The world below our feet can be as important as the one we see around us. It provides many things we need, including drinking water, but it also carries contaminants that poison that water.
Much of what we know about underground contamination comes from scientists such as geochemist David Wesolow...
A scientific breakthrough by ORNL researchers is allowing millions of gallons of dangerous waste in South Carolina to be removed from the environment and processed for safe disposal.
The waste is a toxic, highly radioactive soup left over from the Savannah River Site’s days creating and processin...
Soybean oil is especially versatile. It fries chicken. It makes a tasty salad dressing. Believe it or not, it can remove uranium from groundwater, too.
ORNL investigators have developed a method for reducing both nitrate and uranium in groundwater by using the energy found in soybean oil. Their a...
ORNL’s Vehicle System Integration Laboratory evaluates new vehicles before they exist. Simulated real-world conditions combine with advanced data collection to give engineers the information they need, both on individual components and on entire systems. As a result they can create high-performance,...
Oak Ridge has a unique relationship to the science of mercury contamination. In the 1950s and ’60s, the city’s Y-12 nuclear weapons plant released around 350,000 pounds of mercury into Upper East Fork Poplar Creek and other local waterways, making the region a de facto laboratory for mercury in the ...
It produces more than 2 million billion neutrons each second through an area less than half the size of a dime, providing researchers with the Western world’s highest reactor-based neutron flux. Its neutron scattering stations allow scientists to better understand the structure and dynamics of matte...
Frances H. Arnold is the Dickinson Professor of Chemical Engineering, Bioengineering, and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology. She is a pioneer of “directed evolution,” which mimics Darwinian evolution in the laboratory to create new biological molecules. Her research is particula...