Ramamoorthy Ramesh
KNOXVILLE—Ramamoorthy Ramesh, an authority in the physics of functional materials, has been named the 12th University of Tennessee-Oak Ridge National Laboratory Governor’s Chair. He has also been appointed as deputy director for science and technology at ORNL.
Ramesh will serve as Governor’s Chair for Nanomaterials Engineering, based in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. He began on June 1. [Read more…]
Submitted
The Friends of ORNL will hold its monthly luncheon lecture meeting on Tuesday, July 9.
This month, Cymbeline Culiat will discuss “Translating an ORNL Technology from Lab Bench to the Clinic: The NELL1 Story.” This meeting is open to the public. [Read more…]
A Sunday night alarm at the TRU Waste Processing Center in west Oak Ridge was triggered by smoke from a heater when the power went out during a thunderstorm and a ventilation system shut off. (Photo courtesy DOE Oak Ridge Office)
It was initially believed to be triggered by a small fire, but federal officials now say the Sunday night alarm at a waste processing center in west Oak Ridge was set off by smoke.
A ventilation system shut off when the power went out during a thunderstorm between 5 and 6 p.m. Sunday, and that caused a heater at the Transuranic Waste Processing Center to overheat, said Laura Wilkerson, federal project director in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Office. [Read more…]
George Flanagan
George Flanagan of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been elected fellow of the American Nuclear Society.
The ANS recognized Flanagan’s leadership in the field of nuclear safety, especially in the area of liquid metal reactor safety, space reactor safety, and the safety of smaller research reactors and for the applications of probabilistic risk assessment to reactors. [Read more…]
Note: This story was updated at 9:03 a.m.
No radiological or hazardous materials were released and no one was injured in a small fire at a waste processing center late Sunday night, federal officials said.
An alert was declared at about 11:45 p.m. Sunday after a fire alarm and sprinkler system activated in Room 327 at Building 7880, which is part of the TRU Waste Processing Center, the U.S. Department of Energy Oak Ridge Office reported on its Facebook page. An “alert” is an event that has occurred at a building on a DOE site in Oak Ridge. [Read more…]
Fans of University of Tennessee football and supporters of the United Way had a chance to see UT coach Butch Jones, right, on Monday at Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s United Way campaign kickoff. (ORNL photo by Jason Richards)
University of Tennessee football coach Butch Jones helped Oak Ridge National Laboratory kick off this year’s United Way campaign on Monday morning.
“United Way means everything,” Jones said after discussing leadership—and football—with several hundred workers at ORNL. “It’s a great way to give back to your community.”
He said United Way agencies help about 100,000 people in the Knoxville area. [Read more…]
Lights on the Chinese Tianhe-2 supercomputer, which has a theoretical peak that is twice as fast as the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. (Photo courtesy Jack Dongarra)
A Chinese supercomputer has bumped the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory from the No. 1 spot on a semiannual ranking of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
The Tianhe-2, which was developed by China’s National University of Defense Technology, is capable of 33.86 petaflops, or more than 33,000 trillion calculations per second.
Now ranked No. 2, Titan was able to perform 17,000 trillion calculations per second, or 17.59 petaflops, according to the list published in November. [Read more…]
The Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was ranked as the world’s fastest supercomputer in November 2012. (Photo courtesy of ORNL)
By Leo Williams
Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Titan supercomputer has completed rigorous acceptance testing to ensure the functionality, performance, and stability of the machine, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputing systems for open science.
The U.S. Department of Energy machine, the first to combine different types of processing units to maximize performance at such a large scale, ranked as the fastest supercomputer in the world in the November 2012 list published at http://www.top500.org/. Titan, a Cray XK7 supercomputer, is capable of more than 27,000 trillion calculations each second—or 27 petaflops. [Read more…]
East Fork Poplar Creek starts at a spring at the Y-12 National Security Complex and flows through Oak Ridge. It has been listed on a state list of impaired waterways due to mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls, among other things.
About six million gallons of chlorinated water spilled into East Fork Poplar Creek from a ruptured drinking water line at the Y-12 National Security Complex, and an estimated 8,500 minnow-sized fish and almost 30 salamanders were killed in the area of the incoming chlorinated water, a media advisory said.
It said the rupture in the potable water line was found Saturday. The numbers of dead fish and salamanders were determined by workers from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Biological Monitoring and Abatement Program. [Read more…]
Scott Curran
Ron Graves
Three Oak Ridge National Laboratory staff members—Scott Curran, Ron Graves, and Janet Hopson—were recognized following a U.S. Department of Energy Vehicle Technologies Office, or VTO, annual merit review.
Curran was recognized with a 2013 VTO Research and Development Award for “his leadership in transitioning reactivity controlled compression ignition combustion from a single cylinder to a multi-cylinder engine using bio-renewable fuels.” [Read more…]
U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, right, tours the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility during his visit Monday to the Y-12 National Security Complex. Joining him are, from left, B&W Y-12 President and General Manager Chuck Spencer, Julie Huff of B&W Y-12’s Materials Management Organization, B&W Y-12 Senior Vice President of Security Rod Johnson, and NNSA Production Office Manager Steve Erhart.
New U.S. Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz visited the Y-12 National Security Complex this week.
Before touring production and storage facilities at the site, Moniz held an all-hands meeting with Y-12, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and federal employees at Y-12’s New Hope Center. Joining him at the meeting was U.S. Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, a Tennessee Republican whose district includes Oak Ridge. [Read more…]
A new all-solid lithium-sulfur battery developed by an Oak Ridge National Laboratory team led by Chengdu Liang has the potential to reduce cost, increase performance, and improve safety compared with existing designs. (Submitted photo)
Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory have designed and tested an all-solid lithium-sulfur battery with approximately four times the energy density of conventional lithium-ion technologies that power today’s electronics.
The ORNL battery design, which uses abundant low-cost elemental sulfur, also addresses flammability concerns experienced by other chemistries.
“Our approach is a complete change from the current battery concept of two electrodes joined by a liquid electrolyte, which has been used over the last 150 to 200 years,” said Chengdu Liang, lead author on the ORNL study published this week in Angewandte Chemie International Edition. [Read more…]
