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As use of electric vehicles grows, ORNL is working to make them better. A battery research team led by chemist Nancy Dudney, an internationally recognized leader in energy storage, focuses on technologies that make EV batteries crash- tolerant while keeping them relatively lightweight and cos...

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Two years after the detonation of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bill and Liane Russell came to Oak Ridge with a purpose: to explore the genetic effects of radiation on mammals.

The work of this husband-and-wife team shaped our modern-day understanding of how radiation affects the bo...

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While ORNL researchers produced isotopes for medicine, designed and tested nuclear power reactors, and studied the biological effects of radiation, the advent of nuclear weapons transformed global politics. During the four-decade Cold War, new feats of science and technology fed threats and fears...

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Travel eastbound on Interstate 40 in Tennessee and you can glimpse a reminder of a project that, while it literally never got off the ground, had monumental influence on the direction of R&D at ORNL.

The two towers of the Tower Shielding Facility, briefly visible from the interstate, were bui...

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The Cold War was fought on many fronts.

The United States and Soviet Union avoided direct military conflict, as that would include the very real risk of nuclear war. Instead, the two sides competed in less catastrophic realms.

In an environment that saw the development of the hydrogen bomb, th...

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It’s hard to overstate all that ORNL owes to Alvin Weinberg, its longest-serving director. Weinberg took over the lab’s Physics Division in 1947 at a moment of great uncertainty. The Atomic Energy Commission was consolidating reactor research at Chicago’s Argonne National Laboratory, threatening ...

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At the end of World War II, most people who knew anything about generating nuclear power were located at Manhattan Project sites like Oak Ridge.

That’s where a young naval officer named Hyman Rickover found himself attending nuclear engineering classes with a handful of other students at the newl...