The heat is on at this year’s Molten Salt Reactor Workshop – where top research and industry minds are melding to advance development on molten salt technology – at ORNL.
The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory hosted the second 2023 cohort of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Lise Meitner Programme in October.
In a finding that helps elucidate how molten salts in advanced nuclear reactors might behave, scientists have shown how electrons interacting with the ions of the molten salt can form three states with different properties. Understanding these states can help predict the impact of radiation on the performance of salt-fueled reactors.
ORNL, a bastion of nuclear physics research for the past 80 years, is poised to strengthen its programs and service to the United States over the next decade if national recommendations of the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, or NSAC, are enacted.
Quantum computers process information using quantum bits, or qubits, based on fragile, short-lived quantum mechanical states. To make qubits robust and tailor them for applications, researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory sought to create a new material system.
ORNL is leading two nuclear physics research projects within the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing, or SciDAC, program from the Department of Energy Office of Science.
In June, ORNL hit a milestone not seen in more than three decades: producing a production-quality amount of plutonium-238
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, a rising junior at the United States Air Force Academy, visited ORNL with one goal in mind: collect air.
Rare isotope oxygen-28 has been determined to be "barely unbound" by experiments led by researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology and by computer simulations conducted at ORNL. The findings from this first-ever observation of 28O answer a longstanding question in nuclear physics: can you get bound isotopes in a very neutron-rich region of the nuclear chart, where instability and radioactivity are the norm?