King Charles rides electric:
BMW replaces traditional British limo
The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the only facility to achieve nuclear fusion in a lab, is moving toward a significant enhancement in its capabilities.
The huge 192-laser facility is 10 stories high and covers 500,000 square feet, about three football fields. It has a checkered past, coming in five years late and four times more expensive than the original budget. The lab team members literally had to invent new processes to build it.
That said, it hit the critical milestone about 60 years after research started in December 2022 and has built on it to improve the energy output. It was designed for 1.9 megajoules input from the laser bank and the lab team has been able to coax 2.2 MJ out of it. The upgrade would bring it to 2.6 MJ with the hope of getting it to 3 MJ. Increasing the power significantly increases the energy output providing more information for researchers.
The plan has received a positive second phase decision in a five-phase process with the National Nuclear Security Administration, the division of the Dept. of Energy responsible for nuclear weapons and their stewardship.
The laser facility has a dual mission, but its primary goal is ensuring the nation’s nuclear weapons are safe, reliable and secure. The United States voluntarily discontinued underground nuclear testing in 1991 after the implosion of the Soviet Union. That’s more than 35 years without seeing if the weapons actually would work as designed.
Only North Korea has tested in recent years, but the Trump Administration has indicated that both Russia and China have resumed a level of testing. The president has said that resuming testing to keep pace could be necessary. When I inquired about it to a NNSA spokesperson, there was no response to the testing resumption question. The agency answer mirrored the lab answer on the nuclear weapons mission for NIF.
Regardless, the upgrades to NIF will improve monitoring capabilities by potentially enhancing the understanding of the fusion reaction. The lasers, wisely, were designed with expansion in mind so there’s room in each beam to add more amplifier slabs. The glass crystals were grown for the original system and there’s enough surplus to provide for the upgrade.
The lab also announced a partnership with Inertia, a Livermore-based company striving to develop and build a pilot commercial fusion energy plant. Like other companies in the fusion space, it has attracted impressive funding–$450 million since its founding in 2024.
It was founded by CEO Jeff Lawson, Annie Kritcher (a leading researcher at the lab facility) and Mike Dunne, director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford. That’s a high-powered crew to lead the effort, particularly when coupled with the lab’s team.
The latest ugly news from the state’s high speed rail authority: the system now estimates (dreams) of completing phase 1 from Bakersfield to Merced in 2032 and the costs for the system have skyrocketed from the $33-45 billion sold to voters in 2008 to about $231 billion. It’s way past time to quit burning up good money on a project that is unnecessary and completely mis-managed.
King Charles makes no bones about his environmentalist bent and demonstrated it when it moved to a BMW 7-class electric vehicle for his official transportation. He still has the traditional Bentley limo available as well as the Range Rovers, but he showed off the specially-made electric BMW on his visit to America last week. Given its electric motors, it would leave the Bentley in the dust in a drag race—it goes 0-60 in 3.5 seconds. That’s smoking fast for a vehicle that weighs 6,200 pounds stock before any protective equipment is added.
