Livermore, California
Livermore is a city in Alameda County, California, in the United States. With an estimated 2017 population of 89,648, Livermore is the most populous city in the Tri-Valley. Livermore is located on the eastern edge of California's San Francisco Bay Area; the incumbent Mayor of Livermore is John Marchand. Livermore was founded by William Mendenhall and named for Robert Livermore, his friend and a local rancher who settled in the area in the 1840s. Livermore is the home of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, for which the chemical element livermorium is named. Livermore is the California site of Sandia National Laboratories, headquartered in Albuquerque, New Mexico, its south side is home to local vineyards. The city has redeveloped its downtown district and is considered part of the Tri-Valley area, comprising Amador and San Ramon valleys. Before its incorporation in 1796 under the Franciscan Mission San Jose, located in what is now the southern part of Fremont, the Livermore area was home to some of the Ohlone native people.
Each mission had two to three friars and a contingent of up to five soldiers to help keep order in the mission and to help control the natives. Like most indigenous people in California, the natives in the vicinity of Mission San Jose were coerced into joining it, where they were taught Spanish, the Catholic religion, construction, agricultural trades and herding—the Native Californian people had no agriculture and no domestic animals except dogs. Other tribes were coerced into other adjacent missions; the Mission Indians were restricted to the mission grounds where they lived in sexually segregated "barracks" that they built themselves with padre instruction. The population of all California missions plunged steeply as new diseases ravaged the Mission Indian populations—they had no immunity to these "new to them" diseases, death rates over 50% were not uncommon; the Livermore-Amador Valley after 1800 to about 1837 was used as grazing land for some of the Mission San Jose's growing herds of mission cattle and horses.
The herds grew wild with no fences and were culled about once a year for cow hides and tallow—essentially the only money-making products produced in California then. The dead animals were left to rot or feed the California grizzly bears which roamed the region; the secularization and closure of the California missions, as demanded by the government of Mexico, from 1834 to 1837 transferred the land and property the missions claimed on the California coast to about 600 extensive ranchos. After the missions were dissolved, most of the surviving Indians went to work on the new ranchos raising crops and herding animals where they were given room and board, a few clothes and no pay for the work they did—the same as they had had while working in the missions; some Indians re-joined some of the few surviving tribes. The about 48,000-acre Rancho Las Positas grant, which includes most of Livermore, was made to ranchers Robert Livermore and Jose Noriega in 1839. Most land grants were given with no cost to the recipients.
Robert Livermore was a British citizen who had jumped from a British merchant sailing ship stopping in Monterey, California, in 1822. He became a naturalized Mexican citizen who had converted to Catholicism in 1823 as was required for citizenship and legal residence. After working for a number of years as a majordomo, Livermore married on 5 May 1838 the widow Maria Josefa de Jesus Higuera, daughter of Jose Loreto Higuera, grantee of Rancho Los Tularcitos, at the Mission San José. Livermore, after he got his rancho in 1839, was as interested in viticulture and horticulture as he was in cattle and horses, despite the fact that about the only source of income was the sale of cow hides and tallow. In the early 1840s he moved his family to the Livermore valley to his new rancho as the second non-Indian family to settle in the Livermore valley area, after building a home he was the first in the area in 1846 to direct the planting of vineyards and orchards of pears and olives. Typical of most early rancho dwellings, the first building on his ranch was an adobe on Las Positas Creek near the western end of today's Las Positas Road.
After the Americans took control of California in 1847 and gold was discovered in 1848, he started making money by selling California longhorn cattle to the thousands of hungry California Gold Rush miners who soon arrived. The non-Indian population exploded, cattle were worth much more than the $1.00-$3.00 their hides could bring. With his new wealth and with goods flooding into newly rich California, in 1849 Livermore bought a two-story "Around the Horn" disassembled house, shipped about 18,000 miles on a sailing ship around Cape Horn from the East Coast, it is believed to be the first wooden building in the Livermore Tri-Valley. During the Gold Rush, Livermore's ranch became a popular "first day" stopping point for prospectors and businessmen leaving San Francisco or San Jose and headed for Sacramento and the Mother Lode gold country. Most horse traffic went by way of Altamont Pass just east of Livermore. Robert Livermore was a accommodating host and welcomed nearly all that stopped by with lodging and meals.
Robert Livermore died in 1858 and was buried at Mission San Jose before the establishment of the town that bears his name. His ranch included much of the present-day city; the city of Livermore, named in honor of Robert Livermore, was established in 1869 by William Mendenhall, who had first met Livermore while marching through the valley w
Jet engine
A jet engine is a type of reaction engine discharging a fast-moving jet that generates thrust by jet propulsion. This broad definition includes airbreathing jet engines. In general, jet engines are combustion engines. Common parlance applies the term jet engine only to various airbreathing jet engines; these feature a rotating air compressor powered by a turbine, with the leftover power providing thrust via a propelling nozzle – this process is known as the Brayton thermodynamic cycle. Jet aircraft use such engines for long-distance travel. Early jet aircraft used turbojet engines which were inefficient for subsonic flight. Most modern subsonic jet aircraft use more complex high-bypass turbofan engines, they give higher speed and greater fuel efficiency than piston and propeller aeroengines over long distances. A few air-breathing engines made for high speed applications use the ram effect of the vehicle's speed instead of a mechanical compressor; the thrust of a typical jetliner engine went from 5,000 lbf in the 1950s to 115,000 lbf in the 1990s, their reliability went from 40 in-flight shutdowns per 100,000 engine flight hours to less than 1 per 100,000 in the late 1990s.
This, combined with decreased fuel consumption, permitted routine transatlantic flight by twin-engined airliners by the turn of the century, where before a similar journey would have required multiple fuel stops. Jet engines date back to the invention of the aeolipile before the first century AD; this device directed steam power through two nozzles to cause a sphere to spin on its axis. It was seen as a curiosity. Jet propulsion only gained practical applications with the invention of the gunpowder-powered rocket by the Chinese in the 13th century as a type of firework, progressed to propel formidable weaponry. Jet propulsion technology stalled for hundreds of years; the earliest attempts at airbreathing jet engines were hybrid designs in which an external power source first compressed air, mixed with fuel and burned for jet thrust. The Caproni Campini N.1, the Japanese Tsu-11 engine intended to power Ohka kamikaze planes towards the end of World War II were unsuccessful. Before the start of World War II, engineers were beginning to realize that engines driving propellers were approaching limits due to issues related to propeller efficiency, which declined as blade tips approached the speed of sound.
If aircraft performance were to increase beyond such a barrier, a different propulsion mechanism was necessary. This was the motivation behind the development of the gas turbine engine, the commonest form of jet engine; the key to a practical jet engine was the gas turbine, extracting power from the engine itself to drive the compressor. The gas turbine was not a new idea: the patent for a stationary turbine was granted to John Barber in England in 1791; the first gas turbine to run self-sustaining was built in 1903 by Norwegian engineer Ægidius Elling. Such engines did not reach manufacture due to issues of safety, reliability and sustained operation; the first patent for using a gas turbine to power an aircraft was filed in 1921 by Frenchman Maxime Guillaume. His engine was an axial-flow turbojet, but was never constructed, as it would have required considerable advances over the state of the art in compressors. Alan Arnold Griffith published An Aerodynamic Theory of Turbine Design in 1926 leading to experimental work at the RAE.
In 1928, RAF College Cranwell cadet Frank Whittle formally submitted his ideas for a turbojet to his superiors. In October 1929 he developed his ideas further. On 16 January 1930 in England, Whittle submitted his first patent; the patent showed a two-stage axial compressor feeding a single-sided centrifugal compressor. Practical axial compressors were made possible by ideas from A. A. Griffith in a seminal paper in 1926. Whittle would concentrate on the simpler centrifugal compressor only. Whittle was unable to interest the government in his invention, development continued at a slow pace. In 1935 Hans von Ohain started work on a similar design in Germany, both compressor and turbine being radial, on opposite sides of same disc unaware of Whittle's work. Von Ohain's first device was experimental and could run only under external power, but he was able to demonstrate the basic concept. Ohain was introduced to Ernst Heinkel, one of the larger aircraft industrialists of the day, who saw the promise of the design.
Heinkel had purchased the Hirth engine company, Ohain and his master machinist Max Hahn were set up there as a new division of the Hirth company. They had their first HeS 1 centrifugal engine running by September 1937. Unlike Whittle's design, Ohain used hydrogen as fuel, supplied under external pressure, their subsequent designs culminated in the gasoline-fuelled HeS 3 of 5 kN, fitted to Heinkel's simple and compact He 178 airframe and flown by Erich Warsitz in the early morning of August 27, 1939, from Rostock-Marienehe aerodrome, an impressively short time for development. The He 178 was the world's first jet plane. Heinkel applied for a US patent covering the Aircraft Power Plant by Hans Joachim Pabst von Ohain in May 31, 1939. Austrian Anselm Franz of Junkers' engine division introduced the axial-flow compressor in their jet engine. Jumo was assigned the next engine number in the RLM 109-0xx numbering sequence for gas turbine aircraft powerplants, "004", the result was t
Project Prometheus
Project Prometheus/Project Promethian was established in 2003 by NASA to develop nuclear-powered systems for long-duration space missions. This was NASA's first serious foray into nuclear spacecraft propulsion since the cancellation of the SNTP project in 1995; the project was cancelled in 2005. Its budget shrank from $252.6 million in 2005 to only $100 million in 2006, $90 million of, for closeout costs on cancelled contracts. Named the "Nuclear Systems Initiative", Project Prometheus was named for the wisest of the Titans in Greek mythology who gave the gift of fire to humanity. NASA said the name Prometheus indicates its hopes of establishing a new tool for understanding nature and expanding capabilities for the exploration of the Solar System. Due to their distance from the Sun, spacecraft exploring the outer planets are limited in that they cannot use solar power as a source of electrical energy for onboard instrumentation or for ion propulsion systems. Previous missions to the outer planets such as Voyager and Galileo probe have relied on radioisotope thermoelectric generators as their primary power source.
Unlike RTGs which rely on heat produced by the natural decay of radioactive isotopes, Project Prometheus called for the use of a small nuclear reactor as the primary power source. The primary advantages of this would have been: Increased power generation compared to RTGs, allowing scientists and engineers more flexibility in both mission design and operations. Increased spacecraft longevity. Increased range and propulsion power. High speed data links. Missions planned to involve Prometheus Nuclear Systems and Technology included: Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter Exploration of the Jovian moons Europa and Callisto. Planned to be the first mission of Project Prometheus, it was deemed too complex and expensive, its funding was cut in the 2006 budget. NASA instead considered a demonstration mission to a target closer to Earth to test out the reactor and heat rejection systems with a spacecraft scaled down from its original size. Project Prometheus was focused on one type of spacecraft power system: Nuclear electric propulsionDevelopment of spacecraft powered by nuclear reactors to generate electricity.
This electricity would be used to run ion engines. It did not study nor pursue nuclear thermal propulsion Project Prometheus would have had substantial involvement of the U. S. Department of Energy. Naval Reactors, which oversees the nuclear reactor program of the U. S. Navy, was to participate in the design and construction of the reactors for the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter. Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory Gerald Feinberg, author of'The Prometheus Project Magnetoplasmadynamic thruster NERVA Nuclear fission Project Orion Project Rover NASA space propulsion and mission analysis office BBC audio programme about Project Prometheus 982-R120461, PROMETHEUS PROJECT FINAL REPORT Abstract, link to pdf, of 227 page final report. Retrieved 2010-02-14 Project Prometheus-related items in the Naval Reactors History Database
Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion
The Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program and the preceding Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft project worked to develop a nuclear propulsion system for aircraft. The United States Army Air Forces initiated Project NEPA on May 28, 1946. After funding of $10 million in 1947, NEPA operated until May 1951, when the project was transferred to the joint Atomic Energy Commission /USAF ANP; the USAF pursued two different systems for nuclear-powered jet engines, the Direct Air Cycle concept, developed by General Electric, Indirect Air Cycle, assigned to Pratt & Whitney. The program was intended to develop and test the Convair X-6, but was cancelled in 1961 before that aircraft was built. Direct cycle nuclear engines would resemble a conventional jet engine, except that there would be no combustion chambers; the air gained from the compressor section would be sent to a plenum that directs the air into the nuclear reactor core. An exchange takes place where the reactor is cooled, but it heats up the same air and sends it to another plenum.
The second plenum directs the air into a turbine. The end result is that instead of using jet fuel, an aircraft could rely on the heat from nuclear reactions for power; the General Electric program, based at Evendale, was pursued because of its advantages in simplicity, reliability and quick start ability. Conventional jet engine compressor and turbine sections were used, with the compressed air run through the reactor to be heated by it before being exhausted through the turbine; the United States Aircraft Reactor Experiment was a 2.5 MW thermal nuclear reactor experiment designed to attain a high power density for use as an engine in a nuclear-powered bomber. It used the molten fluoride salt NaF-ZrF4-UF4 as fuel, was moderated by beryllium oxide, used liquid sodium as a secondary coolant and had a peak temperature of 860 °C, it operated for a 1000-hour cycle in 1954. It was the first molten salt reactor. Work on this project in the United States stopped after intercontinental ballistic missiles made it obsolete.
The designs for its engines can be viewed at the Experimental Breeder Reactor I memorial building at the Idaho National Laboratory. In 1955, this program produced the successful X-39 engine, two modified General Electric J47s, with heat supplied by the Heat Transfer Reactor Experiment-1; the first full power test of the HTRE-1 system on nuclear power only took place in January 1956. A total of 5004 megawatt-hours of operation was completed during the test program; the HTRE-1 was replaced by the HTRE-2 and the HTRE-3 unit powering the two J47s. The HTRE-3 used "a flight-type shield system" and would have gone on to power the X-6 had that program been pursued. On February 5, 1957, another reactor was made critical at the Critical Experiments Facility of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory as part of the circulating-fuel reactor program of the Pratt and Whitney Aircraft Company; this was called the PWAR-1, the Pratt and Whitney Aircraft Reactor-1. The purpose of the experiment was to experimentally verify the theoretically predicted nuclear properties of a PWAC reactor.
The experiment was only run shortly. The experiment was run at zero nuclear power; the operating temperature was held constant at 675 °C, which corresponds to the design operating temperature of the PWAR-l moderator. Like the 2.5 MWt ARE, the PWAR-1 used NaF-ZrF4-UF4 as coolant. Indirect cycling involves thermal exchange outside of the core with compressor air being sent to a heat exchanger; the nuclear reactor core would heat up pressurized water or liquid metal and send it to the heat exchanger as well. That hot liquid would be cooled by the air; the turbine would send the air out the exhaust. The Indirect Air Cycle program was assigned to Pratt & Whitney, at a facility near Middletown, Connecticut; this concept would have produced far less radioactive pollution. One or two loops of liquid metal would carry the heat from the reactor to the engine; this program involved a great deal of research and development of many light-weight systems suitable for use in aircraft, such as heat exchangers, liquid-metal turbopumps and radiators.
The Indirect Cycle program never came anywhere near producing flight-ready hardware. On September 5, 1951, the USAF awarded Convair a contract to fly a nuclear reactor on board a modified Convair B-36 Peacemaker under the MX-1589 project of the ANP program; the NB-36H Nuclear Test Aircraft was to study shielding requirements for an airborne reactor, to determine whether a nuclear aircraft was feasible. This was the only known airborne reactor experiment by the U. S. with an operational nuclear reactor on board. The NTA flew a total of 47 times testing the reactor over Southern New Mexico; the reactor, named the Aircraft Shield Test Reactor, was operational but did not power the aircraft, rather the primary purpose of the flight program was shield testing. Based on the results of the NTA, the X-6 and the entire nuclear aircraft program was abandoned in 1961. After numerous problems the project was shut down in March 1953 only to be re-opened a year later. Technological competition with the Soviet Union, continued strong support from the Air Force allowed the program to continue, despite divided leadership between the DOD and the AEC.
The election of John F. Kennedy as President changed the course. Kennedy wrote "15 yea
Metallurgy
Metallurgy is a domain of materials science and engineering that studies the physical and chemical behavior of metallic elements, their inter-metallic compounds, their mixtures, which are called alloys. A special type of alloy was invented in 1995, when Taiwanese scientists invented the world's first high-entropy alloys of metals that can withstand the highest temperatures and pressures for use in industrial and technological applications such as state of the art race cars, submarines, nuclear reactors, jet airplanes, nuclear weapons, long range hypersonic missiles and many other areas of technology. Metallurgy is used to separate metals from their ore. Metallurgy is the technology of metals: the way in which science is applied to the production of metals, the engineering of metal components for usage in products for consumers and manufacturers; the production of metals involves the processing of ores to extract the metal they contain, the mixture of metals, sometimes with other elements, to produce alloys.
Metallurgy is distinguished from the craft of metalworking, although metalworking relies on metallurgy, as medicine relies on medical science, for technical advancement. The science of metallurgy is subdivided into physical metallurgy. Metallurgy is subdivided into ferrous metallurgy and non-ferrous metallurgy. Ferrous metallurgy involves processes and alloys based on iron while non-ferrous metallurgy involves processes and alloys based on other metals; the production of ferrous metals accounts for 95 percent of world metal production. The roots of metallurgy derive from Ancient Greek: μεταλλουργός, metallourgós, "worker in metal", from μέταλλον, métallon, "metal" + ἔργον, érgon, "work"; the word was an alchemist's term for the extraction of metals from minerals, the ending -urgy signifying a process manufacturing: it was discussed in this sense in the 1797 Encyclopædia Britannica. In the late 19th century it was extended to the more general scientific study of metals and related processes. In English, the pronunciation is the more common one in the Commonwealth.
The pronunciation is the more common one in the USA, is the first-listed variant in various American dictionaries. The earliest recorded metal employed by humans appears to be gold, which can be found free or "native". Small amounts of natural gold have been found in Spanish caves used during the late Paleolithic period, c. 40,000 BC. Silver, copper and meteoric iron can be found in native form, allowing a limited amount of metalworking in early cultures. Egyptian weapons made from meteoric iron in about 3000 BC were prized as "daggers from heaven". Certain metals, notably tin and copper, can be recovered from their ores by heating the rocks in a fire or blast furnace, a process known as smelting; the first evidence of this extractive metallurgy, dating from the 5th and 6th millennia BC, has been found at archaeological sites in Majdanpek and Plocnik, in present-day Serbia. To date, the earliest evidence of copper smelting is found at the Belovode site near Plocnik; this site produced a copper axe from 5500 BC.
The earliest use of lead is documented from the late neolithic settlement of Yarim Tepe in Iraq, "The earliest lead finds in the ancient Near East are a 6th millennium BC bangle from Yarim Tepe in northern Iraq and a later conical lead piece from Halaf period Arpachiyah, near Mosul. As native lead is rare, such artifacts raise the possibility that lead smelting may have begun before copper smelting." Copper smelting is documented at this site at about the same time period, although the use of lead seems to precede copper smelting. Early metallurgy is documented at the nearby site of Tell Maghzaliyah, which seems to be dated earlier, lacks pottery. Other signs of early metals are found from the third millennium BC in places like Palmela, Los Millares, Stonehenge. However, the ultimate beginnings cannot be ascertained and new discoveries are both continuous and ongoing. In the Near East, about 3500 BC, it was discovered that by combining copper and tin, a superior metal could be made, an alloy called bronze.
This represented a major technological shift known as the Bronze Age. The extraction of iron from its ore into a workable metal is much more difficult than for copper or tin; the process appears to have been invented by the Hittites in about 1200 BC. The secret of extracting and working iron was a key factor in the success of the Philistines. Historical developments in ferrous metallurgy can be found in a wide variety of past cultures and civilizations; this includes the ancient and medieval kingdoms and empires of the Middle East and Near East, ancient Iran, ancient Egypt, ancient Nubia, Anatolia, Ancient Nok, the Greeks and Romans of ancient Europe, medieval Europe and medieval China and medieval India and medieval Japan, amongst others. Many applications and devices associated or involved in metallurgy were established in ancient China, such as the innovation of the blast furnace, cast iron, hydraulic-powered trip hammers, double acting piston bellows. A 16th century book by Georg Agricola called De re metallica describes the developed and complex processes of mining metal ores, metal extraction and metallurgy of the time.
Agricola has been described as the "father of metallurgy". Extractive metallurgy is the practice of removing valuable metals from an ore and refining the extracted
Nuclear thermal rocket
A nuclear thermal rocket is a proposed spacecraft propulsion technology. In a nuclear thermal rocket a working fluid liquid hydrogen, is heated to a high temperature in a nuclear reactor, expands through a rocket nozzle to create thrust. In this kind of thermal rocket the nuclear reactor's energy replaces the chemical energy of the propellant's reactive chemicals in a chemical rocket; the thermal heater / inert propellant paradigm as opposed to the reactive propellants of chemical rockets turns out to produce a superior effective exhaust velocity, therefore a superior propulsive efficiency, with specific impulses on the order of twice that of chemical engines. The overall gross lift-off mass of a nuclear rocket is about half that of a chemical rocket, hence when used as an upper stage it doubles or triples the payload carried to orbit. A nuclear engine was considered for some time as a replacement for the J-2 used on the S-II and S-IVB stages on the Saturn V and Saturn I rockets. "drop-in" replacements were considered for higher performance, but a larger replacement for the S-IVB stage was studied for missions to Mars and other high-load profiles, known as the S-N.
Nuclear thermal space tugs were planned as one component of the Space Transportation System, taking payloads from low Earth orbit to higher orbits, the Moon, other planets. Robert Bussard proposed the single-stage-to-orbit "Aspen" vehicle using a nuclear thermal rocket for propulsion and liquid hydrogen propellant for partial shielding against neutron back scattering in the lower atmosphere; the Soviet Union studied nuclear engines for their own moon rockets, notably upper stages of the N-1, although they never entered an extensive testing program like the one the U. S. conducted throughout the 1960s at the Nevada Test Site. Despite many successful firings, American nuclear rockets did not fly. To date, no nuclear thermal rocket has flown, although the NERVA NRX/EST and NRX/XE were built and tested with flight design components; the successful U. S. Project Rover which ran from 1955 through 1972 accumulated over 17 hours of run time; the NERVA NRX/XE, judged by SNPO to be the last "technology development" reactor necessary before proceeding to flight prototypes, accumulated over 2 hours of run time, including 28 minutes at full power.
The Russian nuclear thermal rocket RD-0410 was claimed by the Soviets to have gone through a series of tests at the nuclear test site near Semipalatinsk. The United States tested twenty different sizes and designs during Project Rover and NASA's NERVA program from 1959 through 1972 at the Nevada Test Site, designated Kiwi, Phoebus, NRX/EST, NRX/XE, Pewee 2 and the Nuclear Furnace, with progressively higher power densities culminating in the Pewee and Pewee 2. Tests of the improved Pewee 2 design were cancelled in 1970 in favor of the lower-cost Nuclear Furnace, the U. S. nuclear rocket program ended in spring of 1973. Current 110 kN reference designs are based on the Pewee, have specific impulses of 925 seconds. A nuclear thermal rocket can be categorized by the construction of its reactor, which can range from a simple solid reactor up to a much more complicated but more efficient reactor with a gas core; as with all thermal rocket designs, the specific impulse produced is proportional to the square root of the temperature to which the working fluid is heated, hence the most efficient designs require the highest temperatures possible.
This is limited by the properties of materials. The most traditional type uses a conventional nuclear reactor running at high temperatures to heat the working fluid, moving through the reactor core; this is known as the solid-core design, is the simplest design to construct. A solid core reactor's performance is limited by the melting point of the materials used in the reactor cores; the design needs to be constructed of materials that remain strong at as high a temperature as possible, as nuclear reactions can create much higher temperatures than most materials can withstand, meaning that much of the potential of the reactor for high temperatures might not be realized. Additionally problematic, since there is no cooling medium at work, is the cracking of fuel rod coatings due to the large temperature ranges they would experience, the necessity of matching coefficients of expansion in all the components of the reactor. Using hydrogen as a propellant, a solid core design would deliver specific impulses on the order of 850 to 1000 seconds, about twice that of liquid hydrogen-oxygen designs such as the Space Shuttle main engine.
Other propellants have been proposed, such as ammonia, water or LOX, while these propellants would provide reduced exhaust velocity when compared to hydrogen, their greater availability could reduce payload costs by a large factor, perform adequately where the mission delta-v is not too high. Still, yet another mark in favor of hydrogen is that above about 1500 K, it begins to dissociate at low pressures, or around 3000 K at high pressures, a potential area of promise for increasing the Isp of solid core reactors; the weight of a solid core reactor was thought to be its main drawback. After World War II, a complete nuclear reactor was so heavy that it was feared that solid core nuclear thermal engines would be hard-pressed to achieve a thrust-to-weigh
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is a federal research facility in Livermore, United States, founded by the University of California, Berkeley in 1952. A Federally Funded Research and Development Center, it is funded by the U. S. Department of Energy and managed and operated by Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC, a partnership of the University of California, Bechtel, BWX Technologies, AECOM, Battelle Memorial Institute in affiliation with the Texas A&M University System. In 2012, the laboratory had the synthetic chemical element livermorium named after it. LLNL is self-described as "a premier research and development institution for science and technology applied to national security." Its principal responsibility is ensuring the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons through the application of advanced science and technology. The Laboratory applies its special expertise and multidisciplinary capabilities to preventing the proliferation and use of weapons of mass destruction, bolstering homeland security and solving other nationally important problems, including energy and environmental security, basic science and economic competitiveness.
The Laboratory is located on a one-square-mile site at the eastern edge of Livermore. It operates a 7,000 acres remote experimental test site, called Site 300, situated about 15 miles southeast of the main lab site. LLNL has an annual budget of about $1.5 billion and a staff of 5,800 employees. LLNL was established in 1952 as the University of California Radiation Laboratory at Livermore, an offshoot of the existing UC Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, it was intended to spur innovation and provide competition to the nuclear weapon design laboratory at Los Alamos in New Mexico, home of the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic weapons. Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence, director of the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley, are regarded as the co-founders of the Livermore facility; the new laboratory was sited at a former naval air station of World War II. It was home to several UC Radiation Laboratory projects that were too large for its location in the Berkeley Hills above the UC campus, including one of the first experiments in the magnetic approach to confined thermonuclear reactions.
About half an hour southeast of Berkeley, the Livermore site provided much greater security for classified projects than an urban university campus. Lawrence tapped age 32, to run Livermore. Under York, the Lab had four main programs: Project Sherwood, Project Whitney, diagnostic weapon experiments, a basic physics program. York and the new lab embraced the Lawrence "big science" approach, tackling challenging projects with physicists, chemists and computational scientists working together in multidisciplinary teams. Lawrence died in August 1958 and shortly after, the university's board of regents named both laboratories for him, as the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory; the Berkeley and Livermore laboratories have had close relationships on research projects, business operations, staff. The Livermore Lab was established as a branch of the Berkeley laboratory; the Livermore lab was not severed administratively from the Berkeley lab until 1971. To this day, in official planning documents and records, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is designated as Site 100, Lawrence Livermore National Lab as Site 200, LLNL's remote test location as Site 300.
The laboratory was renamed Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in 1971. On October 1, 2007 LLNS assumed management of LLNL from the University of California, which had managed and operated the Laboratory since its inception 55 years before; the laboratory was honored in 2012 by having the synthetic chemical element livermorium named after it. The LLNS takeover of the laboratory has been controversial. In May 2013, an Alameda County jury awarded over $2.7 million to five former laboratory employees who were among 430 employees LLNS laid off during 2008. The jury found that LLNS breached a contractual obligation to terminate the employees only for "reasonable cause." The five plaintiffs have pending age discrimination claims against LLNS, which will be heard by a different jury in a separate trial. There are 125 co-plaintiffs awaiting trial on similar claims against LLNS; the May 2008 layoff was the first layoff at the laboratory in nearly 40 years. On March 14, 2011, the City of Livermore expanded the city's boundaries to annex LLNL and move it within the city limits.
The unanimous vote by the Livermore city council expanded Livermore's southeastern boundaries to cover 15 land parcels covering 1,057 acres that comprise the LLNL site. The site was an unincorporated area of Alameda County; the LLNL campus continues to be owned by the federal government. From its inception, Livermore focused on new weapon design concepts; the lab persevered and its subsequent designs proved successful. In 1957, the Livermore Lab was selected to develop the warhead for the Navy's Polaris missile; this warhead required numerous innovations to fit a nuclear warhead into the small confines of the missile nosecone. During the Cold War, many Livermore-designed warheads entered service; these were used in missiles ranging in size from the Lance surface-to-surface tactical missile to the megaton-class Spartan antiballistic missile. Over the years, LLNL designed the following warheads: W27 (Regulus cruise missile.
