Researchers at ORNL are developing advanced automation techniques for desalination and water treatment plants, enabling them to save energy while providing affordable drinking water to small, parched communities without high-quality water supplies.
Yarom Polsky, director of the Manufacturing Science Division, or MSD, at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been elected a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, or ASME.
As renewable sources of energy such as wind and sun power are being increasingly added to the country’s electrical grid, old-fashioned nuclear energy is also being primed for a resurgence.
ORNL is teaming with the National Energy Technology Laboratory to jointly explore a range of technology innovations for carbon management and strategies for economic development and sustainable energy transitions in the Appalachian region.
David McCollum, a senior scientist at the ORNL and lead for the lab’s contributions to the Net Zero World Initiative, was one of more than 35,000 attendees in Egypt at the November 2022 Sharm El-Sheikh United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, Conference of the Parties, also known as COP27.
Researchers in the geothermal energy industry are joining forces with fusion experts at ORNL to repurpose gyrotron technology, a tool used in fusion. Gyrotrons produce high-powered microwaves to heat up fusion plasmas.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory physicist Elizabeth “Libby” Johnson (1921-1996), one of the world’s first nuclear reactor operators, standardized the field of criticality safety with peers from ORNL and Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Mechanical engineer Marm Dixit’s work is all about getting electricity to flow efficiently from one end of a solid-state battery to the other. It’s a high-stakes problem
To achieve practical energy from fusion, extreme heat from the fusion system “blanket” component must be extracted safely and efficiently. ORNL fusion experts are exploring how tiny 3D-printed obstacles placed inside the narrow pipes of a custom-made cooling system could be a solution for removing heat from the blanket.
What’s getting Jim Szybist fired up these days? It’s the opportunity to apply his years of alternative fuel combustion and thermodynamics research to the challenge of cleaning up the hard-to-decarbonize, heavy-duty mobility sector — from airplanes to locomotives to ships and massive farm combines.