News

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.

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.

ORNL has been selected to lead an Energy Earthshot Research Center, or EERC, focused on developing chemical processes that use sustainable methods instead of burning fossil fuels to radically reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions to stem climate change and limit the crisis of a rapidly warming planet.
 

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

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? 

Madhavi Martin brings a physicist’s tools and perspective to biological and environmental research at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, supporting advances in bioenergy, soil carbon storage and environmental monitoring, and even helping solve a murder mystery.

Technologies developed by researchers at ORNL have received six 2023 R&D 100 Awards.  

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.

Timothy Gray of ORNL led a study that may have revealed an unexpected change in the shape of an atomic nucleus. The surprise finding could affect our understanding of what holds nuclei together, how protons and neutrons interact and how elements form.