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Germina Ilas (left) and Ian Gauld review spent fuel data entries in the SFCOMPO 2.0 database.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory provided significant contributions and coordination in the development of the Nuclear Energy Agency’s (NEA’s) recently released Spent Fuel Isotopic Composition (SFCOMPO) 2.0—the world’s largest open database for spent
In a model of a 1.6 liter engine cylinder, liquid fuel (shown in red and orange) is converted to fuel vapor under high temperatures during ignition. Image courtesy of Ronald Grover.

Most car owners in the United States do not think twice about passing over the diesel pump at the gas station. Instead, diesel fuel mostly powers our shipping trucks, boats, buses, and generators—and that is because diesel engines are about 10 percent more fuel-efficient than gaso...

A conceptual illustration of proton-proton fusion in which two protons fuse to form a deuteron. Image courtesy of William Detmold.

Nuclear physicists are using the nation’s most powerful supercomputer, Titan, at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility to study particle interactions important to energy production in the Sun and stars and to propel the search for new physics discoveries Direct calculatio...

Yarom Polsky

Yarom Polsky’s diverse background in private and public-sector research has given him a knack for recognizing opportunities to advance the state-of-the-art, and he parlays that knowledge into successful innovation as an engineer, group leader, and 

Brian Post is building the future of large-scale additive manufacturing at the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at ORNL.

Brian Post came to the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory looking for a way to combine his interests in controls engineering and robotics, and he found it at the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility (MDF), where he and his colleagues are revolutionizing 3D-printi...

A senior research scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Olufemi “Femi” Omitaomu is leveraging Big Data for urban resilience. Image credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Dept. of Energy; photographer Jason Richards.

At the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Olufemi “Femi” Omitaomu is leveraging Big Data for urban resilience, helping growing cities support future infrastructure and resource needs. A senior research scientist for ORNL’s Computational Sciences and Engineeri...

ORNL researcher Miaofang Chi refines her microscopy techniques toward understanding how and why materials have certain properties.

Material surfaces and interfaces may appear flat and void of texture to the naked eye, but a view from the nanoscale reveals an intricate tapestry of atomic patterns that control the reactions between the material and its environment. Electron microscopy allows researchers to probe...

Mallory Ladd gathers field samples on the coastal plain of northern Alaska. Photo courtesy, Mallory Ladd.
Mallory Ladd began trekking to the Arctic, even before her time at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in search of a better understanding of what’s going on belowground and how it links to changes in the larger landscape. The University of Tennessee, Knoxv...
Robert Wagner is director of the National Transportation Research Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Photo credit: Jason Richards, ORNL.

Some engineers are attracted to fuels and engine research out of a love of cars. For Robert Wagner, however, enthusiasm for combustion science and chaos theory drew him to this area of research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After years of delivering breakthroughs for cleane...

ORNL’s Larry Allard used high-resolution aberration-corrected electron microscopy methods to image single atoms of rhodium in a zeolite catalyst material, which aided in the development of a breakthrough process that directly converts methane to methanol.
MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE – The direct oxidation of methane—found in natural gas—into methanol at low temperatures has long been a holy grail. Now, researchers at Tufts have found a breakthrough way to accomplish the feat using a heterogeneous catalyst and cheap molecular oxygen, according to a paper published today in the journal Nature by a team led by Tufts University chemical engineers.