Feature Articles

Upgrading a particle accelerator is a lot like modernizing a house. It just requires extra teamwork, a mountain of parts and a highly specialized understanding of the physics and technology that make accelerators work.

Sandia National Laboratories marked a major milestone when the Nuclear Security Enterprise successfully produced the first completely refurbished bomb for the B61-12 life extension program in November 2021. More than 5,000 employees have worked on the B61-12 life extension program at Sandia during the last decade. As part of the program, Sandia worked to refurbish, replace or reuse about 50 different components and sub-systems that make up the B61-12.

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – DARPA – has enlisted Idaho National Laboratory to help create a mechanical system that soldiers can use to separate their garbage and turn it into everything they need to survive: food and water for their bodies, fuel and lubricants for their vehicles.

A new PNNL study quantifies hydropower's contribution to grid stability. When other power sources go out, hydropower can ramp up, recoup shortfalls, and stabilize the grid nearly instantaneously.

Machinists at INL’s Materials and Fuels Complex (MFC) have successfully fabricated a full-scale, electrically heated prototype for the Department of Energy’s Microreactor Applications Research Validation and Evaluation (MARVEL) project in just nine months.

A team at Arizona State University used the nation's fastest supercomputer, Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to simulate millions of structures and gain new insights into how proteins transition to different shapes.

Abhay Deshpande, director of Electron-Ion Collider science at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory and a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Stony Brook University, has been named a 2021 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is being recognized for his accomplishments in experimental nuclear physics at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider and other facilities, and for his role in planning for a future Electron-Ion Collider at Brookhaven Lab.

To explore the inner workings of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, or SARS-CoV-2, researchers from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a novel technique.

Peter Lindstrom is the project leader at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Center for Applied Scientific Computing, where he develops efficient ways to avoid bottlenecks while moving data.