More than 200 people turned out yesterday for the “Nuclear Opportunities Workshop” organized by the East Tennessee Economic Council with sponsorship support from a number of organizations that have a stake in the region’s long-standing place in the sector and the nuclear renaissance that is occurring.
Judging by the turnout – a record of more than 200 people at the all-day program, interest in nuclear power is clearly a “top of mind” item for many in a region with a long and well-known legacy in the nuclear sector as well as a strong footprint in the future in areas like advanced reactor technologies, next-gen reactor designs, and fusion power.
Knoxville startup SkyNano has been named a finalist for Tesla founder Elon Musk’s $100 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal prize. SkyNano will find out Friday if it is one of 15 winners to take home a $1 million prize in the Milestone Award category, which recognizes the most promising concepts to pull carbon pollution out of Earth’s atmosphere.
What if you could capture pollution off a smokestack and turn it into a polyester dress, jet fuel or high-end running shoes? That’s something that Oak Ridge National Lab scientists have been working on and it’s already hitting stores. ORNL and LanzaTech, a biotechnology company, have created a synthetic bacterium that eats industrial pollution and secretes useful chemicals as waste.
Measuring water quality throughout river networks with precision, speed and at lower cost than traditional methods is now possible with AquaBOT, an aquatic drone developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The maneuverable AquaBOT measures water quality indicators such as nitrate, temperature and dissolved oxygen along the entire length of mid-sized streams where water quality can be variable.
ORNL researchers collaborated with Iowa State University and RJ Lee Group to demonstrate a safe and effective antiviral coating for N95 masks. The coating destroys the COVID-19-causing coronavirus and could enable reuse of masks made from various fabrics.
Computational users at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, or OLCF, are running scientific codes on Frontier’s architecture in the form of a powerful test system at the OLCF called Crusher. Frontier, an HPE Cray EX supercomputer capable of 1018 calculations per second — or 10 with 18 zeroes — was installed in late 2021 and is undergoing integration and testing. Frontier is on track to be the nation’s first exascale supercomputer this year.
Oak Ridge, Tenn.—ORAU assumed management of a $129.7 million contract for the NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) on Jan. 30 with a new website for available fellowships. Both early-career and senior scientists are invited to explore these fellowship opportunities and share in NASA’s mission to develop advancements in science, technology, aeronautics and space exploration. The first round of upcoming application deadlines for these fellowships is March 1.
novel method to 3D print components for nuclear reactors, developed by DOE’s ORNL, has been licensed by Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation, or USNC.
e challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2021 continued apace, with developments across the lab’s broad science and technology missions.
