Quantum precision reached in modeling molten salt behavior
The world’s first exascale supercomputer will help scientists peer into the future of global climate change and open a window into weather patterns that could affect the world a generation from now.
Raina Setzer knows the work she does matters. That’s because she’s already seen it from the other side. Setzer, a radiochemical processing technician in Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Isotope Processing and Manufacturing Division, joined the lab in June 2023.
In response to a renewed international interest in molten salt reactors, researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have developed a novel technique to visualize molten salt intrusion in graphite.
Steven Campbell can often be found deep among tall cases of power electronics, hunkered in his oversized blue lab coat, with 1500 volts of electricity flowing above his head. When interrupted in his laboratory at ORNL, Campbell will usually smile and duck his head.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in collaboration with NASA, are taking additive manufacturing to the final frontier by 3D printing the same kind of wheel as the design used by NASA for its robotic lunar rover, demonstrating the technology for specialized parts needed for space exploration.
As Frontier, the world’s first exascale supercomputer, was being assembled at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in 2021, understanding its performance on mixed-precision calculations remained a difficult prospect.
In June, ORNL hit a milestone not seen in more than three decades: producing a production-quality amount of plutonium-238
Outside the high-performance computing, or HPC, community, exascale may seem more like fodder for science fiction than a powerful tool for scientific research. Yet, when seen through the lens of real-world applications, exascale computing goes from ethereal concept to tangible reality with exceptional benefits.
Subho Mukherjee, an R&D associate in the Vehicle Power Electronics Research group at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been elevated to the grade of senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
It was reading about current nuclear discoveries in textbooks that first made Ken Engle want to work at a national lab. It was seeing the real-world impact of the isotopes produced at ORNL