a retired microbiologist who led the United Nations’ biological weapons inspections of Iraq, told the New York Times that he remained skeptical of the bureau’s argument despite the new evidence. “It’s a pretty tenuous argument,” Spertzel said, adding that he questioned the bureau’s claim that the powder was less than military grade. Nass adds some more questions to the coverage

Nature News: The director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, talks to Eric Hand about the uncertain future of particle colliders in the United States.

CBS Channel 5: The California Supreme Court today dismissed a whistleblower lawsuit filed by two former Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory employees, Les Miklosy and Luciana Messina, who claimed they were forced out of their jobs because they raised concerns about safety at the National Ignition Facility project.

The court said the "plain language" of the state's whistleblower law precludes the lawsuit because the University of California had already considered the retaliation complaint.

The court, in a decision issued in San Francisco, upheld rulings by an Alameda County Superior Court judge and a state appeals court in dismissing the lawsuit.

San Francisco Chronicle: Stanford's famed high-energy physics laboratory is in a tussle with the U.S. Department of Energy over naming rights to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, better known as SLAC.

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.

The New York Times: With an infusion of money, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will avoid layoffs of 80 employees and resume work on a project to investigate ephemeral particles known as neutrinos.

The Denver Post: The incident in a Boulder lab, where powder went down a drain, is called unacceptable.

Knoxville News Sentinel: Ward Plummer, a distinguished scientist with joint appointments at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Tennessee, said today that ORNL had eliminated his lab position — effective June 30.

“ORNL terminated me,” Plummer said. “I got terminated without a review.”

Contra Costa Times: Some workers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory fear that the lab's ability to employ the country's top scientists, critical to its ability to carry out its mission, is in jeopardy. Under new corporate management, the workforce has been subjected to layoffs for the first time in three decades. Of the 440 employees escorted off lab property May 22 and May 23, more than 150 were scientists and engineers, including 110 with at least two decades of experience at the lab.

The Daily Telegraph: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco made 440 staff redundant last month, many of them involved in nuclear weapons work or efforts to stop other countries acquiring them.

In total, the lab has lost some 1,800 of its 8,000 workforce in the past two and a half years.

The exodus has worried some politicians, not only about the consequences for the United States of such a “brain drain” but also as to where those workers may head now to find jobs.