Feature Articles

A new project gearing up at Jefferson Lab will construct a new facility for equipment and materials. The Laydown Yard Expansion project has received $2.25 million in Inflation Reduction Act funding to provide approximately 100,000 square feet of outside storage space. The new storage space will help accommodate large experimental assemblies and support structures, as well as equipment for future experiments and operations.

Sandia National Laboratories engineers have developed a standardized screening method to determine the most important radioactive isotopes produced by an advanced nuclear reactor in the unlikely event of an incident.

At Idaho National Laboratory, computational scientists use INL’s supercomputers to perform “virtual experiments” to accomplish research that couldn’t be done by conventional means. While supercomputing can’t replace traditional experiments, supercomputing is an essential component of all modern scientific discoveries and advancements.

A scholar in Argonne's Applied Materials Division, Sixbert Muhoza is studying a new class of materials called MXenes that could improve batteries and help convert carbon dioxide to fuel.

Tiny particles in Earth’s atmosphere can have a big impact on climate. But understanding exactly how these aerosol particles form cloud drops and affect the absorption and scattering of sunlight is one of the biggest sources of uncertainty in climate models. Ogochukwu (Ogo) Enekwizu is trying to tame that complexity by creating soot-seeded clouds in the laboratory.

We need a better understanding of the particles emitted by wildfires, including how they evolve, so we can improve our predictions of their impacts on climate, climate change, and human health. Atmospheric scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborating institutions recently published a study that suggests the global climate models aren’t getting the full picture. Their data could change that.

Rachel Mandelbaum prepares to measure weak gravitational lensing, the tiny deflections of light from distant galaxies due to the gravitational influence of dark matter and visible matter that the light rays pass by on their way to Earth. Those measurements can help answer fundamental questions.

Kemmerer, Wyoming is the proposed site of a new sodium-cooled fast reactor plant designed by nuclear innovation company TerraPower. The National Reactor Innovation Center (NRIC) supports companies like TerraPower, by facilitating partnerships between the private and public sector to enable the technology demonstrations and eventual deployment of advanced reactor projects like Natrium. A significant portion of that work is taking place at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), utilizing its unique expertise and nuclear research and development facilities.

A new software package developed by Argonne will help scientists reconstruct data from X-ray tomography experiments at the Advanced Photon Source up to 30 times faster than current methods.