News By Location

2022 marks a major milestone for Sandia National Laboratories’ groundbreaking tribal energy internship program: two decades of meeting the growing renewable energy technical needs of Native American tribes and providing valuable, real-world experience for Native and Alaska Native STEM students.

Roasting green chile is an important cultural touchstone for New Mexico, but it leads to a seasonal emission of approximately 7,800 metric tons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of driving 1,700 cars for a year. Sandia National Laboratories engineer Kenneth Armijo, who grew up on a chile farm in Sabinal, located between Albuquerque and Socorro, New Mexico, thought there was a “greener” way to roast green chile. The results of his experiments roasting chile with concentrated sunlight will be shared at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ conference on energy and sustainability next week.

Why are scientists setting off small-scale explosions inside 1-foot cubes of plexiglass? They’re watching how fractures form and grow in a rock-like substance to see if explosives or propellants, similar to jet fuel, can connect geothermal wells in a predictable manner.

New scientific results confirm an anomaly seen in previous experiments, which may point to an as-yet-unconfirmed new elementary particle, the sterile neutrino, or indicate the need for a new interpretation of an aspect of standard model physics, such as the neutrino cross section, first measured 60 years ago. Los Alamos National Laboratory is the lead American institution collaborating on the Baksan Experiment on Sterile Transitions (BEST) experiment, results of which were recently published in the journals Physical Review Letters and Physical Review C.

Valhalla, a Python-based performance modeling framework developed at Sandia National Laboratories, uses high-performance computing to build preliminary satellite designs based on mission requirements and then runs those designs through thousands of simulations. The results of the simulations feed into an interactive multidimensional video-like view of satellites executing their mission and hundreds of plots that show the user the relationship between each of the outputs and inputs at a glance. This data enables the user to quickly find the solution that best executes the mission.

Sandia National Laboratories talent acquisition specialist Tony Lona, a recruiter focused on veterans and unique abilities, was named a 2022 Veteran Champion of the Year in Corporate America by G.I. Jobs Magazine.

New research predicts that changes in mountain snowmelt will shift peak streamflows to much earlier in the year for the vast Colorado River Basin, altering reservoir management and irrigation across the entire region.