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Nearly 200 attendees from national labs, industry, utilities, reactor design firms, and international development companies gathered at ORNL’s latest molten salt reactor workshop.

Renewed interest in molten salt technology was evident at a recent gathering of advanced nuclear reactor experts at the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Nearly 200 attendees from national labs, industry, utilities, reactor design firms,...

Doctoral student Rachel Seibert works with ORNL mentor Kurt Terrani as part of the lab’s Nuclear Engineering Science Laboratory Synthesis (NESLS) program.
For a second straight summer, Rachel Seibert spent her days at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) researching advanced nuclear reactors. The Ph.D. candidate may not have had such an opportunity more than a decade ago, but thanks to a unique internship ...
The Advanced Reactors Technical Summit III, hosted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory Feb. 10-11, had a record 180-plus participants. (Photo by Rachel Brooks)

Moving advanced nuclear reactors from the drawing board to the field was the focus of the Advanced Reactors Technical Summit III, hosted by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and attended by 180 experts from industry, government and academia. The conference, ...

Pellet selector

When it’s up and running, the ITER fusion reactor will be very big and very hot, with more than 800 cubic meters of hydrogen plasma reaching 170 million degrees centigrade. The systems that fuel and control it, on the other hand, will be small and very cold. Pellets of frozen gas will be shot int...

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Blowing bubbles may be fun for kids, but for engineers, bubbles can disrupt fluid flow and damage metal.
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depth, population-based approach to identifying such mechanisms for adaptation, and describes a method that could be harnessed for developing more accurate predictive climate change models. For the U.S. Department of...
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Thomas Wilbanks and Benjamin Preston, both of the Climate Change Science Institute (CCSI) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), are among the 309 coordinating lead authors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) Working Group II (WG II) report.
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Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may get the lion’s share of attention in climate change discussions, but the biggest repository of carbon is actually underfoot: soils store an estimated 2.5 trillion tons of carbon in the form of organic matter.
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Former Energy Secretary Steven Chu mixed his Wigner Distinguished Lecture on Feb . 12 with a description of his current research at Stanford and his outlook on energy policy and climate change.