Jack Orebaugh, a forensic anthropology major at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has a big heart for families with missing loved ones. When someone disappears in an area of dense vegetation, search and recovery efforts can be difficult, especially when a missing person’s last location is unknown. Recognizing the agony of not knowing what happened to a family or friend, Orebaugh decided to use his internship at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to find better ways to search for lost and deceased people using cameras and drones.
The 21st Symposium on Separation Science and Technology for Energy Applications, Oct. 23-26 at the Embassy Suites by Hilton West in Knoxville, attracted 109 researchers, including some from Austria and the Czech Republic. Besides attending many technical sessions, they had the opportunity to tour the Graphite Reactor, High Flux Isotope Reactor and both supercomputers at ORNL.
Researchers at ORNL became the first to 3D-print large rotating steam turbine blades for generating energy in power plants.
Raina Setzer knows the work she does matters. That’s because she’s already seen it from the other side. Setzer, a radiochemical processing technician in Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Isotope Processing and Manufacturing Division, joined the lab in June 2023.
In June, ORNL hit a milestone not seen in more than three decades: producing a production-quality amount of plutonium-238
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.
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.
Early experiments at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have revealed significant benefits to a dry battery manufacturing process. This eliminates the use of solvents and is more affordable, while showing promise for delivering a battery that is durable, less weighed down by inactive elements, and able to maintain a high capacity after use.
Creating energy the way the sun and stars do — through nuclear fusion — is one of the grand challenges facing science and technology. What’s easy for the sun and its billions of relatives turns out to be particularly difficult on Earth.