ORNL in the 21st century and beyond

ORNL was built on Big Science—a term coined in 1961 by Alvin Weinberg—and 75 years later the lab is still dedicated to that approach.

By gathering thousands of talented scientists and engineers and giving them access to uniquely powerful research facilities, ORNL accelerates both our access to fundamental knowledge and our society’s ability to use that knowledge to provide clean, new technologies.

Seventy-five years ago, the lab hosted the world’s first permanent nuclear reactor—the Graphite Reactor—and helped bring World War II to an end. Today, ORNL is home to a range of facilities that make Oak Ridge a focus for research into supercomputing, materials, manufacturing, nuclear science and myriad other fields. It stands up world-class research facilities—many of which are beyond the means of even the largest universities—and provides them to more than 3,000 scientists each year from universities, government laboratories and private industry.

Consider:

• ORNL’s Summit supercomputer is the most powerful system in the world, capable of 200 million billion calculations each second.
• The Spallation Neutron Source provides the most intense pulsed neutron beams in the world, while the High Flux Isotope Reactor is the country’s highest flux reactor-based source of neutrons for research.
• The Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences provides world-class microscopes and other equipment, allowing users to study and manipulate materials at the scale of atoms and molecules.
• The Manufacturing Demonstration Facility is pushing boundaries in 3D printing, carbon fiber technology, materials composites and battery technology.

Supercomputing and artificial intelligence

ORNL scientists not only operate the world’s most powerful supercomputer, they are also pioneering a computing future that will look very different from the field as we’ve come to know it.

Two especially promising areas are artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

Data scientists are taking the enormous power of Titan and using it to solve problems in ways that were previously unheard of. Traditionally, scientific computing involves simulating a problem using a model derived by researchers from first principles—usually solutions from partial differential equations. In the new world of artificial intelligence, supercomputers use big datasets to develop models from the data—many times automatically—without a scientist’s input.

“Computing has fundamentally changed the way that we do big science,” said Jeff Nichols, ORNL’s associate laboratory director for computing and computational sciences. “Twenty years ago, people were saying modeling and simulation was the third leg of science, on equal footing with experiment and theory. Now you don't write down equations. You’ve got data, and you use the data to create models. So all of a sudden, the way we do science has fundamentally shifted again. Data science has become the fourth paradigm of scientific discovery.”

Turning particles into computers

While big data research is taking traditional systems in new directions, quantum computing researchers are working on systems unlike anything we’ve seen.

You can make a quantum computer out of any particle that obeys the laws of quantum mechanics: an atom, say, or a photon, or an electron. As a result, early development of these systems is taking a variety of directions, according to Travis Humble, who leads ORNL’s quantum computing research team.

Quantum computers are fundamentally different from the computers that most of us know. Whereas a standard computer chip recognizes information as a series of bits (1s and 0s), a quantum computer recognizes the wave form of a quantum particle, otherwise known as a qubit (pronounced CUE-bit).

The differences continue. Because a qubit is quantum, it behaves strangely. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle dictates that we can’t know its position and its momentum at the same time. The principle of superposition tells us that it can be in mutually exclusive states at the same time—for instance, spinning in opposite directions. And because quantum data cannot be copied and pasted, quantum computer users have to learn new tricks for programming.

Nevertheless, these systems—now in very early stages of development—hold the potential to make a big impact on scientific computing applications. Recently, an ORNL team demonstrated the first application of quantum computing to nuclear physics.

“We’ve already seen that quantum computers would be capable of solving some problems in the simulation of physics, biology, chemistry, much more quickly,” Humble said. “A key challenge, though, is how will those types of computers integrate with our existing ways of solving problems?”

Exploiting the neutron

ORNL’s first neutron scattering research predated the end of World War II—and the name “Oak Ridge National Laboratory.”

Ernest Wollan began working with neutron diffraction at the lab’s Graphite Reactor in 1944 and was joined by colleague Clifford Shull in 1946. Five decades later Shull and Bertram Brockhouse were jointly awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Physics “for pioneering contributions to the development of neutron scattering techniques for studies of condensed matter.” Unfortunately, Wollan had died a decade earlier.

Today ORNL is a world center for neutron research and hosts two of the world’s leading neutron sources: SNS, which provides the world’s most intense pulsed neutron beams, and HFIR, which is the United States’ highest flux reactor-based source of neutrons for research. As an added bonus, HFIR also produces much-needed isotopes (see below).

Neutrons are one of two particles found within an atom’s nucleus (the other being protons). When neutrons pass through a sample—of an electrical component, a material or a collection of cells, for instance—they scatter much like balls in a microscopic game of pool. By measuring the energies and angles of the scattered neutrons, scientists can glean details about the fundamental nature of materials that cannot be obtained with other techniques.

For example:

• Neutrons have a magnetic moment, like the north and south poles of a magnet. This makes them uniquely sensitive to magnetism at the atomic scale.
• Neutrons are highly penetrating and do not destroy samples, which makes possible the study of materials in more detail, in real time and under more realistic environmental conditions than those of other techniques.
• Being highly sensitive to small atoms such as hydrogen (with only one proton) and lithium (with three protons), neutrons are good at analyzing biological systems and battery materials.

“Neutrons, because they are sensitive to magnetism, because they can see small elements like hydrogen and lithium, because they are highly penetrating, can do things that other techniques can’t do,” said Paul Langan, ORNL’s associate laboratory director for neutron sciences.

Because the lab offers two very different neutron sources— SNS, which delivers pulsed beams, and HFIR, which delivers a continuous beam—as well as over 30 world-leading neutron scattering instruments, researchers are able to choose what facility or instrument best suits a given project, Langan explained.

ORNL’s neutron facilities are highly sought after by scientists and engineers alike. For every one available research opportunity, there are between two and three applicants.

Health researchers, for example, used neutrons to better understand an enzyme involved in the replication of HIV to make drugs that more effectively treat AIDS. Researchers from Corning used them to study how silica behaves as it heats and cools, the better to design smartphone screens, windshields and TV screens. And NASA and Honeywell Aerospace used them to study alloys for use in aircraft components like jet and rocket engines.

A neutron scattering sample can even be alive, as when an ORNL team performed the first-ever direct nanoscale examination of a living cell membrane. Or it can be moving, as when another ORNL team used neutrons to look at the performance of a new aluminum alloy in a running engine.

Langan stressed that neutron research at ORNL encompasses both basic science and applied engineering.

“We’re not just trying to discover the answer to the universe,” he said. “We do a lot of practical research that involves solving everyday problems, that benefits industry and our everyday lives. Almost every part of your cell phone—the glass screen, the alloy that’s used in your cell phone case, the electronic technology, the battery—we contribute to basic research and development of it.”

Exploring materials, atom by atom

The most exciting research in materials tends to take place at the scale of atoms and molecules—otherwise known as the nanoscale. Much of what you observe in this world obeys the strange laws of quantum mechanics, where each particle is also a wave. In addition, nearly every atom of a nanoparticle is near that particle’s surface, where the chemistry takes place.

“In most materials, only a tiny percentage of all of the atoms will see the neighboring material, because they’re on the inside,” noted Hans Christen, who was until recently CNMS director. “At the nanoscale that’s not the case. If you make your material small enough, almost all of the atoms are close to the surface. So that fundamentally changes the chemical interactions.”

Researchers from ORNL and around the world gather at CNMS to explore matter at this tiny scale. The center hosts a staff of materials experts and a variety of world-class equipment and facilities, including electron microscopes, scanning probe microscopes, and fabrication and synthesis laboratories.

With that combination of talent, equipment and facilities, researchers are able explore not only where the atoms are but also what they are doing.

At that scale, for instance, materials can sometimes be combined to do a job that neither is good at alone. That’s what happened when ORNL researchers developed a catalyst consisting of copper nanoparticles embedded in carbon spikes. While neither carbon nor copper is an especially good catalyst, this new structure was able to convert carbon dioxide—a greenhouse gas—into ethanol.

In another project, researchers used an electron beam to place a silicon atom into a graphene structure, opening the door to unbelievably fine manipulation of materials.

“It’s not quite like playing with Legos,” Christen explained. “You have to know how to remove things and how to move things around so that the material will do what you want it to do. Understanding that interaction between an electron beam and a solid is not a trivial thing.”

Keeping people healthy and happy

Much of ORNL’s work can improve human health and well-being. For instance, the ability to crunch huge datasets offers a wide variety of highly practical applications, ranging from population studies to the treatment of diseases.

ORNL’s Geographic Information Science and Technology group uses satellite data—along with information such as social media and cellphone use—to identify where people are across the globe.

The effort is especially important for remote areas in underdeveloped and developing countries, noted GIST group leader Budhendra Bhaduri, because countries in the Southern Hemisphere often do not have good census data.

The group is mapping every building on the globe from satellite images with a resolution of half a meter—about 20 inches— and using that information to predict where people live and in what densities. Along the way it has identified human settlements that were unknown to public officials.

“It’s a unique challenge,” Bhaduri said, “because 3 percent or less of the world’s landmass is actually populated by humans, so when you’re trying to find where people are, it’s much harder than it sounds.”

The information produced by this effort helps both in the short term—for instance, in knowing where to send help in case of a disaster—and in the longer term, by informing the location of infrastructure and services.

As an example, ORNL has teamed with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to estimate the locations of children under 5 years old in Nigeria, so they can be vaccinated against polio. The collaboration is indispensable, Bhaduri noted, because Nigeria’s last official census was a dozen years back, in 2006, and the last official population estimate was in 2012.

Looking forward, he said, researchers are working to understand how they can process a new global collection of images each day, providing what he calls dynamic observation and analysis. The images will have resolutions of 5 meters or finer. It will be a big job.

“When you have 700 trillion pixels thrown at you every day, there are a lot of stories that are captured in those pictures,” he added.

Keeping track of cancer

ORNL’s data skill also allows health researchers to improve our approach to cancer and other diseases.

Working with the National Cancer Institute, an ORNL team is developing the means to automate and scale the collection of cancer information from state cancer registries around the country.

Cancer is a reportable disease, meaning all diagnosed cancer cases in a given state are reported to the state’s cancer registry, explained Gina Tourassi, leader of ORNL’s Biomedical Sciences, Engineering, and Computing group. From the time a case is diagnosed, the patient’s progress is followed step by step, through every procedure and every diagnosis.

Cancer registries rely on manual review of clinical documents to collect patients’ information. This is laborious and time-consuming, particularly as the number of cancer cases grows.

In response, Tourassi and colleagues have developed artificial intelligence tools to automate information collection. Effectively, the ORNL team trains computers to understand complex cancer reports and pull out the relevant information. Currently the researchers are working with experts to validate the process, improving it iteratively to meet rigorous standards.

“This is one of those AI applications where the performance bar is very high,” Tourassi said. “There is no room—or there is very little room—for error. I would put it on the same level as the self-driving cars; the room for error is very low.”

Tourassi noted that the AI tools being developed are applicable not only to cancer but also to a wide range of other health crises that require time-efficient and accurate comprehension of clinical text documents, including Alzheimer’s disease and opioid and other drug addictions.

Isotopes for a better world

Enhanced human health is only one of the benefits we get from the production of isotopes at ORNL. This program produces isotopes for medical, industrial and even interplanetary purposes.

For example,

• ORNL is the primary producer of californium-252, which is used by industry to determine the potential of new oil wells and for calibrating radiation detectors.
• ORNL produces actinium-225, actinium-227 and other medical isotopes that are showing promise in treating a variety of cancers.
• The lab’s Stable Isotope Production Facility, equipped with a gas centrifuge production cascade capable of producing kilogram quantities of stable isotopes, is expected to go into production by 2023. Enriched stable isotopes have many medical, R&D and national security uses including being fabricated into targets for the production of radioisotopes used to diagnose and treat cancers and other ailments.
• The lab is ramping up production of plutonium-238, which powers NASA deep space missions.

“We are becoming well recognized for our ability to produce radioisotopes effectively,” said Cecil Parks, director of ORNL’s Nuclear Security and Isotope Technology Division. “What we want to do is use our science and technology here at the lab to do that in improved ways.”

The tech future is here

Nothing demonstrates the relationship between basic and applied research better than the development of new technology. ORNL scientists and engineers take the lab’s expertise in materials research, neutron science and high-performance computing and create both the technologies and the materials that will dominate manufacturing into the next century.

“The legacy of Oak Ridge is turning science to manufacturing—taking fundamental scientific discovery and scaling it up to full-scale manufacturing. That’s what the Manhattan Project was all about,” said Lonnie Love, leader of ORNL’s Manufacturing Systems Research Group. “Nowhere else is there this conglomeration of fundamental scientific tools and talent that, brought together, can really leapfrog the world in terms of additive manufacturing.”

Manufacturing layer by layer

Perhaps the most important manufacturing advances this century will be in 3D printing, known to professionals as additive manufacturing.

ORNL is at the forefront of this technology, demonstrating its prowess by printing cars, buildings, heavy machinery and even a submersible. The lab even earned a Guinness World Record for the world’s largest solid 3D-printed item, a trim-and-drill tool for building aircraft.

ORNL’s additive manufacturing team works with both metals and polymers. Along the way the team has improved the materials that go into these printed objects, making them stronger and more reliable. Looking forward, ORNL researchers are focusing on new materials tailor-made for 3D printing.

“In the past, most people would ask, for instance, ‘Can you 3D print aluminum?’” Love said. “That’s really not the right question to ask. The right question is, ‘What properties do you need, and can we create materials and structures that are printable and achieve these properties?’”

As the work moves forward, researchers are developing methods to print objects with multiple materials, adding properties such as extra strength where they are needed most.

“We want to look at graded material structures rather than just a monolithic material,” said Bill Peter, director of DOE’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at ORNL. “I could, for instance, build most of a part with a low-carbon steel, but as I go along I could shift that chemistry and go to a higher-carbon steel or other material and grade the properties.”

That approach would be useful, for instance, in extreme environments such as reactor vessels in nuclear or fossil-fuel power plants. In such environments, materials that are resistant to oxidation, radiation and high temperature could be strategically placed in exposed areas.

Materials have always been a challenge for additive manufacturing. Because the process involves melting and cooling metals or polymers, there are many opportunities for flaws in a finished product that affect its performance. In response, researchers rely on both neutron scattering and high-performance computing to ensure that materials perform properly.

“We’re already using artificial intelligence in our additive manufacturing,” noted Vincent Paquit from ORNL’s Imaging, Signals and Machine Learning Group. “As you’re building parts layer by layer, you’re rich in terms of data. The challenge is, can you do real-time analysis of that data and repair defects in situ and ultimately control your whole process?”

Ten times stronger than steel

Another focus of ORNL’s manufacturing efforts is the production of low-cost carbon fiber. Carbon fiber is lightweight and as much as 10 times stronger than steel, making it ideal for industries where weight is an issue. The problem is that carbon fiber is also expensive, limiting its use.

A key potential use for carbon fiber is in electric vehicles, where reductions in weight translate directly into increased range for batteries.

“Weight is going to be more and more important,” noted Craig Blue, director of ORNL’s Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy program. “With carbon fiber you have the opportunity to decrease the weight of the car chassis by 30 to 50 percent by going to carbon fiber composites.”

ORNL’s 42,000-square-foot Carbon Fiber Technology Facility is focusing both on carbon fiber precursors—the materials that are turned into carbon fiber—and the ovens and other processing equipment that turn those precursors into usable carbon fiber.

“When you think of carbon fiber cost drivers, there’s capital, energy and raw materials,” explained CFTF Director Merlin Theodore. “Raw material is half the cost of the product, so alternative precursors make a very big impact.”

The traditional carbon fiber precursor is a resin called polyacrylonitrile. Alternatives include textiles—essentially the same materials used to produce carpeting. Carbon fiber researchers are also developing new oven technologies that save both time and space. The goal, Theodore said, is to bring the cost of carbon fiber—which is now around $8.50 a pound—down to $5 or below.

In 2016, ORNL demonstrated and made available for licensing a new production method that researchers estimated could reduce the cost of carbon fiber by as much as 50 percent and the energy used in its production by as much as 60 percent. Companies, including licensees of ORNL’s carbon fiber production method, use the CFTF to refine and validate manufacturing processes.

“One of the main hesitations I see from industry is the cost,” Theodore said. “If you get the cost down, I really do believe the use of carbon fiber will expand. You have automotive leading demand, then there’s aerospace. With that cost point going that low, you may see some new areas emerging.”

Understanding superconductors

ORNL researchers are exploring a variety of materials that could be game changers, but maybe none has as much potential as superconductors—materials that conduct large amounts of electricity with no loss.

Superconductors hold enormous promise. Without resistance, a superconducting wire can carry current indefinitely without energy loss, making it an ideal transmission line. In addition, superconductors generate very strong magnetic fields, making them useful in lightweight, compact and efficient generators and magnets.

The primary challenge of superconductors is that they have to be kept very cold before they become superconducting. Even so-called high-temperature superconductors must be kept below about minus 200°F, meaning they must be cooled with liquid nitrogen. In addition, existing superconducting wires are complex, requiring many layers of material to support a thin film layer of superconducting material that makes them both expensive and inflexible as wires.

Even so, some superconductors are being used in short cables to transmit electricity to condensed urban areas and in applications such as magnetic resonance imaging machines and magnetic levitation trains. ORNL researchers are working to better understand the workings of superconductors and the best arrangement of the atoms within these materials.

In the 1990s, an ORNL team led by Amit Goyal developed a high-temperature superconducting wire technology that was licensed for the commercial production of highly energy-efficient, copper-oxide based high-temperature superconducting wires. Following its development, ORNL demonstrated that the rolling-assisted, biaxially textured substrates technology—or RABiTS—delivered 3,750 times more amperes per square centimeter than typical copper wire, conducting electricity at practically no resistance or loss.

The RABiTS development process was later used by Brookhaven National Laboratory to make an iron-based superconducting wire for carrying very high electrical currents through high magnetic fields.

The focus at this point is on superconducting materials containing iron or other earth-abundant elements.

“We want to understand the atomic-level interactions that are causing these superconducting transition temperatures,” explained ORNL’s Athena Sefat. “What is crucial to note is that it is fundamental knowledge that we are collecting: What causes the superconducting temperature?”

To deepen their understanding, researchers are making liberal use of ORNL’s user facilities: exploring the magnetic basis of superconductors with neutron scattering at SNS, examining the nanostructures of crystals with microscopy and spectroscopy at CNMS, and hypothesizing new arrangements of atoms with computing resources at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility.

Fundamental though it is at this stage, this research is likely to lead to more useful and less expensive superconducting wires that can revolutionize the way we transmit and use electricity.

The future of materials

Superconductors are an example of quantum materials— materials that have exotic properties due to the interaction of particles at the nanoscale.

Quantum materials are promising for next-generation information and energy technologies such as:

• ultrafast electronics for energy-efficient computing,
• ultrahigh-density data storage,
• the use of electron spin in electronics—known as spintronics—without power dissipation, and
• quantum computing.

ORNL researchers work to unveil new classes of these materials, such as 2D materials, unconventional superconductors and quantum magnets, creating new materials in forms such as thin films and nanostructures.

These efforts make use of ORNL's strengths.

The creation of new materials is guided by predictive theory and supercomputer modeling on Titan and Summit. Materials analysis relies on neutron scattering at SNS and HFIR, which is able to probe magnetic properties at length scales ranging from single atoms to tens of nanometers—or roughly 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair.

And specialized microscopy equipment can take samples to near absolute zero—or just above negative 460 degrees Fahrenheit—which is necessary for many quantum materials to exhibit their exotic properties.

“The discovery of new technologies critical for daily life in the 21st century and beyond relies on mastering our understanding of the extraordinary properties and behaviors of quantum materials,” said Ho Nyung Lee, ORNL manager of DOE’s Basic Energy Sciences Materials Science and Engineering Program.

Glass that sheds water

ORNL’s Tolga Aytug and colleagues have developed a nanostructured antireflective glass surface that also sheds water.

Because it doesn’t reflect light, the coating is especially useful for electronics displays. It also has the potential to make solar panels more efficient—both because of its antireflectivity and because beads of water roll off the superhydrophobic surface, carrying dirt and dust away with them and making the panels easier to clean.

“Antireflectivity means that you don’t see yourself when you look at the window,” Aytug said. “With solar panels, that reflection is a loss. Because light is not reflected back, more is coming through.”

Samsung and Carlex Glass Co. have licensed the technology.

More efficient home tech

Heating, air conditioning and appliances consume about 40 percent of energy in the United States, so advanced building technologies can provide an enormous opportunity for energy and cost savings. Heating, ventilating and air conditioning consume more than half of our utility bills.

ORNL researchers have more than 40 projects focused on advancing building technologies, including appliances and HVAC, explained Ayyoub Momen, a member of the lab’s Building Equipment Research Group.

Refrigeration technology is poised for advancement. For instance, ORNL researchers are using the magnetocaloric effect—in which some alloys heat up in the presence of a magnet and cool down when the magnet is withdrawn—to develop refrigerators that eschew environmentally harmful refrigerants.

Other efforts include the exploration of refrigerants that are effective, environmentally benign and safe—a challenging trio of goals. Alternative refrigerants—propane, for one—tend to be flammable, so they can be used only in small amounts.

“We’re doing research to understand how much of this flammable refrigerant can certain devices contain and still be safe,” noted Brian Fricke, group leader in ORNL’s Building Equipment Research Group. “A refrigerator in your kitchen or a window air conditioner would use very small amounts of propane, but if you’re talking about a large refrigeration system in a supermarket, for example, there you’ve got thousands of pounds of refrigerant in the system, so obviously propane would not be a wise choice.”

Clothes dryers are also a great candidate for innovative technologies. ORNL researchers have invented an ultrasonic dryer that removes water from clothing with vibrations rather than heat. They are also working on systems that use thermoelectric heat pump technology, another big advance.

Other projects include dishwashers that retrieve the heat from the hot water they use and vacuum insulation technologies that provide twice the protection in half the thickness of conventional insulation.

Energy to keep it all running

ORNL nuclear scientists are working both to ensure the safety and longevity of the country’s current power plants and to develop safer, less expensive new technologies to take over when current reactors are eventually mothballed.

Nuclear power provides about a fifth of the electricity used in the United States and almost two-thirds of our carbon-free electricity, yet nearly all of the country’s nuclear plants will reach the end of their operating lives over the course of the next couple of decades.

To help them make the most of the time they have left, the ORNL-led Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors developed the Virtual Environment for Reactor Applications, or VERA, a tool that uses Titan to perform high-fidelity simulations of operating reactors and to enable less powerful computers to tackle problems, too.

VERA modeled the first 18 years of operation at Unit 1 of the nearby Watts Bar Nuclear Plant, for example, and CASL partner Westinghouse used the tool to model the company’s new AP1000 pressurized water reactor.

ORNL’s computing expertise will also pave the way for a new generation of reactors. Current power plants use regular water both to cool the core and to moderate the reaction (that is, slow down fast-moving neutrons to sustain a nuclear chain reaction). Potential new reactors may fill those functions in various ways by, for instance, cooling the core with a gas such as helium or moderating the reaction with graphite.

ORNL is particularly involved in the development of reactors that are powered and cooled by molten salts—an appropriate role given that ORNL was home to the world’s only molten salt reactors: the Aircraft Reactor Experiment in the 1950s and the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment in the 1960s. ORNL’s Lou Qualls has been chosen by DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy as the national technical director for molten salt reactors.

One advantage of advanced new designs—including molten salt reactors—is that, unlike current reactors, they don’t need to be kept under pressure. This makes them inherently safer and potentially lower cost than pressurized water reactors.

“They operate at atmospheric conditions,” explained Ken Tobin, director of ORNL’s Reactor and Nuclear Systems Division. “If you were to have a breach, once that salt gets down below

450 degrees or so, it solidifies, so you don't have to worry about radiation contamination into the atmosphere.”

Turning plants into fuel

The transportation industry will benefit from the work being done by ORNL biologists and colleagues from across the country. These researchers are using their knowledge of genetics, computational biology and other tools to develop next-generation biofuels that provide all the benefits of ethanol, without the drawbacks.

Advanced fuels, such as butanol and esters, are not derived from food crops such as corn, but rather from perennial plants such as poplar and switchgrass. The fuels themselves, such as isobutanol, are chemically much closer to gasoline than ethanol is, so they can be introduced into the fuel earlier in the production and distribution process.

According to ORNL’s Jerry Tuskan, who leads the Center for Bioenergy Innovation, one of four DOE bioenergy research centers, this similarity means that advanced biofuels can be blended into gasoline in greater concentrations than ethanol, possibly making up as much as 30 percent of fuel.

Before they become feasible, however, the process must advance at each step along the way, he said. Plant yields must rise substantially, the amount of fuel per volume of bioreactor (known as the “titer”) must be higher, and the microbes that convert the plants into fuel must become more robust and yield fuels at higher titers.

Finally, researchers must scale the process up from benchtop to industrial scale.

“We have produced these advanced fuels, so we know it’s feasible,” he said. “Our job, our focus, is to use modern genetics and genomics, metabolic engineering and computational biology to help us elevate the yield, titer and robustness.”

Keeping us safe

ORNL’s grid-related research works to keep the lights on in the event of a natural disaster or human attack, from modeling the electrical grid in North America to locate potential vulnerabilities, to operating DOE’s Eagle-I—Environment for Analysis of Geo-Located Energy Information—system, which tracks electricity disruptions across the country.

ORNL researchers have developed low-cost sensors that are plugged into outlets around the country to monitor conditions of the electrical grid such as voltage, frequency and current. They are also developing sensors that can be used to detect cyberattacks.

ORNL is also leading the way to develop a private communications and control system for the grid to move utilities and grid operators off the public internet. The research initiative, called DarkNet, will take advantage of unused fiber-optic cable to create a network separate from the public internet. At those points where the two networks necessarily overlap, the system will use quantum encryption techniques to thwart unwanted intrusions.

Among the most potentially innovative approaches to power security will be the development of 3D-printed utility poles that can bend under stress. This research will leverage ORNL’s expertise in grid, electricity, materials and additive manufacturing to produce the poles, which can keep both the poles and power lines from breaking, according to Sustainable Electricity Program director Tom King.

“Let’s say you have two utility poles,” he said. “If a tree falls on the line between them, typically that’s going to snap the line or the distribution tower. But if these poles have some give at the base, once the trees are removed, it comes back up.”

ORNL researchers also partner with the Chattanooga Electric Power Board to test new cybersecure sensors and instrumentation on the city’s fiber-optic “smart grid”—an electric grid that uses digital technology to communicate between the utility provider and the customer.

The smart grid devices provide real-time data on the environment, such as solar irradiance, temperature, humidity, and wind; inputs such as vibrations, radio frequencies, coronal discharge, and thermal images from infrared cameras; as well as physical and cybersecurity situational awareness via measuring/monitoring parameters including cell phone signals, the presence of drones, sensor network cyberintrusion attempts, or physical intrusion.

Keeping nukes out of the wrong hands

ORNL’s nuclear, chemical, and materials science R&D capabilities strengthen the lab’s ability to deliver on its nuclear security mission. The Nuclear Security and Isotope Technology Division researches, develops, and deploys technology that enhances nuclear nonproliferation and safeguards, reduces threats to nuclear material and facilities at risk, and expands the national capabilities in radiation detection and nuclear forensics.

ORNL’s Nuclear Analytical Chemistry and Isotopics Laboratories Group—whose members are recognized as world experts in nuclear analytical measurements—help federal and international agencies address nuclear threats and materials security worldwide.

As a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Network of Analytical Laboratories, the group provides ultratrace detection and measurement to analyze swipe samples, thereby ensuring that countries are living up to treaty obligations regarding uranium enrichment.

The swipes are collected on walls and surfaces of a nuclear facility. Because the process can analyze very low levels of nuclear material to a high degree of precision, it has proven to be an extremely powerful technique for detecting undeclared nuclear material and activities.

The ORNL group, led by Joe Giaquinto, also works closely with the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, which is responsible for ensuring that nuclear materials are not smuggled into the country.

Working with other DOE laboratories, the ORNL scientists are leaders for the production of nuclear forensic reference materials. DHS labs use these materials in an investigation to validate analytical methods and provide traceability and defensibility for their forensic measurements.

In addition, the group trains international scientists to ensure they are competent at destructive analysis protocols used for nuclear security. This work includes the establishment in Beijing of analytical laboratories in China’s Center of Excellence for nuclear security, which was funded through a collaborative agreement between the American and Chinese governments.

The facility is a world-class training platform in the protocols and methodologies required to control and account for nuclear materials in an operating nuclear facility. The ORNL group is developing destructive analysis training materials for the Chinese center to train scientists across Asia.

Looking at big questions

Nuclear physicists at ORNL couple theory with high-performance computing to understand how protons and neutrons combine to create the nucleus of an atom and, by extension, nuclei that formed the universe as we know it.

These efforts grow from a half-century legacy of work in theoretical nuclear physics dating back to the 1960s, according to David Dean, ORNL’s associate laboratory director for Physical Sciences. Over that time, ORNL researchers have explored a variety of theoretical approaches to understand the nucleus.

“With this long history of research using theoretical tools such as density functional theory, the interacting nuclear shell model, and more recently coupled-cluster theory with realistic nucleon-nucleon interactions, we have made big splashes in nuclear physics,” Dean said.

Throughout this history, researchers have relied on ORNL’s expertise in high-performance computing, from punch-card computing in the early days to the lab’s Summit system, currently the world’s most powerful supercomputer. Most recently, with an eye toward future computing technologies, ORNL researchers were able for the first time to simulate a nucleus using a quantum computer.

ORNL astrophysicists also explore the ways in which stars manufacture new elements through nuclear fusion and other processes, and how they distribute those new elements through neutron star mergers and supernova explosions.

According to Dean, the lab’s theoretical work in nuclear physics is getting a boost from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory—or LIGO—the world’s largest gravitational wave observatory. LIGO recently observed the merger of two neutrons stars.

“Optical telescopes have seen from that same merger evidence that nuclei, such as gold, are being ejected,” Dean said, “so our theoretical understanding of what's going on has seen the light of day in observations.”