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ORNL’s new salt purification lab offers tools to make and purify the salt and perform corrosion testing, which are essential steps in qualifying molten salt reactor technologies for commercial use. Credit: Carlos Jones/ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy

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...

Kevin Robb, a staff scientist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is taking what he learned from developing the Liquid Salt Test Loop—a key tool in deploying molten salt technology applications

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 ...

Methanotroph_OB3b_cells

A team led by the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has identified a novel microbial process that can break down toxic methylmercury in the environment, a fundamental scientific discovery that could potentially reduce mercury toxicity levels and sup...

By wet-sieving stream sediment, (from left) Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Kenneth Lowe, Melanie Mayes and John Dickson sort sediment into different particle size in this stream near Rocky Top.

An Oak Ridge National Laboratory study is providing an unprecedented watershed-scale understanding of mercury in soils and sediments. Researchers focused on evaluating mercury and soil properties along the banks of a mercury-contaminated stream in Oak Ridge, Tenn., sampling 145 loca...

Andrew King loads a gel with amplified gene fragments to detect the presence of mercury methylation genes in samples from East Fork Poplar Creek in Oak Ridge.

Environmental scientists can more efficiently detect genes required to convert mercury in the environment into more toxic methylmercury with molecular probes developed by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “We now have a quic...