The Advanced Beam Laboratory at Colorado State University will receive funding under the DOE’s LaserNetUS program.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) aims to accelerate U.S. research in the field of high-energy-density plasma science with the awarding of $18 million to fund operations and user support at high-intensity laser facilities in the United States and Canada, the DOE announced on October 27.

The award is part of FES’s LaserNetUS initiative, which was established in 2018 to provide U.S. scientists increased access to high-intensity laser facilities at 10 universities and national laboratories: the University of Texas at Austin, Ohio State University, Colorado State University, the University of Michigan, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the University of Rochester, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Canada’s Université du Québec.

ITER vacuum vessel section no. 6, shown here, was completely assembled in April. South Korea is providing four of the nine 40-degree vacuum vessel sections; Europe is providing the other five. Photo: ITER

South Korea’s Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) has completed work on the first vacuum vessel section for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the ITER Organization reported on April 28. The 440-ton section is now being prepared for shipping this summer to the ITER construction site, located near Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, France.

Deep in the underground of a New Mexico desert, the Department of Energy is studying the effects of high-level, heat-generating radioactive waste on water migration in the salt formations. At the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., a collaboration between Sandia, Los Alamos, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories is performing a series of borehole-scale process tests, called the Brine Availability Test in Salt (BATS) project.