Experts focused on the future of nuclear technology will gather at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the fourth annual Molten Salt Reactor Workshop on October 3–4.
Mircea Podar has travelled around the world and to the bottom of the ocean in pursuit of scientific discoveries, but it is the uncharted territory he encounters when working with new microbes that inspires his research at ORNL.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists have developed a crucial component for a new kind of low-cost stationary battery system utilizing common materials and designed for grid-scale electricity storage. Large, economical electricity storage systems can benefit the nation’s grid ...
Oak Ridge National Laboratory has developed a salt purification lab to study the viability of using liquid salt that contains lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride, known as FLiBe, to cool molten salt reactors, or MSRs. Multiple American companies developing advanced reactor technol...
Energy storage could get a boost from new research of tailored liquid salt mixtures, the components of supercapacitors responsible for holding and releasing electrical energy. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Naresh Osti and his colleagues used neutrons at the lab’s Spallation Neutron ...
Thanks in large part to developing and operating a facility for testing molten salt reactor (MSR) technologies, nuclear experts at the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are now tackling the next generation of another type of clean energy—concentrating ...
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 have long sought electrically conductive materials for economical energy-storage devices. Two-dimensional (2D) ceramics called MXenes are contenders. Unlike most 2D ceramics, MXenes have inherently good conductivity because they are molecular sheets made from the carbides ...