The current capsule target design for the first ignition experiments at the NIF Facility beginning in 2009 will be a copper-doped beryllium capsule, roughly 2 mm in diameter with 160-{micro}m walls. The capsule will have a 75-{micro}m layer of solid DT on the inside surface, and the capsule will driven with x-rays generated from a gold/uranium cocktail hohlraum. The design specifications are extremely rigorous, particularly with respect to interfaces, which must be very smooth to inhibit Rayleigh-Taylor instability growth. This paper outlines the current design, and focuses on the challenges and advances in capsule fabrication and characterization; hohlraum fabrication, and D-T layering and characterization.

This technical document reports on the exploratory research conducted by NREL on PHEV technology using a Toyota Prius that has been converted to a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. The data includes both controlled dynamometer and on-road test results, particularly for hilly driving. The results highlight the petroleum savings and benefits of PHEV technology.

We conduct a series of high-resolution, fully self-consistent dissipation less N-body simulations to investigate the cumulative effect of substructure mergers onto thin disk galaxies in the context of the {Lambda}CDM paradigm of structure formation. Our simulation campaign is based on a hybrid approach combining cosmological simulations and controlled numerical experiments. Substructure mass functions, orbital distributions, internal structures, and accretion times are culled directly from cosmological simulations of galaxy-sized cold dark matter (CDM) halos. We demonstrate that accretions of massive subhalos onto the central regions of host halos, where the galactic disk resides, since z {approx} 1 should be common occurrences. In contrast, extremely few satellites in present-day CDM halos are likely to have a significant impact on the disk structure. This is due to the fact that massive subhalos with small orbital pericenters that are most capable of strongly perturbing the disk become either tidally disrupted or suffer substantial mass loss prior to z = 0. One host halo merger history is subsequently used to seed controlled N-body experiments of repeated satellite impacts on an initially-thin Milky Way-type disk galaxy. These simulations track the effects of six dark matter substructures, with initial masses in the range {approx} (0.7-2) x 10{sup …