Los Alamos Laboratory

This kind of simulation requires massive computer power, and much of it is done on so-called supercomputers . This is a reason why much recent research of this kind has been done at Los Alamos. In a survey of research in the American national laboratories, the then director of the Los Alamos laboratory, Siegfried Hecker (1990) explains that the laboratory has worked closely with all supercomputer vendors over the years, typically receiving the serial No. I machine for each successive model . He goes on to exemplify the kinds of problems in materials science that these extremely powerful machines can handle. 

Reider et al. (1965) describe the incident at Los Alamos Laboratory in Jackass Flats, Nevada. An experiment was conducted on January 9, 1964, to test a rocket nozzle, primarily to measure the acoustic sound levels in the test-cell area which occurred during the release of gaseous hydrogen at high flow rates. Hydrogen discharges were normally flared, but, in order to isolate the effect of combustion... 

Berkeley, and, essentially simultaneously, by Hindman and coworkers (1949) at the Metallurgical Laboratory and Mastick and Wahl (1944) at the Los Alamos Laboratory the latter two groups utilized the milligram amounts of plutonium made available at the time through the operation of the reactor and chemical separation plant at the Clinton Laboratories in Tennessee. The existence of the V oxidation state was established in the summer of 1944, through the use of plutonium obtained from the Clinton Laboratories, by Connick and coworkers (1949), at the University of California, Berkeley. 

D15791Z, Enviro-Access Centre web site, 1995 D21225Z, Los Alamos Laboratory, 1996... 

During World War II, the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico conducted a highly secret and successful operation to build the world s first atomic bomb. The bomb ended the war, and politicians as well as scientists began to appreciate the benefits of establishing scientific laboratories and conducting research. The national laboratory at Los Alamos continued its work on atomic physics and other projects after the war, and in the early 1950s, the physicists Ernest Lawrence (1901-58) at the University of California, Berkeley, and Edward Teller (1908-2003), then at Los Alamos, urged the establishment of another laboratory. Under the supervision of the University of California, a new national laboratory was set up in Livermore, California, in 1952, with Herbert York (1921-2009), a former student of Lawrence, as its first director. 

Accdg to Dunkle (Ref 7, p 175), R.E. Duff E.E. Houston of Los Alamos Laboratory estimated a spike pressure of 0.385 megabar, or ca 1.42 times the C-J pressure (0.272 megabar)- These results were de-... 

Detonation Products, Thermodynamic Properties of were determined by C.L. Mader at Los Alamos Laboratory and described in Rept GMX-2-R-59-3 (Sept 1959) and SupplRept GMX-2-R-60-1 (April 1961)... 

Mack Fulwyler at the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico had decided to investigate a problem well known to everyone looking at red blood cells in Coulter counters. Red cells were known to show a bimodal distribution of their electrical resistance ( Coulter volume ). Anyone looking at erythrocytes under the microscope cannot help but be impressed by the remarkable structural uniformity of these cells Fulwyler wondered if the bimodal Coulter volume distribution represented differences between two classes of these apparently very uniform cells or, alternatively, whether the bimodal profile was simply an artifact based on some quirky aspect of the electronic resistance measurements. The most direct way of testing these two alternatives... 

There may well be increasing interest in analysis of the intrinsic characteristics of cells that lead to alterations in autofluorescence. John Steinkamp, Harry Crissman, and others at the Los Alamos Laboratory have been using flow systems to study the time character-... 

Los Alamos Laboratory Down-flow reactor Actinide-contaminated waste 540°C, 46 MPa... 

Campbell, D.K. (1987). Nonlinear science, from paradigms to practicalities, in Los Alamos Science, Vol. 15, ed. N.G. Cooper (Los Alamos Laboratory, Los Alamos). 

Bowman, C., Arthur, E., Heighway, E., Lisowski, P., Venneri, F., Wender, S. (1994). Accelerator-driven transmutation technology, Vol. 1, pp. 1-11. Los Alamos Laboratory, report LALP-94-59. 

Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico has terminated its work with the ANT ARES system operating at 10.6 micrometers because it was shown it would not be possible to generate sufficient heating or compression with the 10.6 micrometer wave length radiation. They have turned their efforts to the development of krypton-fluorine lasers. They have generated 10,000 joules pulses at 250 nanometers at efficiency of 1.5%. In 1989, this laser system had not yet been incorporated into a fusion test apparatus and little recent data is available. 

The principal U.S. projects of this type are research at U.S. DOE s Los Alamos Laboratory, which uses UFg vapor, and work by U.S. DOE s Livermore Laboratory and a joint venture of Avco Everett Research Laboratory, Inc., and Exxon Nuclear Company, which use uranium metal vapor. The two groups [J2, T3] using uranium metal vapor reported production of milligram quantities of partially enriched uranium in 1975. Avco and Exxon applied for a license to build a pilot plant to demonstrate their process in the mid-1980s. 

Los Alamos Laboratory Mail stop J580, ESA-AET Los Alamos, NM 87545 USA... 

Fresquez, P.R. and Armstrong, D.R. (1996). Radionuclide concentrations in bees and honey in the vicinity of Los Alamos laboratory. Health Phys. 70 (Suppl 6), S69. 

Analyses of mortality among persons chronically exposed to plutonium in the workplace have been conducted. In the three occupational cohorts studied (Los Alamos Laboratory, Rocky Flats facility, and Hanford Plant), there were consistently fewer deaths than expected based on data for United States white males (Gilbert and Marks 1979 Voelz et al. 1983a, 1983b Wilkinson et al. 1987). This phenomenon is generally attributed to the "healthy worker effect," which holds that individuals in the work force are healthier than those in the general population. However, in a refined cohort from the Rocky Flats facility, the mortality of plutonium-exposed workers was compared to that of unexposed workers from the same plant. It was reported that death from all causes was elevated in exposed individuals but the increase was not statistically significant (Wilkinson et al. 1987). 

L.A. Braby (Pacific Northwest Laboratories) is studying the malignant transformation of mammalian cells exposed to alpha particles that pass through the cell nuclei in an attempt to elucidate the mechanisms of action of radiation. The mechanisms of cell killing by alpha particles (M. Raju, Los Alamos Laboratories), cell neoplastic transformation from alpha particles (S.B. Curtis, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory), and pulmonary tissue injury from radon/radon daughter exposure (T.M. Seed, Argonne National Laboratory) are also under investigation. 

Ihe approximation of separating electronic and nuclear motions is called the Bomr-Oppenheimer approximation and is basic to quantum chemistry. [The American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967) was a graduate student of Bom in 1927. During World War II, Oppenheimer directed the Los Alamos laboratory that developed the atomic bomb.] Born and Oppenheimer s mathematical treatment indicated that the tme molecular wave function is adequately approximated as... 

Lawrence Livermore Laboratory reported measurements of optical gain and directionally enhanced light emission in high-pressnre Xe gas, and Los Alamos Laboratory si-mnltaneonsly reported a chemical HF laser initiated by radiation. These were the first NPLs reported and demonstrated that nnclear radiation could produce lasing action. 

Initial studies of the chemistry of neptunium and plutonium actually preceded the official establishment of the Manhattan Project. But as soon as the project got underway, they became the subject of intensive investigation at several of the Manhattan Project laboratories (Seaborg and Katz 1954). Both elements turned out to have four major oxidation states -F3, -F4, -F5, -F6, similar to uranium, hut plutonium is unique in that these four states can all exist simultaneously in aqueous solution. Microchemical techniques were applied to prepare and study microgram quantities, such as the first weighahle sample of a man-made element, 2.77 ig Pu02, in September 1942 (Cunningham and Wemer 1949). At the Los Alamos Laboratory, chemists and metallurgists learned to produce metallic plutonium and studied its complex properties, which eventually turned out to involve no less than six allotropic phases, more than any other element. 

In the 1950 s, the nuclear scientists at the Los Alamos Laboratory devised Project Orion, a proposed interplanetary vehicle propelled through space by riding the shockwave of a nuclear device exploded a distance behind the vehicle. Project Orion never got off the drawing board. 

Biery, J.C. (1977). Methanation with high thermodynamic efficiency energy recovery. Los Alamos Laboratory Report LA-6656-MS. Los Alamos Laboratory, USA, January. 

As Einstein s remarks illustrated, the atomic era was serious business. No incident exemplified the fear of an atomic arms race more than the revelation that during the 1940s two Americans, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, headed a spy ring that had stolen scientific documents from the Los Alamos laboratory and supplied them to the Soviets, evidently helping the Soviets develop the atomic bomb. In 1951 the Rosenbergs were tried and convicted of espionage they were executed two years later. 

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