Latest news with #OakRidgeNationalLaboratory
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Oak Ridge High gets $225,000 donation supporting new high-tech tools
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (WATE) — UT-Battelle donated $225,000 to Oak Ridge Public Schools Education Foundation for a project called 'Giants of Oak Ridge.' The money is to fund a student-run project that uses generative AI, advanced manufacturing and software from Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Students will use the tools to design statues of prominent historical figures to be installed throughout the city. UT-Battelle is also paying up to $250,000 for lab staff to work alongside Oak Right High School students, training them to use the equipment. London, Kentucky couple recounts huddling in basement as tornado destroyed home 'What keeps America a great country is the investment that we make in public education and the way that we support our kids who grow up and be the leaders of tomorrow,' said Stephen Streiffer from ORNL. 'One of the things we often say at Oak Ridge National Laboratory is 'The people that will make up the workforce 10 years from now are the kids that are at the high school, middle schools and elementary [schools] now.' Streiffer said this will help students learn how to move into the workforce. He emphasized that the equipment the students will be using is the same as is used at ORNL. TWRA, Appalachian Bear Rescue working to boost cooperation, increase transparency UT-Battelle is a nonprofit company established to manage and operate ORNL. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
A Thorium Reactor in the Middle of the Desert Has Rewritten the Rules of Nuclear Power
Scientists have built the first-ever thorium reactor. Thorium is both more easily accessible and less dangerous than uranium—the most common fission fuel. The system also uses molten salt instead of water to cool the fission reactor, which is reportedly much safer in the event of a meltdown. Uranium (U) is the poster child for nuclear fission reactors—the most common type of nuclear reactor we have. Most fission reactors are fueled by the isotope uranium-235 (it even made its way into The Simpsons as the glowing green sludge that spawns mutant fish), but despite its star status in pop culture and nuclear physics, uranium is not the only heavy metal that can release a tremendous amount of power when its nuclei are split. In the remote expanse of the Gobi desert stands the first thorium (Th) reactor ever built. Last year, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences showed that this two-megawatt reactor could power up and operate without a glitch, and they have now achieved another first—successfully reloading it while it was still running. Thorium-232 (the isotope of thorium that most commonly occurs on its own) is not capable of undergoing fission by itself. By capturing an extra neutron, however, it can morph into protactinium, which decays into U-233. This can be achieved by exposing the thorium to extreme radiation, which bombards it with enough neutrons for the transmutation to happen. Protactinium is then extracted from the reactor's active zone before too many neutrons can be lost. It is possible to recycle the U-233 decay into new fuel, or continue fueling the machine with it as is, the latter of which is usually done with molten salt reactors like this new thorium reactor. These reactors are gaining traction again after a decades-long hiatus—almost $1 billion was spent on developing stealth bomber planes with molten salt reactors that used thorium for nuclear power at the dawn of the Cold War era. When the first functional molten salt reactor was developed by scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, it ran at full power from 1965 though 1969 (over 13,000 hours), but the Department of Energy lost interest and no further work was done to advance the technology until the early 2000s. But that research remained available to the public, which is how China eventually discovered it and used it as a backbone for their own reactor. And, as it turns out, molten salt is still an appealing option. Most nuclear reactors use water as a coolant, but because water is volatile—high pressure needs to be maintained so that it stays in its liquid state. Without that pressure, the water evaporates, and reactor fuel could overheat and suffer a meltdown. Using molten salt prevents radioactive sludge from leaking because the boiling point of salt is too high for it to evaporate at reactor temperatures. In case of overheating, the molten salt circling the reactor will expand and halt the reaction. Molten salt reactors can can also use molten salt in the fuel, which makes it prone to freezing in case of a breach (a very good thing). The fuel in those vessels or pipes will spread and cool until it finally freezes in place. China's reactor uses salt both as coolant and in its fuel. Thorium is not only more abundant than uranium, but has the upside of not being as easy to weaponize. While the fission of Th-232 produces protinactium, which decays into U-233 and can be used in nuclear weapons, U-233 isn't nearly as explosive as other isotopes (the isotope most commonly used in uranium explosives is U-235). There wouldn't be much of a point in dealing it to create an illicit nuclear bomb. Though China may currently be the world leader in molten salt reactors, the U.S. is catching up. Nuclear tech company Core Power is planning an enormous floating network of these power plants within the next decade. We'll just have to wait and see where the molten salt take us. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Total U.S. building energy use topic of FORNL talk April 8
A distinguished scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory who has led the creation of computer models of energy use in nearly every residential and commercial building in the United States will speak Tuesday, April 8, to Friends of ORNL. The models are proving useful for scientists and businesses. 'An energy model of every U.S. building: Science and business uses' is the title of a talk that will be presented to FORNL by Joshua New of the Grid-Interactive Controls Group in the Electrification and Energy Infrastructure Division at ORNL. In 2024 he received the international R&D 100 'Researcher of the Year' award. In 2016 he won an R&D 100 award (Oscar of Invention) titled, 'Roof Savings Calculator Suite.' The free presentation is open to the public and will be held at noon at the UT Resource Center, 1201 Oak Ridge Turnpike. Sandwiches, chips, cookies and drinks will be available at 11:15 a.m. at the UT Resource Center for a donation of $10 on a first-come, first-served basis. To view the virtual presentation, click on the talk title on the website homepage and then click on the Zoom link near the top of the page describing the lecture. You can view it the next day by clicking on 'Past Talks' on the website's navigation bar. New is also a joint faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and Bredesen Center at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, where he received the Outstanding Mentor Award in 2024 and his Ph.D. in computer science in 2009. He has more than 200 peer-reviewed publications. He managed research portfolios for the Building Technologies Office of the U.S. Department of Energy that totaled more than $25 million while he was on loan to the Department of Energy. Over the past 15 years, he led more than 225 projects totaling $350 million. 'More than 125 million residential and commercial buildings in the United States account for 40% of the nation's primary energy use and 73% to 80% of electricity use on the nation's grid,' he said. 'The total energy cost of operating buildings in the United States is $370 billion per year. 'Scientists at ORNL are leveraging high-performance computing resources to simplify building-specific decisions and to provide major industry partners with data necessary to increase deployment of energy-efficient and other building technologies to help meet national goals. 'After five years of effort, the team I led successfully created a model of every U.S. building in 2020. Our building energy model is an open-source tool. We achieved breakthroughs in urban scale energy modeling made possible by artificial intelligence, computer vision and big data processing. 'The digital twin data for 125.7 million U.S. buildings and 122 million models have been made open source. We developed software to help inform best practices for urban-scale energy modeling.' A digital twin is a virtual copy of a real-world object that accurately reflects its physical counterpart; it is able to be updated with real-time digital data in an effort to determine how to optimize the performance of the real-world object, such as a building. 'In the past five years, I have been working with key partners in several multibillion-dollar industries to enhance the data and models for practical uses in actionable business decisions,' New continued. 'Yet, even more exciting multi-trillion-dollar opportunities exist for resilience, insurance and automated financing of building investments. 'In my talk, I will present some of DOE's national goals, scientific breakthroughs, a roadmap for how to create a digital twin of every building in a nation, ways this information is being used currently, and some thoughts regarding how this new information could help scale up existing industries or create new ones.' The ORNL data on individual American buildings' energy use, energy demand, emissions and costs has been made publicly available, he said. 'It can be used in scaling up the total effect on the nation of all building operations.' This article originally appeared on Oakridger: Total U.S. building energy use topic of Friends of ORNL talk April 8
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Knoxville nuclear company papers show 'no scientific barriers' to fusion power plant
Type One Energy, a Knoxville-based company with a mission to build the world's first commercial nuclear fusion power plant, has published a collection of papers it says leave "no scientific barriers" in its path to bringing the power of the sun to Earth. The six peer-reviewed scholarly papers and an editorial were published in a special issue of the Journal of Plasma Physics, the company announced March 27. The articles describe the science behind Type One Energy's fusion power plant design, part of a class of technologies called stellarators, which use powerful magnetic fields to contain plasma heated to around 100 million degrees Celsius, or around 180 million degrees Fahrenheit. Unlike traditional nuclear power plants that split isotopes of uranium apart to create heat, fusion reactions crush isotopes of hydrogen together at extreme temperatures to create heat. Scientists have worked to develop nuclear fusion power plants since the 1950s, but rapid advancements in supercomputing have sped up stellarator breakthroughs. Type One Energy must overcome engineering challenges to achieve its goal of supplying clean energy through fusion, but it has solved the basic physics problems of the design by running more than 70,000 simulations on supercomputers like Frontier at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. 'We don't need a scientific breakthrough to figure out how the heck we're going to do this,' John Canik, chief science and engineering officer at Type One Energy, told Knox News. 'There's no fundamental technical unknown that we need to figure out." Type One Energy, founded in 2019 by energy business leaders and some of the world's leading fusion experts, has not yet built a stellarator under the company name. It plans to begin constructing a prototype called Infinity One at the Tennessee Valley Authority's closed Bull Run coal plant in 2026. But its scientists have built and run experimental stellarators around the world, including the world's largest and most powerful stellarator, the Wendelstein 7-X in Germany. For Type One Energy's experts, nuclear fusion isn't science fiction. 'We reach these temperatures pretty routinely in existing fusion facilities,' Canik said. Type One Energy signed an agreement with TVA in February to develop a pilot fusion power plant called Infinity Two, which the federal utility may one day operate. The company has not selected a location for its first power plant. 'Why are we the first private fusion company with an agreement to develop a potential fusion power plant project for an energy utility? Because we have a design anchored in reality,' Type One Energy CEO Christofer Mowry said in a release. "We have an organization that understands this isn't about designing a science project.' The company finalized an $82.4 million fundraising round last year which included investment from Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures. It is preparing to raise $200 million this year to fund development of its technology, Axios reported. Type One Energy established its headquarters in Hardin Valley last year to be near ORNL and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. It became the first recipient of Gov. Bill Lee's nuclear fund, benefitting from Tennessee's effort to become the national hub of new nuclear technologies. The company plans to begin building its prototype in the turbine hall of the Bull Run plant next year, and to complete it by early 2029 to prove key functions of the machine. It announced the symbolic transition for the closed coal plant last year alongside a $223 million investment that would create around 300 high-paying jobs. Type One Energy now has close to 160 employees, and around 60 people are based out of its headquarters at 2410 Cherahala Blvd. Stellarators are just one fusion technology among many, though Canik and his colleagues believe their design has the best shot at commercial success. The other main design that uses magnetic confinement is called a tokamak, made famous by ITER, a giant multinational science project based in France. Other technologies use lasers to ignite a fusion reaction by rapidly heating a small pellet of fuel. 'The stellarator has the advantage that you can predict its performance pretty accurately with modern supercomputers and the most advanced physics codes we have,' Canik said. 'As it turns out, that performance is basically determined by the shape of the plasma.' The stellarator is a complex system shaped like a twisted doughnut. At its extreme internal temperatures, matter only exists as plasma – there are no solids, liquids or gases. One of the central challenges of nuclear fusion is containing the hot, diffuse plasma. 'People have likened it to holding Jello with rubber bands,' Canik said. 'Plasmas are very squirrely.' The Type One Energy design keeps the plasma's heat from escaping using precisely shaped coils of copper magnets that form powerful magnetic fields. It uses helium to chill the magnets to extremely low temperatures to achieve a state called superconductivity, a similar technology used in medical MRI machines. The magnets will operate at around four Kelvin, or minus 450 degrees Fahrenheit. 'Fusion is interesting because you have one of the hottest places in the universe right next to one of the coldest places,' Canik said. The main fuels for the machine are deuterium, an isotope of helium abundant in seawater, and lithium. Fusion scientists say there is enough deuterium in a bathtub of seawater and enough lithium in two laptop batteries to create all the electricity a person needs in a lifetime through nuclear fusion. A meter-thick metal "blanket" surrounds the plasma to absorb heat, produce tritium through a breeder reaction and protect the rest of the system. Helium flows through the metal wall to carry heat to the electrical side of the plant, which functions much like a traditional nuclear plant. If Type One Energy succeeds in building a fusion power plant that produces electricity, its "ash" waste product would be helium, too. And its mind-bogglingly hot and cold insides would be so contained, Canik said, that you could walk up and touch the machine's outer shell and it would feel room temperature. Daniel Dassow is a growth and development reporter focused on technology and energy. Email: Signal: @danieldassow.24. Support strong local journalism by subscribing at This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Knoxville's Type One Energy details nuclear fusion plant in new papers
Yahoo
16-03-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Scientists make groundbreaking discovery that could change the future of recycling: 'This process could make a significant impact'
Researchers from Oak Ridge National Laboratory have discovered a process that could change how we handle plastic waste forever. Melting, the traditional way of recycling plastic, degrades the material. Repeated recycling renders the material weak, and it is often discarded because of diminished durability and quality. With the new recycling process, plastic is recycled by rearranging it at the molecular level — which is highly efficient. By using advanced chemical reactions, ORNL researchers found a way to strengthen recycled plastic, according to a report in E+E Leader. This breakthrough, called polymer editing, works by rearranging the molecular structure of polymers instead of breaking them down. With this process, plastics can be refined and made more durable than the original material. The difference between traditional recycling and polymer editing is similar to bulldozing a house versus remodeling it. With traditional recycling, you tear down the house and rebuild it using the scraps. On the other hand, with polymer editing, you're rearranging and upgrading materials while reinforcing its foundation. The end results for both are vastly different. ORNL's method offers more benefits than old-school recycling. It produces less pollution, uses less energy, and generates materials with enhanced functionality. "This process could make a significant impact," according to lead researcher Jeffrey Foster, as it allows previously deemed "difficult-to-recycle" materials, including polyurethane and epoxy resins, to be broken down and repurposed. E+E Leader noted that an estimated 450 million tons of plastic waste are generated each year, only 9% of which is recycled. And the plastics included in the 9% can only be recycled two or three times before they can no longer be reused, according to BBC Science Focus. ORNL's revolutionary process could significantly boost this figure, possibly reducing plastic waste's impact, especially on marine life. Polymer editing may be the answer the world is waiting for in curbing plastic pollution. As polymer editing becomes a reality, we can expect better environmental health and lower costs for industries and consumers. Companies such as Trashie and other eco-conscious organizations are already working toward similar waste-reduction goals, making this discovery even more exciting. Do you think we use too much plastic in America? Definitely Only some people Not really I'm not sure Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. For more ways to reduce plastic waste, check out this guide on choosing plastic-free options for everyday products. Join our free newsletter for weekly updates on the latest innovations improving our lives and shaping our future, and don't miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.
