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The Spallation Neutron Source — already the world’s most powerful accelerator-based neutron source — will be on a planned hiatus through June 2024 as crews work to upgrade the facility. Much of the work — part of the facility’s Proton Power Upgrade project — will involve building a connector between the accelerator and the planned Second Target Station.

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory hosted its Smoky Mountains Computational Science and Engineering Conference for the first time in person since the COVID pandemic broke in 2020. The conference, which celebrated its 20th consecutive year, took place at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in downtown Knoxville, Tenn., in late August.

In June, ORNL hit a milestone not seen in more than three decades: producing a production-quality amount of plutonium-238

Neutron experiments can take days to complete, requiring researchers to work long shifts to monitor progress and make necessary adjustments. But thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, experiments can now be done remotely and in half the time.

A group at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory made a difference for local youth through hands-on projects that connected neutron science and engineering intuitively.

Cody Lloyd became a nuclear engineer because of his interest in the Manhattan Project, the United States’ mission to advance nuclear science to end World War II. As a research associate in nuclear forensics at ORNL, Lloyd now teaches computers to interpret data from imagery of nuclear weapons tests from the 1950s and early 1960s, bringing his childhood fascination into his career

After a highly lauded research campaign that successfully redesigned a hepatitis C drug into one of the leading drug treatments for COVID-19, scientists at ORNL are now turning their drug design approach toward cancer. 

For more than half a century, the 1,000-foot-diameter spherical reflector dish at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico was the largest radio telescope in the world. Completed in 1963, the dish was built in a natural sinkhole, with the telescope’s feed antenna suspended 500 feet above the dish on a 1.8-million-pound steel platform. Three concrete towers and more than 4 miles of steel cables supported the platform.

It was reading about current nuclear discoveries in textbooks that first made Ken Engle want to work at a national lab. It was seeing the real-world impact of the isotopes produced at ORNL 

Eric Myers of ORNL has been named a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, effective June 21.