Feature Articles

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in collaboration with three other national labs, have developed a free online platform to help utilities understand how solar energy projects will affect the operation of their power systems. This capability can increase utilities’ confidence in expanding their solar portfolios, protecting reliable delivery of electricity while supporting U.S. efforts to slow climate change.

Argonne’s Aurora system has officially entered the exascale era with its latest submission to the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.

A specialized piece of equipment at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is used for measurements varying from extremely large structures to quantum. The equipment is available for projects within the national lab as well as outside.

When President Biden signed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in 2021, he announced a goal to install 500,000 new electric vehicle chargers across the nation by 2030. The Department of Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office has tasked the experts at Idaho National Laboratory to answer big questions surrounding this goal.

Jefferson Lab has teamed up with New Mexico’s Sandia National Laboratories to bring the BoostPlatform to Hampton Roads, kicking off the partnership with a well-attended workshop in Newport News. The DOE initiative, led by Sandia Labs, brings national labs, startups, academia and entrepreneurs together to find solutions to big, community-based energy and technology challenges.

In a whirling geopolitical landscape of new nuclear weapons, hypersonic weapons, drones and satellites, the U.S. is hustling to test new kinds of radars aimed at detecting evolving threats. Many of these tests take place in a simulated research environment created at Sandia National Laboratories.

Under DOE’s Integrated Research Infrastructure initiative, a team from ORNL and SLAC is establishing a data portal that will enable Frontier to process the results from experiments conducted by LCLS-II. Scientists and users at LCLS will leverage ORNL’s computing power to study their data, conduct simulations and more quickly inform their ongoing experiments, all within a seamless framework. 

Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory researchers measured a new record for a fusion device internally clad in tungsten. The device sustained a fusion reaction for a record six minutes and four seconds with 1.15 gigajoules of power injected, 15% more energy and twice the density than before. PPPL researchers used their own novel approach to measure several aspects of the reaction using a specially adapted device for detecting X-rays called the multi-energy soft X-ray camera (ME-SXR).