Plant geneticist Gerald Tuskan is an ORNL corporate fellow and leader of the lab’s Plant Systems Biology Group. Using the computational muscle available at ORNL, Tuskan and his colleagues have resequenced about 1,000 genotypes of the fast-growing perennial poplar tree
The ingredients that make geothermal energy suitable for electricity production are simple: heat, permeability (usually fractured rock) and water. Until recently the trick has been finding all in the same place and in the right amounts.
Enormous heat energy is available between 3 and 10 kilometer...
Recycling is nothing new; microbes have been doing it for a long, long time. ORNL’s Melanie Mayes is exploring how.
Refrigerators using the magnetocaloric effect will be both greener and more energy efficient than conventional appliances.
Electricity powers our work and our lives, keeps us warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and drives the economy. The distribution of electric power around the world—electrification, as it’s called—is so important, it was named the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century by the Nat...
We sat down with ORNL Director Thom Mason to discuss the energy challenge: How is the national laboratory finding ways to provide the energy needed to support a higher quality of life for a growing global population without harm to the environment or intractable conflict over finite resources? ...