News

Three staff members in ORNL’s Fusion and Fission Energy and Science Directorate have moved into newly established roles facilitating communication and program management with sponsors of the directorate’s Nuclear Energy and Fuel Cycle Division. 

The 2023 top science achievements from HFIR and SNS feature a broad range of materials research published in high impact journals such as Nature and Advanced Materials.

Nuclear engineering students from the United States Military Academy and United States Naval Academy are working with researchers at ORNL to complete design concepts for a nuclear propulsion rocket to go to space in 2027 as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DRACO program.

Lee's paper at the August conference in Bellevue, Washington, combined weather and power outage data for three states – Texas, Michigan and Hawaii –  and used a machine learning model to predict how extreme weather such as thunderstorms, floods and tornadoes would affect local power grids and to estimate the risk for outages. The paper relied on data from the National Weather Service and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Environment for Analysis of Geo-Located Energy Information, or EAGLE-I, database.

How do you get water to float in midair? With a WAND², of course. But it’s hardly magic. In fact, it’s a scientific device used by scientists to study matter.

In response to a renewed international interest in molten salt reactors, researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a novel technique to visualize molten salt intrusion in graphite.

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.

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.

ORNL’s Fulvia Pilat and Karren More recently participated in the inaugural 2023 Nanotechnology Infrastructure Leaders Summit and Workshop at the White House.