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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.

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.

Assembly of the PROSPECT neutrino detector. (Credit: PROSPECT collaboration / Mara Lavitt)
The Precision Reactor Oscillation and Spectrum Experiment (PROSPECT) has completed the installation of a novel antineutrino detector that will probe the possible existence of a new form of matter. PROSPECT, located at the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at the Department of Energy...
From left, ORNL’s Rick Lowden, Chris Bryan and Jim Kiggans were troubled that target discs of a material needed to produce Mo-99 using an accelerator could deform after irradiation and get stuck in their holder.

“Made in the USA.” That can now be said of the radioactive isotope molybdenum-99 (Mo-99), last made in the United States in the late 1980s. Its short-lived decay product, technetium-99m (Tc-99m), is the most widely used radioisotope in medical diagnostic imaging. Tc-99m is best known ...

Esther Parish

Esther Parish’s holistic approach to life is apparent not only in her environmental research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, but in her careful cultivation of a future crop of young scientists. Her expertise as a geographer coupled with a keen interest in the natural world drives Parish’s resea...

A tetradentate ligand selects americium (Am, depicted by green spheres) over europium (Eu, blue spheres). Red indicates oxygen atoms and purple, nitrogen atoms that are the key to the ligand’s selectivity. Image credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S.
After used nuclear fuel is removed from a reactor, it emits heat for decades and remains radioactive for thousands of years. The used fuel is a mixture of major actinides (uranium, plutonium), fission products (mainly assorted metals, including lanthanides) and minor actinides (i.e....
Oak Ridge National Laboratory bioinformatics researcher Dan Jacobson plugs AI, deep learning into biosystems.

Dan Jacobson is illuminating the workings of biological systems from the molecular scale up by leveraging Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s supercomputing resources to create machine- and deep-learning techniques more easily understood by humans

Fidget spinner
One drop of liquid, a cutting-edge laser 3D-printer and a few hours are all it takes to make a fidget spinner smaller than the width of a human hair. The tiny whirligig was created by researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences to illustrate the facility’s unique resources and expertise available to scientists across the world.
David Weston

David Weston became fascinated with plant genetics and ecology in college, and now with the support provided by the DOE Office of Science Early Career Research Program, he will link those fields as he studies plant-microbe symbiosis. The research will focus on sphagnum moss, a dominant plant of n...

ORNL Image

Working backwards has moved Josh Michener’s research far forward as he uses evolution and genetics to engineer microbes for better conversion of plants into biofuels and biochemicals. In his work for the BioEnergy Science Center at ORNL, for instance, “we’ve gotten good at engineering microbes th...

Researchers at Rice University and Oak Ridge National Laboratory determined that two-dimensional materials grown onto a cone allow control over where defects called grain boundaries appear.

Rice University researchers have learned to manipulate two-dimensional materials to design in defects that enhance the materials’ properties. The Rice lab of theoretical physicist Boris Yakobson and colleagues at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are combi...