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ORNL retiree Duane Starr and his wife, Nancy, pose with the critical frequencies demo unit Duane designed, built and donated to the laboratory to support nuclear workshops.  Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, Dept. of Energy

For years, Duane Starr led workshops at ORNL to help others from across the U.S. government understand uranium processing technologies. After his retirement, Starr donated a 5-foot-tall working model, built in his garage, that demonstrates vibration harmonics, consistent with operation of a super critical gas centrifuge rotor, a valuable resource to ongoing ORNL-led workshops. 

non-powered dam

Although more than 92,000 dams populate the country, the vast majority — about 89,000 — do not generate electricity through hydropower.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory has signed a memorandum of understanding with the United Kingdom’s National Nuclear Laboratory to partner on various nuclear research and development efforts.

The United Kingdom’s National Nuclear Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have agreed to cooperate on a wide range of nuclear energy research and development efforts that leverage both organizations’ unique expertise and capabilities.

ORNL researcher Xiaobing Liu  works in the laboratory’s Building Technologies Research and Integration Center.

As a boy growing up in China, Xiaobing Liu knew all about Oak Ridge and the World War II Manhattan Project. He had no idea that he would one day work at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Secret City’s successor. Liu is a lead researcher in geothermal heat pump (GHP) techn...

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers have produced the next generation of the National Hydropower Map – a visualization tool that provides updated statistics on overall capacity and performance on the nation’s hydropower fleet. The map is part of the lab’s National Hydropower ...
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Blowing bubbles may be fun for kids, but for engineers, bubbles can disrupt fluid flow and damage metal.
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Photovoltaic spray paint could coat the windows and walls of the future if scientists are successful in developing low-cost, flexible solar cells based on organic polymers. Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently discovered an unanticipated factor in the performance of polymer-based solar devices that gives new insight on how these materials form and function.