Feature Articles

Scientist Xiaohan Yang’s research at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory focuses on transforming plants to make them better sources of renewable energy and carbon storage. He works with the ORNL-led Center for Bioenergy Innovation, or CBI, a DOE Bioenergy Research Center where scientists are developing feedstock crops like poplar trees that grow quickly, require less water and fertilizer and are easily broken down and converted into sustainable aviation fuels.

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.

Researchers can use the radio-quiet far side of the moon to listen for a never-before-heard signal from the “Dark Ages” of the universe. The LuSEE-Night experiment will act as a pathfinder for future experiments, testing equipment and techniques in the harsh lunar environment. The Berkeley Lab team is now building the experiment’s antenna, which will head to the moon and hunt for radio waves.

New exascale simulations, some of the most robust ever, could improve reactor design, driving down costs to build.

The degradation of a nuclear fuel’s thermal conductivity is a challenge for efficient nuclear energy operations, but the Center for Thermal Energy Transport under Irradiation (TETI) is helping researchers are learning that this degradation can be mitigated by designing the chemistry and structure of the fuel.

PNNL is collaborating with Microsoft, Micron and other partners to make computational chemistry broadly available.