News By Location

Rigoberto Advincula, a renowned scientist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Tennessee, has won the Netzsch North American Thermal Analysis Society (NATAS) Fellows Award for 2023.

Nature-based solutions are an effective tool to combat climate change triggered by rising carbon emissions, whether it’s by clearing the skies with bio-based aviation fuels or boosting natural carbon sinks. At the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, scientists are leading research to transform plants into key drivers of decarbonization, from creating biomass crops for new fuels to enhancing the ability of plants to absorb and store carbon.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory joins four other national laboratories — Idaho, Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore and Lawrence Berkeley — that have institutes named after nuclear chemist and Nobel Prize winner Glenn T. Seaborg.

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility’s Matt Sieger has been named the project director for the OLCF-6 effort. This next OLCF undertaking will plan and build a world-class successor to the OLCF’s still-new exascale system, Frontier.

Led by Kelly Chipps of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, scientists working in the lab have produced a signature nuclear reaction that occurs on the surface of a neutron star gobbling mass from a companion star. Their achievement improves understanding of stellar processes generating diverse nuclear isotopes.

As a biogeochemist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Matthew Berens studies how carbon, nutrients and minerals move through water and soil. In this firsthand account, Berens describes recent fieldwork in Louisiana with colleagues to better understand key processes in coastal ecosystems.

With the world’s first exascale supercomputing system now open to full user operations, research teams are harnessing Frontier’s power and speed to tackle some of the most challenging problems in modern science. Frontier remains in the number one spot on the May 2023 TOP500 rankings, with an updated HPL, or high-performance Linpack, score of 1.194 exaflops. The increase of .092 exaflops, or 92 petaflops, is equivalent to the eighth most powerful supercomputer in the world on the TOP500 List. Engineers at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, which houses Frontier and its predecessor Summit, expect that Frontier’s speeds could ultimately top 1.4 exaflops, or 1.4 quintillion calculations per second.

ORNL’s electromagnetic isotope separator, or EMIS, made history in 2018 when it produced 500 milligrams of the rare isotope ruthenium-96, unavailable anywhere else in the world. And EMIS technology just keeps getting better, said Brian Egle, who heads the Enrichment Science and Engineering Division’s Stable Isotope Research, Development and Production Section. “It’s capable of, essentially, separating the whole periodic table,” he said.

Kelly Chipps, a nuclear astrophysicist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been appointed to the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee, or NSAC. The committee provides official advice to DOE and the National Science Foundation, or NSF, about issues relating to the national program for basic nuclear science research.