Feature Channels: Nuclear Power

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Given a choice of items to lose on a train, a top-secret document detailing the newly developed hydrogen bomb should be on the bottom of the list. In January 1953, amid the Red Scare and the Korean War, that’s exactly what physicist John Archibald Wheeler lost. In the December 2019 issue of Physics Today, science historian Alex Wellerstein details the creation of the document and Wheeler’s day leading up to its mysterious loss.

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Majorities of Americans say the federal government is doing too little for key aspects of the environment. And most believe the U.S. should focus on development of alternative sources of energy over expansion of fossil fuels, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.

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With this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded for the development of lithium-ion batteries, directors of the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research share perspectives on the future of energy storage.

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North Korea withdrew from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 2003. It subsequently developed nuclear weapons

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PPPL and Princeton University are developing a unique neutron-detector robot for arms control and nuclear security purposes. The robot recently passed a key neutron-detection test.

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A research collaboration between Berkeley Lab, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Brown University, and NVIDIA has achieved exaflop performance with a deep learning application used to model subsurface flow in the study of nuclear waste remediation

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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researchers have garnered four awards among the top 100 industrial inventions worldwide.

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ORNL and NREL took demonstrated a miniaturized gyroscope. ORNL created and tested new wireless charging designs. If humankind reaches Mars this century, an ORNL-developed experiment testing advanced materials for spacecraft may play a key role. ORNL and Georgia Tech found that critical interactions between microbes and peat moss break down under warming temperatures. ORNL and industry demonstrated that an additively manufactured hot stamping die can withstand up to 25,000 usage cycles.

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Oregon State University engineers Julie Tucker and Samuel Briggs are helping the Department of Energy develop a method to quickly measure the life-span degradation of materials used to build the next generation of nuclear reactors that will be more energy efficient and produce less waste.

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Chemists have figured out how to keep “the wave” of one particular isotope of oxygen – among the most abundant elements on the planet and a crucial building block for materials like glass and ceramics – going during nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy long enough to learn some things about its structure and function.

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Tangles in courts and in Congress threaten emissions-related energy regulations and incentives. If these are lost, carbon emissions are projected to climb, and the fight against health-damaging ozone may lose traction, allowing it to resurge, too. An expert explains the legal messes.

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Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists Brian Albright, Patrick Chain, Dana Dattelbaum, Michael Hamada, Anna Hayes-Sterbenz, Michael Prime and Laura Smilowitz are being honored as 2019 Laboratory fellows.

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Future fusion reactors will require materials that can withstand extreme operating conditions, including being bombarded by high-energy neutrons at high temperatures. Scientists recently irradiated titanium diboride (TiB2) in the High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) to better understand the effects of fusion neutrons on performance.

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Researchers have constructed a framework for starting and raising a fusion plasma to temperatures rivaling the sun in hundreds of milliseconds.

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Sandia National Laboratories has completed phase one of an anticipated three-year upgrade at its plant responsible for making integrated circuits, similar to computer chips. Chips produced at Sandia can be found in the nation’s nuclear stockpile.

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Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories are developing a promising new way to prevent the spread of radioactive contamination and contain the hot molten mass that develops within a nuclear reactor during a catastrophic accident. During a three-year Laboratory Directed Research and Development project, a team of scientists discovered and patented a process for injecting sand-like minerals into the core of a nuclear reactor during an accident to contain and slow down the progression of a meltdown.

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Profiled is physicist Gaute Hagen of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who runs advanced models on powerful supercomputers to explore how protons and neutrons interact to “build” an atomic nucleus from scratch.

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Feature describes improved model for forecasting the crucial balance of pressure at the edge of a fusion plasma.

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Designing a new type of nuclear reactor is a complicated endeavor requiring billions of dollars and years of development. Because of the high cost, Argonne researchers are running a broad suite of computational codes on supercomputers that offer power available at only a few sites worldwide.

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Ecker became chair of Brookhaven’s Nuclear Science and Technology Department in October 2018, bringing expertise in nuclear reactor materials.

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Argonne scientists have discovered a new way to coat nuclear materials that supports efforts to minimize use of high-enriched uranium.

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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists going to the microscale to study the diverse characteristics of nuclear fuel pellets that could improve nuclear forensic analysis by determining more effectively where the material came from and how it was made.

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If the United States and Russia waged an all-out nuclear war, much of the land in the Northern Hemisphere would be below freezing in the summertime, with the growing season slashed by nearly 90 percent in some areas, according to a Rutgers-led study. Indeed, death by famine would threaten nearly all of the Earth’s 7.7 billion people, said co-author Alan Robock, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University–New Brunswick.

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There has been a flurry of headlines this summer about a "nuclear coffin" leaking radioactive waste into the Pacific Ocean. The coffin—a bomb crater filled with radioactive soil on a tiny island in the Marshall Islands—sits under a 350-foot-wide concrete lid known as Runit Dome. It’s arguably the region’s most visible scar from Operation Crossroads, a series of U.S. nuclear weapons tests that took place off Bikini and Enewetak Atolls between 1946 and 1958.

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Six new nuclear reactor technologies are planned to commercially deploy between 2030 and 2040. ORNL’s Weiju Ren heads a project managing structural materials information. This conversation explores challenges and opportunities in sharing nuclear materials knowledge internationally.

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Communicating about science is a challenge. Bridging the gap between conversations with colleagues immersed in the language of the laboratory and audiences ranging from educated and curious to uninterested or even distrustful can be daunting. Add to that the potential consequences of miscommunication—particularly in high-stakes fields like nuclear materials management and nonproliferation, where political, safety, and security issues exacerbate the task—and some scientists might be tempted to run from the microphone. But scientists at the Institute for Nuclear Materials Management recently hosted two sessions on why it's important to communicate, and tips for making it easier.

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Extreme wildfires in British Columbia, Canada, pumped so much smoke into the upper atmosphere in August 2017 that an enormous cloud circled most of the Northern Hemisphere – a finding in the journal Science that will help scientists model the climate impacts of nuclear war. The pyrocumulonimbus (pyroCb) cloud – the largest of its kind ever observed – was quickly dubbed “the mother of all pyroCbs.”

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Sandia National Laboratories researchers, as part of a group of National Nuclear Security Administration scientists, have wrapped up years of field experiments to improve the United States’ ability to differentiate earthquakes from underground explosions, key knowledge needed to advance the nation’s monitoring and verification capabilities for detecting underground nuclear explosions.

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Technology to measure the flow of subatomic particles known as antineutrinos from nuclear reactors could allow continuous remote monitoring designed to detect fueling changes that might indicate the diversion of nuclear materials. The monitoring could be done from outside the reactor vessel, and the technology may be sensitive enough to detect substitution of a single fuel assembly.

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Thanks to fungi, researchers have made a new discovery that could lead to the development of effective radioprotective drugs for workers cleaning up nuclear contamination zones, like Fukushima and Chernobyl. The discovery could also help astronauts travel to Mars, where severe radiation remains the greatest obstacle.

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Scientists at Argonne and Oak Ridge national laboratories are drawing on decades of nuclear research on salts to advance a promising solar technology.

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Blog Post from CFR's Energy Realpolitik by Amy M. Jaffe.

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Nuclear power plants can withstand most inclement weather and do not emit harmful greenhouse gases. However, trafficking of the nuclear materials to furnish them with fuel remains a serious issue as security technology continues to be developed. Two physicists conducted research to enhance global nuclear security by improving radiation detectors. According to them, improving radiation detectors requires the identification of better sensor materials and the development of smarter algorithms to process detector signals. They discuss their work in this week’s Journal of Applied Physics.

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Subatomic particles zip around fusion machines known as tokamaks and sometimes merge, releasing large amounts of energy. Now, physicists have confirmed that an updated computer code could help to predict and ultimately prevent the particles from leaking from the magnetic fields confining them.

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A team of researchers led by Bill Tang of the US Department of Energy's (DOE's) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University recently tested its Fusion Recurrent Neural Network (FRNN) code, a novel artificial intelligence (AI) resource designed to predict plasma instabilities, on various high-performance computing (HPC) systems. A reliable way to predict and mitigate disruptions could accelerate the adoption of fusion as an environmentally friendly, virtually unlimited source of energy.

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Los Alamos National Laboratory researchers Patrick McClure and Bob Reid were honored last week with the 2019 Richard P. Feynman Innovation Prize for their work in developing small, cost-effective, and safe nuclear reactor designs to power future habitats in space, as well as remote terrestrial locations.

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The males of one species of butterfly are more attracted to females that are active, not necessarily what they look like, according to a recent research conducted at Augustana University.The paper, “Behaviour before beauty: Signal weighting during mate selection in the butterfly Papilio polytes,” found that males of the species noticed the activity levels of potential female mates, not their markings.

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in 2017, DHS S&T NUSTL, in partnership with the FEMA and DOE NNSA published guidance for first responders and emergency managers on how to plan for the first minutes of an RDD detonation response.

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Jim Morman from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has been elected a fellow of the American Nuclear Society (ANS), the highest grade of membership that the society offers.

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Study finds waste soft drinks for carbon capture could help cut carbon dioxide emissions; sharing secret messages using quantum communications just got more practical for better cybersecurity; designed synthetic polymers for better binding in next-generation li-ion batteries; predictive modeling could point to nuclear reactors running longer; scientists to create computers that mimic human brain.

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“Super H Mode” experiments demonstrate record fusion performance

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Tadpoles can be used to measure the amount of radiocesium, a radioactive material, in aquatic environments, according to new research from University of Georgia scientists.

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Epigenetic technology will provide a new tool in the fight against the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction

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Engineers can model heat distribution in reactor designs with fewer or no approximations.

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ORNL story tips: Tiny test fuels by ORNL explore new reactor fuels more rapidly; ORNL-developed computing method detects, reports bugs in VA’s healthcare data system; new heat transport study in thermoelectric materials may lead to better heat-to-electricity conversion.

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Sandia National Laboratories recently launched a bus into space. Not the kind with wheels that go round and round, but the kind of device that links electronic devices. The bus was among 16 total experiments that were part of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s HOT SHOT program.

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Release describes application of machine learning form of artificial intelligence to predict the behavior of fusion plasma.

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Scientists have demonstrated a new bio-inspired material for an eco-friendly and cost-effective approach to recovering uranium from seawater. The low-cost polymer adsorbent could help push past bottlenecks in the cost and efficiency of extracting uranium resources from oceans for sustainable energy production.