We sat down with ORNL Director Thom Mason to discuss the energy challenge: How is the national laboratory finding ways to provide the energy needed to support a higher quality of life for a growing global population without harm to the environment or intractable conflict over finite resources?
How does ORNL approach clean energy research?
The lab has been doing clean energy research since it was founded. If you look at the original strategic plan put together by Eugene Wigner after the end of World War II, it had a strong focus on nuclear energy and its underlying science and technology. That led us to work in related areas like high-temperature materials, computing, fusion, and isotopes.
Then, in the ’60s, we began working on a better understanding of the environment and nonnuclear aspects of energy. In the ’70s, after the Arab oil embargo, we grew our programs in energy efficiency, renewables and distribution. That is important to meeting energy challenges: finding more effective ways of transforming primary energy into a human-usable form. If you can do that with greater efficiency, you save money and reduce the environmental impacts associated with energy production, distribution and use.
Today, there are additional drivers, given the rapid growth in energy consumption in the developing world and its effect on global energy demand. We have an increasing realization that the environmental burdens of energy production are substantial, so we want an abundant supply of energy that’s reliable, clean and low-cost. We want to support our standard of living while avoiding intractable conflicts over scarce global resources or unacceptable impacts from climate change and other emissions beyond CO2.
We already have a lot of important scientific and technical assets contributing to this effort, such as the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, the Spallation Neutron Source, the High Flux Isotope Reactor and the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences. Those allow us to understand at a fundamental level what’s going on with new materials or complex systems. Our focus increasingly is to make sure the science we do gets translated into usable technologies and products that will be manufactured in the U.S. and sold around the world. We want to contribute to the creation of high-skilled, high-wage jobs in this country but also contribute to the benefits that accrue from better technology options.
Why are ORNL’s Southeastern university partnerships so important to the lab?
First off, most of the problems we’re trying to solve are pretty difficult. We don’t have a monopoly on the expertise to solve them, so it makes sense for us to look to partners who complement our scientific skills. You see that in a lot of partnerships that formed to go after big proposals, like the Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation, the BioEnergy Science Center, the Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light Water Reactors, or some of the energy frontier research centers. We look to universities to strengthen our research activities and make us more successful.
There’s another component: Universities are training the next generation of scientists and engineers, and we want some of them to come work here. So we have undergraduates working on internships. We have an expanded graduate program, with graduate students doing their thesis research at the lab but getting their degrees from institutions like the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Vanderbilt or Georgia Tech. Some may ultimately become our employees, while others will work in universities, other labs, or industry conducting research in tune with things we’re trying to do. Those are all good outcomes.
It’s our version of alumni networking.
Why do we focus some of our efforts regionally?
Even though the national labs are national in terms of their scope and international in terms of the significance of their facilities, they also have a regional character. That’s the natural way that a lot of collaboration and partnerships emerge—proximity matters.
That’s certainly true for us. Our university partnerships and connections to industry extend all across the country, but they’re more heavily weighted to the South and Southeast. It’s true for the other national laboratories, too. It doesn’t change the fact that we interact with companies and universities from all over the country, but it does mean we have our own natural partners.
The character of the energy infrastructure across the country is also very regional in nature, having to do with the assets that can be tapped and the state, local and regional regulatory environments. Even issues of public perception differ by region. In the South, we have a population that’s generally more comfortable with nuclear energy than, say, in the Northeast or California. So it’s no surprise that the new builds in nuclear are going on in the South.
For photovoltaics, Arizona and the Southwest are particularly favorable; wind is most valuable in areas where you have predictable, steady wind, so the Texas panhandle up through North Dakota tend to produce the most wind energy.
What that means is, as the energy infrastructure modernizes, you’re going to see the mixes vary depending on where you are in the country. For the labs, which already have these regional connections, it means that the local and regional interest in lab R&D is going to depend on the regional energy ecosystem.
Take nuclear, which is important for our region. It’s also something that Oak Ridge is very active in, so you have things like the recent announcement of research projects with Southern Nuclear and TerraPower, looking at molten salt advanced reactor technology [see sidebar]. That’s a good example of our regional partnerships leveraging R&D at the lab in a way that promotes new, improved energy technology that’s free of CO2 emissions.
How is ORNL positioned to lead clean energy efforts in the Southeast?
Tennessee is a strong manufacturing state. It’s got a lot of manufacturing associated with the automotive supply chain, but more broadly in the region you’ve got lots of companies interested in instrumentation and controls, which grew out of the lab’s nuclear heritage. So there are a lot of natural partners that help us make that transition into the market.
We already have strong partnerships with regional research universities through the UT-Battelle core universities and other partners around the South. If you look at our involvement in regional innovation systems such as Knoxville-Oak Ridge Innovation Valley or our connections to entrepreneurial activities in Chattanooga, then add the expanded footprint we get with core universities such as Georgia Tech in Georgia, North Carolina State and Duke in North Carolina, and Florida State in Florida, you can imagine us leveraging our university partnerships to reach into private sector activities that are relevant in those states.
There’s no reason we can’t serve as a hub for the clean energy ecosystem in the Southeast. That’s where the supply chain emerges for those energy technologies that are relevant for this part of the country. A lot of our research programs can help support that.
Neutron sciences are an important mission for the lab. How do they contribute to clean energy and energy efficiency?
Neutrons are a great structural probe for complicated materials, because you have sensitivity to atoms all across the periodic table. In the complicated structures that occur in batteries, you have light elements and heavy elements, and as you cycle the battery, they’re moving back and forth.
You want to understand why battery performance degrades over the lifetime of the battery, because that’s a real barrier to getting wider-spread use of electrical energy storage either for transportation or for grid storage. Being able as you’re cycling a battery to nondestructively observe structural changes in the battery materials is one way we can understand the degradation. Then, hopefully, we can develop new and better materials that perform better over the extremes that batteries are exposed to.
Another example, one we’re pushing pretty hard on now, is imaging. It makes use of the fact that neutrons have very different contrasts than the X-ray imaging people are familiar with. In the case of a chest X-ray, for example, you see the heavy elements, so you see bones but not tissue. With neutrons you have sensitivity to light elements as well, so you get very different contrasts.
We’re using neutron imaging to study how additively manufactured components compare to the computer models used in the design loaded into the 3-D printer. The question is, deep inside that complicated structure, does it really look like the model? And that’s hard to do without smashing apart the thing you’ve built.
But neutrons are penetrating, so they’ll go through an entire component, and you can tomographically reconstruct a 3-D image with quite good resolution. It allows you to see how the cooling channels, for instance, are formed in a heat exchanger, which might be important for automotive applications, or for a turbine blade in a jet engine. It’s probably the only technique that you can do that with.
One problem promoting clean energy is what’s known as the “valley of death,” where promising technologies fail to make it into the economy or into manufacturing.
Most federal investments in R&D, not just at Oak Ridge, are focused on longer-term, more fundamental understandings of what’s going on. These enable the development of technology but often themselves are not market-ready technological products.
It’s the science that creates those opportunities, but at the end of the day we don’t make anything and we don’t sell anything. If our technology is going to get deployed, someone who makes and sells stuff needs to turn it into an actual product.
The challenge is, how do you go from the underlying science, through the applied R&D, to the point where a company is making something which they’re going to sell? That’s tricky.
We like to think of this nice linear process where the university or the lab has some fundamental insight, you work on the design, and then you sell it, but it’s rarely that straightforward. You run into problems.
I think that’s one of the reasons that ORNL, as a lab with a very broad span of fundamental science to end-use applications, is well-equipped to deal with those turbulent flows of information. But it’s still a tricky thing to do. The thing we have been trying to focus on, particularly over the last several years, is that final piece of the chain, which is the hand-off to industry and getting the engagement earlier in the process to make the handoff smoother.
We have a variety of different mechanisms for doing that: traditional tech transfer, collaborative research with industry, and students who come in through graduate programs and go off and start companies. So there are all kinds of pathways that things can take. I think we need to work on all of them, because there’s no one single, simple method.
See also:
- ORNL researchers go for a big impact
- In praise of the power grid
- Grad students create biotech company, continue research project
- Infographic: ORNL regional partnerships