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CLIMATE — Icy behavior . . . When a Rhode-Island-sized ice chunk separates from Greenland, is the calving due to typical seasonal variations or a long-term warmer world? A project called the Scalable, Efficient, and Accurate Community Ice Sheet Model, or SEACISM, on the Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, aims to use state-of-the-art simulation to predict the behavior of ice sheets under a changing climate. ORNL computational Earth scientist Kate Evans leads the effort to develop scalable algorithms, which includes other researchers from ORNL as well as Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, New York University and Florida State University. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change did not provide a prediction of ice sheet fate in its Fourth Assessment Report due to a lack of data, the Department of Energy launched SEACISM (within the Ice Sheet Initiative for CLimate ExtremeS, or ISICLES) to improve ice sheet dynamics in Earth system models. The improvements may generate data to inform the next IPCC assessment report, expected in 2013.
ENERGY — Simulating gasification . . .
A process called gasification can turn carbonaceous fuels—coal, petroleum, or biomass—into syngas, a cleaner-burning fuel mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Scientists from the National Energy Technology Laboratory are concluding a three-year project using supercomputers at Oak Ridge and Argonne national laboratories for simulations to reduce the cost and time of building commercial-scale gasifiers. The efforts will inform the design of advanced technologies to supply clean, reliable and affordable electricity. NETL’s Clean Coal Power Initiative, a cost-shared venture of government and industry, aims to employ a commercial-scale gasifier system to sequester 90 percent of the carbon from coal with minimal impact to electricity costs. “High-performance computing is allowing us to reveal and study features of the gas–solids flow in a gasifier to a degree never before possible, experimentally or computationally,” said Madhava Syamlal, principal investigator of the project.
NUCLEAR — Tried & true recipes . . .
Nuclear reactor technology research dwindled away when nuclear power fell out of favor several decades ago. Renewed interest in fission-based energy means knowledge gained in past research is relevant again. Researchers at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, working with Idaho National Laboratory, revived work to fabricate high-quality coated-particle fuel for high-temperature gas reactors (HTGRs). The ORNL researchers coated uranium-based fuel kernels with carbon and silicon carbide, relying in part on techniques developed years ago by scientists, many of who have long since retired. "The processes we based on their research and records worked perfectly," says ORNL researcher Rick Lowden. After setting a new record for HTGR fuel performance, the INL and ORNL team recently received an inaugural Gordon Battelle Prize for re-establishing the coated particle fuel fabrication technology that goes back to the First Nuclear Era. DATA — Tracking forest threats . . .
Alerts from an early warning system developed in part by DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory could help protect forests across the U.S. from the threats of insects, disease and wildfire. Led by the USDA Forest Service, the multi-agency project uses high-performance computing to incorporate remote sensing data from NASA satellites with other climate, soil and weather data to identify abnormal vegetation patterns and the timing of seasonal changes. "We can develop signatures of disturbance dynamics and teach the system to tell us not only where potential threats are, but even suggest what might be going on,” said ORNL computational scientist Forrest Hoffmann. Researchers say the system, called Forest Incidence Recognition and State Tracking, or FIRST, could help guide efforts on the ground to remediate or minimize forest damage by remotely pinpointing locations where threats are suspected.
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