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ORNL researcher Sreenivasa Jaldanki was recently elevated to IEEE senior member. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Sreenivasa Jaldanki, a researcher in the Grid Systems Modeling and Controls group at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was recently elevated to senior membership in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE.

Steve Nolan, left, who manages many ORNL facilities for United Cleanup Oak Ridge, and Carl Dukes worked closely together to accommodate bringing members of the public into the Oak Ridge Reservation to collect distant images from overhead for the BRIAR biometric recognition project. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Carl Dukes’ career as an adept communicator got off to a slow start: He was about 5 years old when he spoke for the first time. “I’ve been making up for lost time ever since,” joked Dukes, a technical professional at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Plutonium oxide is loaded onto a truck for shipping. Adam Parkison/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

In June, ORNL hit a milestone not seen in more than three decades: producing a production-quality amount of plutonium-238

Steven Hamilton, an R&D scientist in the HPC Methods for Nuclear Applications group at ORNL, leads the ExaSMR project. ExaSMR was developed to run on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s exascale-class supercomputer, Frontier. Credit: Genevieve Martin/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

The Exascale Small Modular Reactor effort, or ExaSMR, is a software stack developed over seven years under the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project to produce the highest-resolution simulations of nuclear reactor systems to date. Now, ExaSMR has been nominated for a 2023 Gordon Bell Prize by the Association for Computing Machinery and is one of six finalists for the annual award, which honors outstanding achievements in high-performance computing from a variety of scientific domains.  

Cadet Elyse Wages, Mike Shaffer and Amanda Sandifer pose with a collected sample of air. Credit: Liz Neunsinger/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Cadet Elyse Wages, a rising junior at the United States Air Force Academy, visited ORNL with one goal in mind: collect air.

Rose Montgomery

Rose Montgomery, a distinguished researcher and leader of the Used Fuel and Nuclear Material Disposition group at ORNL, has been selected to participate in the U.S. WIN Nuclear Executives of Tomorrow, or NEXT, class of 2023 to 2024.

Diagram of faults affecting a conventional power system.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are leading the way in understanding the effects of electrical faults in the modern U.S. power grid.

Ken Engle portrait

It was reading about current nuclear discoveries in textbooks that first made Ken Engle want to work at a national lab. It was seeing the real-world impact of the isotopes produced at ORNL 

 

Jonathan Harter, a technical professional in ORNL’s Engineering Science and Technology Directorate, uses a robot and other automated methods to disassemble electric vehicle batteries for recycling or reuse in the electric grid. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

After being stabilized in an ambulance as he struggled to breathe, Jonathan Harter hit a low point. It was 2020, he was very sick with COVID-19, and his job as a lab technician at ORNL was ending along with his research funding.

Leigh R. Martin, a senior scientist and leader of the Fuel Cycle Chemical Technology group at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been named a Fellow of the American Chemical Society, or ACS, for 2023.

Leigh R. Martin, a senior scientist and leader of the Fuel Cycle Chemical Technology group at ORNL, has been named a Fellow of the American Chemical Society for 2023.