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Nearly $500 million in Inflation Reduction Act funding will support several key science projects underway at ORNL. Credit: ORNL/U.S. Dept. of Energy

ORNL to receive $497 million in Inflation Reduction Act funding

Several significant science and energy projects led by the ORNL will receive a total of $497 million in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act.

U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm visited Oak Ridge National Laboratory today to attend a groundbreaking ceremony for the U.S. Stable Isotope Research and Development Center. The facility is slated to receive $75 million in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act.

Energy Secretary breaks ground on new isotope facility at ORNL

U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm visited Oak Ridge National Laboratory today to attend a groundbreaking ceremony for the U.S. Stable Isotope Production and Research Center. The facility is slated to receive $75 million in funding from the Inflation Reduction Act.

ORNL’s Adam Guss and colleagues used synthetic biology to develop a custom microbe capable of converting deconstructed mixed plastic waste into valuable new materials. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Bringing custom microbes to the business of recycling plastic

Scientists working on a solution for plastic waste have developed a two-step chemical and biological process to break down and upcycle mixed plastics into valuable bioproducts.

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory probed the chemistry of radium to gain key insights on advancing cancer treatments using radiation therapy. Credit: Adam Malin/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Cancer-fighting chemistry

Researchers at ORNL explored radium’s chemistry to advance cancer treatments using ionizing radiation.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Mitch Allmond works with the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams Decay Station initiator, which combined diverse detectors for FRIB’s first experiment. Credit: Robert Grzywacz/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

ORNL, partners launch first experiments using new facility to make cosmic isotopes on Earth

Two decades in the making, a new flagship facility for nuclear physics opened on May 2, and scientists from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have a hand in 10 of its first 34 experiments.

ORNL scientists created a new microbial trait mapping process that improves on classical protoplast fusion techniques to identify the genes that trigger desirable genetic traits like improved biomass processing. Credit: Nathan Armistead/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy. Reprinted with the permission of Oxford University Press, publisher of Nucleic Acids Research

Retro technique advances modern bacterial engineering for bioenergy

ORNL scientists had a problem mapping the genomes of bacteria to better understand the origins of their physical traits and improve their function for bioenergy production.

Scientists from LanzaTech, Northwestern University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory engineered a microbe, shown in light blue, to convert molecules of industrial waste gases, such as carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, into acetone. The same microbe can also make isopropanol. Credit: Andy Sproles/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

Carbon-negative platform turns waste gases into valuable chemicals

A team of scientists from LanzaTech, Northwestern University and ORNL have developed carbon capture technology that harnesses emissions from industrial processes to produce acetone and isopropanol

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Physics—Elements at extremes

Physicists turned to the “doubly magic” tin isotope Sn-132, colliding it with a target at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to assess its properties as it lost a neutron to become Sn-131.

Two neutron diffraction experiments (represented by pink and blue neutron beams) probed a salty solution to reveal its atomic structure. The only difference between the experiments was the identity of the oxygen isotope (O*) that labeled nitrate molecules

Seeing a salt solution’s structure supports one hypothesis about how minerals form

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory used neutrons, isotopes and simulations to “see” the atomic structure of a saturated solution and found evidence supporting one of two competing hypotheses about how ions come

The electromagnetic isotope separator system operates by vaporizing an element such as ruthenium into the gas phase, converting the molecules into an ion beam, and then channeling the beam through magnets to separate out the different isotopes.

ORNL produces rare ruthenium isotope for atom smashing experiment

A tiny vial of gray powder produced at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is the backbone of a new experiment to study the intense magnetic fields created in nuclear collisions.