News

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory hosted the second  2023 cohort of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Lise Meitner Programme in October.

In a finding that helps elucidate how molten salts in advanced nuclear reactors might behave, scientists have shown how electrons interacting with the ions of the molten salt can form three states with different properties. Understanding these states can help predict the impact of radiation on the performance of salt-fueled reactors.

To better understand important dynamics at play in flood-prone coastal areas, Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists working on simulations of Earth’s carbon and nutrient cycles paid a visit to experimentalists gathering data in a Texas wetland.

For 25 years, scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have used their broad expertise in human health risk assessment, ecology, radiation protection, toxicology and information management to develop widely used tools and data for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as part of the agency’s Superfund program.

ORNL hosted its annual Smoky Mountains Computational Sciences and Engineering Conference in person for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic.

The common sounds in the background of daily life – like a refrigerator’s hum, an air conditioner’s whoosh and a heat pump’s buzz – often go unnoticed. These noises, however, are the heartbeat of a healthy building and integral for comfort and convenience.

Quantum computers process information using quantum bits, or qubits, based on fragile, short-lived quantum mechanical states. To make qubits robust and tailor them for applications, researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory sought to create a new material system.

The Exascale Small Modular Reactor effort, or ExaSMR, is a software stack developed over seven years under the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project to produce the highest-resolution simulations of nuclear reactor systems to date. Now, ExaSMR has been nominated for a 2023 Gordon Bell Prize by the Association for Computing Machinery and is one of six finalists for the annual award, which honors outstanding achievements in high-performance computing from a variety of scientific domains.  

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have created a new detection system that allows home energy auditors to see air leaking from a building in real time with the help of a camera.

A new nanoscience study led by a researcher at ORNL takes a big-picture look at how scientists study materials at the smallest scales.