April 08 Issue - Employee Monthly Magazine

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Terry Wallace, Actinide Center concept
pushes science to next frontier

Photo by LeRoy N. Sanchez

As part of the complexwide preferred alternative announced by the National Nuclear Security Administration in December, Los Alamos National Laboratory will take a leading role in actinide research. Actually, it may be more accurate to say Los Alamos will continue in its leading role as actinide center of the complex.

Since the days of the Manhattan Project, actinide science has been central to the Laboratory's mission. The research span of actinide science goes from materials science to fundamental physics and chemistry to advanced modeling and simulation on the world's most powerful supercomputers, like the new Roadrunner petaflop platform.

There has been lots of discussion on what it means to be the "plutonium center" and whether this means strictly pit manufacturing. Frankly, the center of excellence is about actinide research and development, including manufacturing. The research will include everything from nonproliferation applications to next-generation nuclear power and methods for effectively reducing and containing the waste products that come with it.

Despite the Laboratory's 60-year relationship with the actinides, there still are many facets that we do not understand. For example, uranium and plutonium are relatively reactive materials; we still do not have a good understanding of corrosion in uranium. The actinides, this set of elements at the end of the Periodic Table, is a fascinating science opportunity. The electron structure of materials like plutonium gives us a great place to explore the next breakthroughs in superconductivity. John Sarrao (Science Program Office) has shown that plutonium-based superconductors provide exciting possibilities, and David Pines (Materials Physics and Applications) and his colleagues recently opined in Nature that actinides might allow superconductors to work at room temperature—the "Holy Grail" of lossless energy transfer and storage.

We are going to be looking at actinide materials on a broad range of scales (both time and distance). In particular, we are interested in bridging "the micron gap." The micron gap is the next frontier of science here and bridges material understanding from the atomic to the bulk scale.

To that end, the Laboratory will create a signature facility called MaRIE (Matter-Radiation Interactions in Extremes) at the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center for use by researchers from around the world. In this facility, materials, including actinides, will be probed and characterized at the micron scale.

The Laboratory's future is one in which world-class scientists will gather in world-class facilities like MaRIE to collaborate on problems of international importance. Like we have seen during the past 60 years, the Laboratory's mission will continue to enable fascinating, relevant, cutting-edge science for the benefit of humanity.

-Terry Wallace, principal associate director for Science, Technology, and Engineering