News By Location

Idaho National Laboratory's Microgrid in a Box includes 320 kilowatt-hours of battery storage, and can tie seamlessly into a modern electrical grid and coordinate the distribution of electricity for a small village, military base, or, in the event of a disaster, a hospital, transportation depot, or other critical infrastructure building.

When U.S. military members are deployed in the Middle East, they often have limited access to sustainable energy sources. To help reduce carbon emissions from troops abroad, Idaho National Laboratory and the U.S. Department of Defense are developing three pilot demonstration projects that will establish clean energy and sustainability solutions for the U.S. Army Central Command in Kuwait. The projects are part of a program called Operational Energy.

Idaho National Laboratory marked a milestone in its efforts to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions with the recent addition of its first electric motor coach. INL’s fleet of roughly 85 motor coaches safely transports more than 1,600 employees a day to their work locations at the Department of Energy’s INL Site and home again. Converting the laboratory’s motor coach fleet to electric or hydrogen power is part of the laboratory’s plan to eliminate or offset the sum of its carbon emissions by 2031. The laboratory plans to purchase six electric motor coaches by 2026 and has approved nearly $2 million to add motor coach charging stations.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) has awarded more than $5.8 million to Idaho National Laboratory to support research that boosts domestic supplies of the critical elements needed to meet the nation’s clean energy goals.

Nuclear and hydrogen could be the ideal fuel for recharging electric trucks, opening potential markets for developers of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). That’s according to a University of Michigan study funded by Emerging Energy Markets Analysis, an Idaho National Laboratory (INL) initiative.

On their way to market, technologies often reach what is called the “valley of death,” the point where a researcher or institution has developed a promising idea, has received funding through grants, and then runs out of cash to move the idea beyond the laboratory. How much easier would it be if the private sector found investors and raised capital, leaving research scientists free to do what they do best? Idaho National Laboratory is on a new path of exploration, as it has executed multiple agreements with Innovyz USA, a Chicago-based company that works with universities and laboratories to find new technologies ready for commercialization.

Although the likelihood of a terrorist nuclear attack is extremely low, a lot of work is required to prepare for such an unthinkable event. That’s why a response team assembled by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) recently trained in eastern Idaho’s desert on ways to collect and analyze simulated debris from a nuclear detonation. Nuclear forensics—the science of determining the origin of nuclear material—is an essential element of the United States’ strategy to prevent nuclear terrorism.

The marketplace debut of Idaho National Laboratory’s Colorimetric Detection of Actinides, or CoDeAc, isn’t the finish to the award-winning technology’s story. According to its inventors and now investors, it’s just the beginning of a new chapter. “CoDeAc has a bright future,” INL Researcher and CoDeAc inventor Catherine Riddle said. “As it gains interest and expands, there will be new opportunities for future colorimetric detection products and a diverse range of new technologies geared towards rapid radionuclide detection.” Riddle, along with fellow INL researcher Rick Demmer, started developing CoDeAc in 2019 to help first responders, radiation specialists and nuclear operators detect uranium and plutonium when responding to an emergency nuclear event.

As nations work to eliminate carbon emissions, batteries will play a huge role. Electric vehicles powered by batteries seem likely to dominate the future of commercial and consumer transportation. Likewise, large stationary batteries will augment renewables like wind and solar by storing energy when production exceeds demand on the electrical grid, then sending that energy back to the grid when needed. But even today’s most advanced lithium-ion batteries don’t yet have the combination of economics, durability and energy density necessary to meet all future energy goals. To tackle this challenge, battery scientists from the U.S., the United Kingdom and Germany have proposed the Battery Data Genome, a central repository for battery test information that could be accessed by researchers around the world.

Kamrynn Schiller, an Idaho National Laboratory nuclear research facility engineer, has designed a robotic system to support post-irradiation examination work at INL’s Irradiated Materials Characterization Laboratory (IMCL).