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Tech giants and nuclear leaders make news at CERAWeek
Microsoft and Nvidia have formed an “AI for nuclear” partnership intended to streamline the permitting, design, and operations of nuclear power plant facilities, and highlighted the collaboration at CERAWeek 2026 in Houston earlier this week.
Microsoft said in an announcement that the collaboration will build a “connected, AI-powered foundation” of AI tools that energy developers will be able to use to make work “repeatable, traceable, secure, and predictable,” all the while reducing work timelines and maintaining safety.
A. Nikroo, D. Czechowicz, R. Paguio, A. L. Greenwood, Masaru Takagi
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 45 | Number 2 | March 2004 | Pages 84-89
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A432
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
New high gain designs for direct drive ignition on NIF require foam shells. Scaled down versions of these designs are needed for near term experiments on the OMEGA laser facility at the Laboratory Laser Energetics (LLE). These shells need to be about 1 mm in diameter and 50-100 m wall thickness and densities of 100-250 mg/cc. In addition, a full density permeation seal needs to be deposited for retention of the fill gas at room temperature or the ice at cryogenic temperatures. We have fabricated such shells using Resorcinolformaldehyde (R/F) as the selected foam material due to its transparency in the optical region. Extensive characterization of the wall uniformity of these shells has been performed. The foam shells have ~5%-6% nonconcentricities on the average. A full density permeation seal has been deposited on the R/F shells using two different techniques. In the first technique R/F shells are coated directly with plasma polymer to thicknesses of 3-4 m. In the second technique, R/F shells are coated with polyvinylphenol, using a chemical interfacial polymerization technique. Data on surface finish and gas retention for R/F shells coated by both methods are provided.