The Tennessee Valley Authority Board of Directors ratified approval of a programmatic approach to exploring advanced nuclear technology as a component of its decarbonization goals as discussed at its meeting on the campus of Western Kentucky University on Feb. 10, the board’s first in-person meeting since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
The Tennessee Valley Authority has published their Fiscal Year 2021 Annual Report. Click to view the overview webpage and the report.
DOE Office of Environmental Management has published it’s calendar year 2022 Mission and Priorities list.
Oak Ridge before-and-after views: At left is the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant when it was closed in the late 1980s, and at right is a view of the site today, known as the East Tennessee Technology Park. The Oak Ridge Vision 2020 Project Team, comprised of members from the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management and cleanup contractor UCOR, was selected for the Secretary’s Achievement Award for successfully cleaning and transforming the former enrichment complex into a multi-use industrial hub, national park and conservation area.
2021 was a BIG year for nuclear energy as the nation continues to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic. Energy use is back on the rise and the global appetite for cleaner energy is higher than ever before.
DOE announced the establishment of the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, a new DOE office that will help deliver on President Biden’s bold climate agenda, create new, good-paying jobs for American families and workers, and reduce pollution while benefitting disadvantaged communities. President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides more than $20 billion to establish the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and support clean energy technology demonstration projects in areas including clean hydrogen, carbon capture, grid-scale energy storage, small modular reactors, and more.
A team led by computational physicist Emily Belli of General Atomics has used the 200-petaflop Summit supercomputer at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, a DOE Office of Science user facility at ORNL, to simulate energy loss in fusion plasmas.
At Oak Ridge National Laboratory, we are working to make fusion energy a reality.
Researchers at DOE’s Oak Ridge, Brookhaven and Idaho national laboratories and Stony Brook University have developed a novel approach to gain fundamental insights into molten salts, a heat transfer medium important to advanced energy technologies. Molten salts, or salt melts, remain liquid across a range of temperatures and offer stable thermal and conductive properties for some of the hottest applications.
