Feature Articles

Jefferson Lab has teamed up with New Mexico’s Sandia National Laboratories to bring the BoostPlatform to Hampton Roads, kicking off the partnership with a well-attended workshop in Newport News. The DOE initiative, led by Sandia Labs, brings national labs, startups, academia and entrepreneurs together to find solutions to big, community-based energy and technology challenges.

In a whirling geopolitical landscape of new nuclear weapons, hypersonic weapons, drones and satellites, the U.S. is hustling to test new kinds of radars aimed at detecting evolving threats. Many of these tests take place in a simulated research environment created at Sandia National Laboratories.

Under DOE’s Integrated Research Infrastructure initiative, a team from ORNL and SLAC is establishing a data portal that will enable Frontier to process the results from experiments conducted by LCLS-II. Scientists and users at LCLS will leverage ORNL’s computing power to study their data, conduct simulations and more quickly inform their ongoing experiments, all within a seamless framework. 

Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory researchers measured a new record for a fusion device internally clad in tungsten. The device sustained a fusion reaction for a record six minutes and four seconds with 1.15 gigajoules of power injected, 15% more energy and twice the density than before. PPPL researchers used their own novel approach to measure several aspects of the reaction using a specially adapted device for detecting X-rays called the multi-energy soft X-ray camera (ME-SXR).

A team of scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames National Laboratory recently developed a chemical conversion process that makes diesel out of plastic waste.

Thunderstorms in the American Midwest. Tiny particles in the cloud cover of the Amazon rainforest. Heat waves in Baltimore. What do these very different places have in common? They’re all areas where the Department of Energy Office of Science Biological and Environmental Research (BER) program is supporting climate research. You can also find information about all of them on the National Virtual Climate Laboratory (NVCL).