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Playing the “bad guy” to enhance next-generation safety
Sometimes, cops and robbers is more than just a kid’s game. At the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, researchers are channeling their inner saboteurs to discover vulnerabilities in next-generation nuclear reactors, making sure that they’re as safe as possible before they’re even constructed.
George A. Kyrala, Matthew M. Balkey, Cris W. Barnes, Steven H. Batha, Cindy R. Christensen, James A. Cobble, James Fincke, Paul Keiter, Nicholas Lanier, Dennis Paisley, Michael Sorem, Damian Swift, Jonathan Workman
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 45 | Number 2 | March 2004 | Pages 286-295
Technical Paper | Target Fabrication | doi.org/10.13182/FST04-A463
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Targets are used for a variety of purposes, but ultimately we use them to validate codes that help us predict and understand new phenomena or effects. The sophistication and complexity of High Energy Density Physics (HEDP) and Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) targets has increased in to match the advances made in modeling complex phenomena. The targets have changed from simple hohlraums, spherical geometries, and planar foils, to 3-dimensional geometries that require precision in construction, alignment, and metrology. Furthermore, material properties, such as surface morphologies and volume texture, have significant impact on the behavior of the targets and must be measured and controlled. In the following we will discuss how experimental physicists view targets and the influence that target construction has on interpreting the experimental results. We review a representative sampling of targets fabricated at the Los Alamos National Laboratory that are used in different experiments in support of ICF and HEDP.