Each day, roughly 43 million Americans eat at least one slice of pizza, according to experts. The hot, cheesy, Italian-inspired dish contributes a whopping $47 billion to the U.S. economy each year, and about a third of those pies come delivered to their destinations in corrugated cardboard boxes.
As nuclear energy is increasingly recognized as a vital component of the clean energy transition, American companies have answered the call with dozens of new reactor and fuel designs.
For the first time in two decades, Idaho National Laboratory, the nation’s nuclear energy laboratory, has received a shipment of used next-generation light water reactor fuel from a commercial nuclear power plant to support research and testing.
Idaho National Laboratory has added three esteemed experts to its National and Homeland Security Strategic Advisory Committee. The newest members are Sue Gordon, John Kelly and Chris Stewart, who have had extensive and notable roles in safeguarding United States national security.
United States’ policymakers, auto manufacturers, energy companies and ultimately citizens are investing trillions of dollars into electrifying vehicles.
Idaho National Laboratory (INL) and Arizona State University (ASU) have agreed to expand their joint efforts in clean energy research for the next five years. An agreement signed in October establishes a framework for both institutions to develop low-carbon processes for the energy and manufacturing sectors.
The National Charging Experience Consortium (ChargeX) has released a report that recommends 26 common electric vehicle (EV) charging error codes to enable faster error reporting, diagnostics and resolution within the EV charging industry. Ultimately, the codes would improve the U.S. charging experience.
Industry needs better ways to diagnose the batteries that power these devices to ensure their safety, performance and reliability from inception to recycling.
National Reactor Innovation Center (NRIC) is now designing and constructing two fields, in the form of nuclear testing facilities known as test beds at Idaho National Laboratory (INL).
Programmatic growth can sometimes involve seeking new customers, but this has not been the case for Idaho National Laboratory’s Nuclear/Radiological Search and Response Training (N/RSRT) program, which turns 20 this year.
To reduce the human, economic and related risks of blackouts and other types of infrastructure failures, a team associated with the Emerging Energy Markets Analysis initiative, based at Idaho National Laboratory, used a novel framework for assessing critical infrastructure’s resilience.
Researchers are getting a closer look at the behavior of nuclear fuel at the atomic level with the Center for Thermal Energy Transport under Irradiation (TETI) 2.0 technology.
Integrating nuclear power into broader energy systems, including renewable energy sources and heat-intensive industries, could improve flexibility and unlock revenue streams for nuclear power producers.
Idaho National Laboratory (INL) celebrated the ribbon-cutting of its new Microgrid in a Box, which was deployed in partnership with the Fall River Electric Cooperative at its hydropower plant in rural Idaho.
Idaho National Laboratory’s International Researcher and Visitor Program drives cross-cultural exchange and promotes collaboration with worldwide scientists and academia inspiring creativity within INL’s scientific community.
Batteries play a pivotal role in the world’s mission to reach net-zero carbon emissions, from electric vehicles to grid-scale electricity storage to home use.
Molten salt has caught the eye of the nuclear industry as an ideal working fluid for reactor cooling, energy transfer, fueling and fission product absorption.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm heralded upgrades to the world’s most complete biomass preprocessing research and development facility during a ribbon-cutting ceremony at Idaho National Laboratory today.
Developers seeking to deploy advanced nuclear reactors can find high market potential in states with energy-intensive industries, nuclear-friendly laws, and widespread social acceptance – factors outlined in a new report by researchers at Idaho National Laboratory (INL).
Idaho National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have partnered with Idaho Power to evaluate the feasibility and advantages of making hydrogen at existing hydropower plants.
Storm-DEPART helps utilities refine their damage estimates by combining utility infrastructure data with weather data from the National Hurricane Center to efficiently deploy restoration resources.
A crowd gathers around a black wooden box that resembles a short refrigerator, waiting for the motion of a pair of robotic arms sitting just outside the box.
Idaho National Laboratory is poised to lend its deep bench of experts to a new resource for states wanting to learn more about advanced nuclear energy deployment.
A series of federal recommendations announced last week aims to make electric vehicle charging more accessible. The announcement paved the way for NEVI to begin implementing these recommendations.
At Idaho National Laboratory, computational scientists use INL’s supercomputers to perform “virtual experiments” to accomplish research that couldn’t be done by conventional means. While supercomputing can’t replace traditional experiments, supercomputing is an essential component of all modern scientific discoveries and advancements.
The city of Kemmerer, Wyoming, home to a coal-fired power plant that is slated for retirement in 2025, has found itself in the spotlight as the center of a new kind of clean energy project.
Idaho National Laboratory (INL) scientists explore key issues such as water supply and extreme weather events, like drought, through the laboratory’s energy and environmental research efforts.
Microgrid in a Box, it 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.
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.
Nuclear and hydrogen could be the ideal fuel for recharging electric trucks, opening potential markets for developers of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs).
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.
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.”
Every day, researchers discover new details about the laws that govern the tiniest building blocks of the universe. These details not only increase scientific understanding of quantum physics, but they also hold the potential to unlock a host of technologies, from quantum computers to lasers to next-generation solar cells.
But there’s one area that remains a mystery even in this most mysterious of sciences: the quantum mechanics of nuclear fuels.
Rare earth metals are a collection of chemically similar metallic elements that tend to occur at low concentrations in nature and can be difficult to separate from one another. They are valuable for their use in electric car motors, computer hard drives, solar panels and wind turbines. Transition metals are a class of metals that are excellent conductors of heat and electricity, often with high melting points and unique structural properties, making them essential for producing common alloys like steel and copper, as well as lithium-ion battery cathodes.
Currently, most of the components carrying these metals are simply disposed of. INL’s new method to extract these valuable metals involves dimethyl ether, a gaseous compound that served as one of the first commercial refrigerants. It drives fractional crystallization — a process that divides chemical substances based on their solubility — to separate rare earth elements and transition metals from magnet wastes.