Story Tips
Story ideas from Oak Ridge National Laboratory
December 1997
Story ideas from Oak Ridge National Laboratory To arrange for an interview with any of these researchers, please call Ron Walli of Communications and Public Affairs (423) 576-0226
ENERGY -- What's your R-value?
Electricity rate hikes in portions of the country and the arrival of cold weather combine for a double whammy on that old wallet, but the Insulation Fact Sheet provides information that can cushion the blow. The 19-page Department of Energy (DOE) publication covers a range of topics, addressing nearly any question a home owner may have. It's divided into several brief sections and includes a lot of do-it-yourself information. It also has a handy chart that provides insulation recommendations based on Zip Code. The fact sheet, which was prepared by ORNL's Metals and Ceramics Division, is available on the Web at http://www.ornl.gov/roofs+walls. You can request a hard copy by calling toll-free 800-363-3732 or writing to DOE's Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Clearing House, P.O. Box 3048, Merrifield, Va. 22116. [Contact: Therese Stovall]
TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER -- The Long Arm of ORCMT
Through fiscal year 1997, the Oak Ridge Centers for Manufacturing Technology, an Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant partnership, assisted more than 3,000 businesses from 49 of the 50 states. Private-sector impact of this technical assistance in the last fiscal year was estimated at nearly $700 million, based on information provided by the companies that worked with the centers. Many of ORCMT's facilities and technologies were developed for manufacturing components for nuclear weapons, for nuclear reactors and for energy-related research. Now these technologies created for national defense and energy research are being adapted and applied to help make American industries be more competitive in the world marketplace and to help our nation maintain national security capabilities. [Contact: Bill Wilburn ]
ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT -- Giving Waste the Cold Shoulder
Freezing the bad guy. It worked in the old comic strips and cartoons, and it's working for the Department of Energy and Arctic Foundations of Alaska, too. Except in this case, the bad guy is radioactive waste in a 316,000-gallon pond at a Superfund site at ORNL. Arctic Foundations, which uses its cryogenic barrier technology to stabilize foundations of buildings in permafrost, was asked to demonstrate the approach for stabilizing and containing contaminants. Using an array of cooling pipes, called thermoprobes, and an environmentally friendly refrigerant, Arctic has surrounded the pond with a 12-foot-thick ice wall that extends from the surface to bedrock. DOE plans to gather performance, cost and reliability data during the demonstration. [Contact: Frank Juan or Margo Weil]
COMPUTING -- New "Super"-Life for Old Computers
Environmental researchers at ORNL needed a powerful supercomputer to analyze billions of bits of landscape data from 7.7 million square kilometers to create a composite map of U.S. soil characteristics. Problem was, the available supercomputers -- including ORNL's Paragon XP/S 150 supercomputer -- are usually booked solid for official "grand challenge" computing tasks, require approvals for time allocations and cannot easily be reconfigured for particular tasks. So the researchers did what every resourceful scientist learns to do -- build it yourself. They have salvaged dozens of cast-off 486 computers, connected them in parallel and are solving problems they couldn't solve using serial workstations. The researchers expect their "poor man's supercomputer" to be useful for other pursuits, especially in testing new programs before running them on state-of-the-art supercomputers. [Contact: Forrest Hoffman]
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