Feature Articles

Nuclear power is a significant source of steady carbon-neutral electricity, making the design and construction of new and next-generation nuclear reactors critical for achieving the U.S.’s green energy goals. A number of new nuclear reactor designs, such as small modular reactors and non-light water reactors, have been developed over the past 10 to 15 years. In order to help the Nuclear Regulatory Commission evaluate the safety of the next generation of reactors, fuel cycle facilities and fuel technologies, researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have been expanding their severe accident modeling computer code, called Melcor, to work with different reactor geometries, fuel types and coolant systems.

The “superheavy” elements are found only in labs. The small amounts of material available means chemists must use special techniques to study them. This research developed a new way to study the chemistry of metallic elements with extremely low concentrations of material. This may lead to better methods of recovering iridium, an element that is critical to national security and the economy.

Using X-rays to study batteries and electronics at nanometer scales requires extremely high resolution. Argonne scientists led an effort to build a new instrument and devise a new algorithm to greatly improve the resolution for nanotomography.

A discovery from PNNL and Washington State University could help reduce the amount of expensive material needed to treat vehicle exhaust by making the most of every precious atom.

Katie Sautter, a postdoctoral scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, is building new, exquisite, atomically engineered materials that will be used for quantum communication. Her work is part of Q-NEXT, a DOE National Quantum Information Science Research Center.

As part of a larger goal to model the energy use of every building in the nation, researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory have analyzed 178,000 buildings using the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility.

At North Carolina State University, associate professor James Kneller studies neutrinos emitted from exploding stars.

Four first-of-a-kind 3D-printed fuel assembly brackets, produced at the Department of Energy’s Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, have been installed and are now under routine operating conditions at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant Unit 2 in Athens, Alabama.