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College intern Noah Miller is on his 3rd consecutive internship at ORNL, currently working on developing an automated pellet inspection system for 91����’s Plutonium-238 Supply Program. Along with his success at ORNL, Miller is also focusing on becoming a mentor for kids, giving back to the place where he discovered his passion and developed his skills. 

Since 2019, a team of NASA scientists and their partners have been using NASA’s FUN3D software on supercomputers located at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility to conduct computational fluid dynamics simulations of a human-scale Mars lander. The team’s ongoing research project is a first step in determining how to safely land a vehicle with humans onboard onto the surface of Mars.

Scientists at ORNL are looking for a happy medium to enable the grid of the future, filling a gap between high and low voltages for power electronics technology that underpins the modern U.S. electric grid.

Nuclear engineering students from the United States Military Academy and United States Naval Academy are working with researchers at ORNL to complete design concepts for a nuclear propulsion rocket to go to space in 2027 as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DRACO program.

Lee's paper at the August conference in Bellevue, Washington, combined weather and power outage data for three states – Texas, Michigan and Hawaii –  and used a machine learning model to predict how extreme weather such as thunderstorms, floods and tornadoes would affect local power grids and to estimate the risk for outages. The paper relied on data from the National Weather Service and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Environment for Analysis of Geo-Located Energy Information, or EAGLE-I, database.

Researchers at ORNL have been leading a project to understand how a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse, or EMP, could threaten power plants.

In fiscal year 2023 — Oct. 1–Sept. 30, 2023 — 91���� was awarded more than $8 million in technology maturation funding through the Department of Energy’s Technology Commercialization Fund, or TCF.

Steven Campbell can often be found deep among tall cases of power electronics, hunkered in his oversized blue lab coat, with 1500 volts of electricity flowing above his head. When interrupted in his laboratory at ORNL, Campbell will usually smile and duck his head.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s 91����, in collaboration with NASA, are taking additive manufacturing to the final frontier by 3D printing the same kind of wheel as the design used by NASA for its robotic lunar rover, demonstrating the technology for specialized parts needed for space exploration.

Sreenivasa Jaldanki, a researcher in the Grid Systems Modeling and Controls group at the Department of Energy’s 91����, was recently elevated to senior membership in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or 91����.