The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has issued a draft safety evaluation report indicating its initial acceptance of Kairos Power’s source term methodology for its Kairos Power fluoride salt-cooled high temperature reactor (KP-FHR). The topical report, which Kairos submitted to the regulator in June 2020, is the first of its kind to be reviewed by the NRC.
The Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory remained the fastest system in the United States and the second-most powerful in the world in the biannual TOP500 list. Fugaku in Kobe, Japan, remained No. 1, where it has been since June 2020. The 442-petaflop system has been at the top of the list four consecutive times.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science announced allocations of supercomputer access to 51 high-impact computational science projects for 2022 through its Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment, or INCITE, program. These awards, which will pursue transformational advances in science and engineering, account for 60 percent of the available time on the leadership-class supercomputers at DOE’s Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.
General Fusion announced its new United States base of operations in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as the company advances plans for a first-of-a-kind commercial pilot plant. A global leader in fusion energy technology development, the company is rapidly expanding its collaboration with national laboratories, universities, and the U.S. government. This expansion will create up to 50 highly technical jobs to advance the company’s commercialization of fusion energy – a carbon-free power source necessary to meet the growing global energy demand while fighting climate change.
The Robertsville Middle School cube-shaped satellite — dubbed RamSat for the school’s mascot was Launched June 3 from the NASA Kennedy Space Center as part of SpaceX Commercial Resupply Service to the International Space Station, RamSat was deployed into low earth orbit on June 14 and is currently traveling at 17,000 miles per hour.
As DOE’s Exascale Computing Project rolls into its sixth year, ECP Director Doug Kothe continues to propel the effort, drawing on the deep well of experience he has filled during three and a half decades of leading programs and building and overseeing highly specialized teams at DOE labs. Just before joining ECP, Kothe was the Deputy Associate Laboratory Director of the Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate at ORNL.
A team from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Stanford University and Purdue University developed and demonstrated a novel, fully functional quantum local area network, or QLAN, to enable real-time adjustments to information shared with geographically isolated systems at ORNL using entangled photons passing through optical fiber.
On Sept. 28, U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm joined leadership and top scientists and engineers online at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for a two-hour whirlwind tour. At 14 stops, researchers highlighted the lab’s world-class facilities and projects that enable leading-edge scientific discoveries and innovations that address some of the nation’s most compelling scientific and technical challenges.
The Department of Energy has begun installing what will become the world’s most powerful supercomputer. Oak Ridge National Laboratory has finished upgrading the data center that will house Frontier, set to be the world’s first exascale system (capable of at least 10¹⁸ floating-point operations per second).
Innovation is everywhere. The University of Tennessee Research Foundation is proud to support innovations from all colleges and departments across the University of Tennessee System. While most disclosures are STEM focused, recent disclosures have come from UT’s Facility Services, Department of Theater, College of Social Work, UTIA-Extension, School of Music, and College of Architecture and Design, showcasing the wide range of translation research happening across the UT System.
