U.S. Department of Energy Research News

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12-Jul-2004
Nuclear energy to go: A self-contained, portable reactor
Nuclear energy supplies 20 percent of the electricity used in the U.S. and 16 percent of that used throughout the world. But as the global use of nuclear energy grows, so do concerns about the vulnerability of nuclear plants and fuel materials to misuse or attacks by terrorists.

12-Jul-2004
Going to extremes
Little is known about the chemistry that produces minerals in the deep regions of Earth or that creates the ammonia oceans of the outer planets and moons. What is known is that an element's fundamental properties--its optical, structural, electrical, and magnetic characteristics--can completely change when it is put under extreme conditions.

12-Jul-2004
Helping water managers ensure clean and reliable supplies
MOST Americans take cheap and plentiful supplies of pure drinking water for granted. Some even consider it to be an inalienable right. However, clean water sources, especially pristine underground aquifers, are being consumed at an increasing rate, and contaminants and changing patterns in rain and snowfall are threatening the adequacy of supplies.

12-Jul-2004
Nature's greatest puzzles attract physicists to SLAC summer institute
With youthful enthusiasm, hundreds of scientists will explore Nature's Greatest Puzzles at the SLAC Summer Institute (SSI) on August 2-13.

12-Jul-2004
Getting more for your energy buck
As the U.S. attempts to move away from dependence on foreign oil and toward less-polluting forms of energy, converting wasted heat into useful energy is increasingly important. In our country today, as much as 30 percent of the energy involved in large-scale industrial processes is lost through smokestacks. Gasoline and diesel engines lose 35 to 40 percent of their fuel energy in waste heat, primarily in the exhaust.

12-Jul-2004
Nanoparticles may mean longer for enzymes
The biochemical world's workaholic is the enzyme. Enzymes are molecules in cells that lead short, active and brutal lives. They restlessly catalyze their neighbors, cleaving and assembling proteins and metabolizing compounds. After a few hours of furious activity, they are what chemists call "destabilized," or spent.

4-Jun-2004
Is dark matter actually black?
Gravity is the glue that holds together huge objects such as planets and galaxies. After looking at scores of galaxies, however, physicists realized something was amiss. On the outskirts of rotating galaxies, for example, stars were moving too fast for the galaxies to hold together by the gravity from the stars alone.

4-Jun-2004
NLC team achieves key milestone for 'warm' linear collider
More than 2,600 physicists agree that the hunt for heavier particles, dark matter and supersymmetry requires an international linear collider (LC)--but the open question is whether to use 'warm' or 'cold' technology to accelerate the electrons and positrons to the massive energies needed.

2-Jun-2004
Future space scientists train at Brookhaven Lab
As astronauts spend more time in space, scientists need to better understand the dangers space travelers face from deep-space radiation -- and how to best shield them against these risks. A new NASA Summer Student Program at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory will help provide a "pipeline" of researchers to tackle this challenge. The program begins June 1, 2004

1-Jun-2004
Agricultural biosecurity taking on increased importance
Our current agricultural food safety and security programs have provided the citizens of the U.S. the safest food production system the world has ever seen. But these programs were not designed to identify or respond to intentional acts of bioterrorism using either conventional or unconventional biological agents to contaminate our food or food processing/distribution system.

1-Jun-2004
SARS foam- Sandia foams fight SARS virus
In a series of tests conducted at Kansas State University on Bovine coronavirus (BCV) -- the internationally accepted surrogate for the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) coronavirus -- Sandia versions of its DF- 200 formulation fully inactivated samples in one minute or less.

1-Jun-2004
Synthetic aperture radar- MiniSAR offers promise
Weighing less than 30 pounds, Sandia National Laboratories' miniSAR (synthetic aperture radar) will be onefourth the weight and one-tenth the volume of conventional SARs that now fly on larger unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). It is the latest design produced by Sandia in a history that involves more than 20 years of related research and development.

1-Jun-2004
Tag-on sensor- Eliminating 'friendly fire' during combat
Building on more than 10 years of research and development, Sandia engineers have created a radar tag sensor that can be mounted on military vehicles and is recognizable to an attack aircraft as a "friendly."

1-Jun-2004
Yucca mountain- Pursuing a license
Sandia National Laboratories scientists, engineers and technicians are performing critical experiments deep in the volcanic heart of Nevada's Yucca Mountain to provide information that will assist in a key decision as to whether to license the remote site as a permanent repository for these radioactive wastes. Our feature story looks at Sandia's role in the 20-year project.

1-Jun-2004
Shocking plutonium to reveal its secrets
One of the most daunting scientific and engineering challenges today is ensuring the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear arsenal. To effectively meet that challenge, scientists need better data showing how plutonium, a key component of nuclear warheads, behaves under extreme pressures and temperatures. On July 8, 2003, Lawrence Livermore researchers performed the inaugural experiment of a 30-meter-long, two-stage gas gun designed to obtain those data.

1-Jun-2004
Strategic supercomputing comes of age
With the birth of the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP), the need for better computer simulations became paramount to help ensure that the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile remained safe, reliable, and capable of meeting performance requirements.

1-Jun-2004
Seeing the universe in a grain of dust
Imagine traveling halfway to Jupiter--3.2 billion kilometers--for a small handful of comet dust. That's the mission for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Stardust spacecraft launched on February 7, 1999. This past January, Stardust flew by Comet Wild 2's nucleus and through a halo of gases and dust at the comet's head, collecting cometary dust particles released from the surface just hours before.

1-Jun-2004
Nuclear plants may be clean hydrogen source
For more than 100 years, visionaries have periodically espoused the dream of an economy driven by hydrogen - an efficient fuel that emits only water when burned.

1-Jun-2004
Creating stability in a world of unstable electricity distribution
Several factors combined during the afternoon of August 14, 2003, to create a blackout that left 50 million people around the Great Lakes without power and cost the nation's economy an estimated $1 billion. This was only the latest in a string of electrical outages. At the other end of the country, bottlenecks in California's transmission grid caused notorious and costly outages throughout summer 2001.

1-Jun-2004
Argonne tests, creates fuel cells to power the future
Fuel cells are a key component of the nation's plan for a secure energy future. Fuel cells convert hydrogen gas into electricity and water. Since hydrogen can be produced from a variety of domestic resources, researchers are seeking cost-efficient ways to use it to meet the nation's growing energy needs and reduce the nation's oil reliance.

1-Jun-2004
Fueling the hydrogen future with Argonne's ceramic membrane
A ceramic membrane developed at Argonne brings fuel-cell cars closer to reality by efficiently and inexpensively extracting hydrogen from fossil fuels.

1-Jun-2004
Superconductivity team wins top research prizes
Awards presented in 2003 to three Argonne scientists highlighted the excellence of Argonne's superconductivity program.

21-May-2004
First seven years of physics with CEBAF
To recognize and review the accomplishments of Jefferson Lab, the JLab User Group Board of Directors organized the symposium which was held June 11-13, 2003 and dedicated to the memory of Nathan Isgur, Jefferson Lab's first Chief Scientist. The meeting was divided into eight topics: nucleon form factors, few-body physics, reactions involving nuclei, strangeness production, structure functions, parity violation, deep exclusive reactions, and hadron spectroscopy. Each topic was presented by one experimentalist and one theorist.

6-May-2004
Brookhaven-developed recyclable catalyst may help to reduce hazardous industrial waste
Brookhaven chemists have developed a new, "green" catalyst -- one that converts chemical reactants into usable products without producing waste.

6-May-2004
Brookhaven develops clean, sustainable energy alternatives
Biofuel field testing, wind-energy design, battery-material development, natural-gas harvesting, clean hydrogen production -- these are several of the alternative-energy research initiatives now underway at Brookhaven. The goal is to transfer to industry technology that solves world-wide energy challenges in an innovative, economically feasible fashion.