Little of the mixed consumer plastics thrown away or placed in recycle bins actually ends up being recycled. Nearly 90% is buried in landfills or incinerated at commercial facilities that generate greenhouse gases and airborne toxins. Neither outcome is ideal for the environment.
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.
The U.S. Departments of Energy and Defense teamed up to create a series of weld filler materials that could dramatically improve high-strength steel repair in vehicles, bridges and pipelines.
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.
Researchers at ORNL are tackling a global water challenge with a unique material designed to target not one, but two toxic, heavy metal pollutants for simultaneous removal.
At the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, scientists use artificial intelligence, or AI, to accelerate the discovery and development of materials for energy and information technologies.
Twenty-seven ORNL researchers Zoomed into 11 middle schools across Tennessee during the annual Engineers Week in February. East Tennessee schools throughout Oak Ridge and Roane, Sevier, Blount and Loudon counties participated, with three West Tennessee schools joining in.
Systems biologist Paul Abraham uses his fascination with proteins, the molecular machines of nature, to explore new ways to engineer more productive ecosystems and hardier bioenergy crops.
From materials science and earth system modeling to quantum information science and cybersecurity, experts in many fields run simulations and conduct experiments to collect the abundance of data necessary for scientific progress.
In the race to identify solutions to the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are joining the fight by applying expertise in computational science, advanced manufacturing, data science and neutron science.