Note: This story was updated at 3:40 p.m.
U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry will make a major computing announcement in Oak Ridge on Tuesday, the Department of Energy said Friday.
DOE did not provide any additional information about the nature of the announcement in a press release on Friday morning.
Perry will be at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on Tuesday morning for a keynote speech at the InnovationXLab Advanced Manufacturing Summit. ORNL is a DOE lab.
[Read more…]U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Tennessee Governor Bill Lee will be among the featured speakers at a manufacturing summit in Oak Ridge next week.
The InnovationXLab Advanced Manufacturing Summit will be at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on Tuesday, May 7, and Wednesday, May 8. There will be optional laboratory tours and an optional reception on Monday, May 6.
Perry will give a keynote speech on Tuesday morning. ORNL is a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory.
Besides Perry and Lee, other featured speakers will be Jeff Lyash, president and chief executive officer of the Tennessee Valley Authority; Deborah Wince-Smith, president and CEO of the U.S. Council on Competitiveness; Lisa Su, president and CEO of AMD; and Doug Woods, president of The Association for Manufacturing Technology.
[Read more…]
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced on Monday that there would be no significant impact from producing tritium for nuclear weapons in a second unit at the Watts Bar Nuclear Power Plant in Rhea County.
The project involves the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge.
The tritium could be produced in Unit 2 at Watts Bar, which is near Spring City about 45 miles southwest of Oak Ridge.
Tritium, which boosts the yields of nuclear weapons, is already being produced in Watts Bar Unit 1. The Tennessee Valley Authority has been producing tritium there since 2003.
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Three national laboratories, including Oak Ridge National Laboratory, are building new computer systems that could be many times more powerful than today’s top supercomputers.
The new machines are exascale systems. None have been delivered yet, but the planning for them started more than a year ago and the new high-performance systems could be delivered to the three laboratories in the next several years. Planning for the exascale computers was under way even before the world’s most powerful supercomputer, a petaflop system called Summit at ORNL, was unveiled in June 2018.
Exascale computers could be 50 to 100 more powerful than today’s petaflop computers, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Besides ORNL, they could be located at Argonne National Laboratory southwest of Chicago and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory east of San Francisco. The first system is expected at Argonne, followed by a second system at ORNL.
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Photo from National Nuclear Security Administration fact sheet on the W76-1 Life Extension Program.
Note This story was updated at 4:40 p.m. Jan. 26.
After two decades, work was completed in December on a program to extend the life of the W76 nuclear warhead, the Y-12 National Security Complex said on Monday.
That ended a decade of work to extend the service life of the original warhead design by 40 years, Y-12 said.
“This warhead plays a vital role in maintaining the nation’s credible nuclear deterrent,” said Consolidated Nuclear Security LLC, which manages and operates Y-12 for the National Nuclear Security Administration.
The Life Extension Program, or LEP, is for the W76-1 warhead. The W76-1 is a refurbished W76-0 warhead. The W76-0 warhead is a submarine-launched ballistic missile system that was first introduced into the stockpile for the U.S. Navy in 1978. The warhead is deployed with Trident II D5 missiles on Ohio-class nuclear ballistic missile submarines. [Read more…]
Image courtesy National Nuclear Security Administration. SRS is the Savannah River Site.
About 20 metric tons of highly enriched uranium could be “down-blended” to low-enriched uranium and transferred to the Tennessee Valley Authority for use as a fuel to produce tritium for nuclear weapons, according to a public notice published in the Federal Register this week.
The project involves the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge and Watts Bar Nuclear Plant near Spring City in Rhea County, among other sites.
The National Nuclear Security Administration and TVA announced in August that they intend to enter into an agreement to “down-blend†highly enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium in order to help produce tritium, a key “boosting†component in nuclear weapons.
The highly enriched uranium used for the “down-blending†will be processed, packaged, and shipped from Y-12, according to the NNSA. Y-12 is an NNSA site, and it is the main storage facility for certain categories of highly enriched uranium. [Read more…]
The National Nuclear Security Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority announced Wednesday, Aug. 22, 2018, that they intend to enter into an agreement to “down-blend” highly enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium in order to help produce tritium, a key “boosting” component in nuclear weapons. The highly enriched uranium used for the “down-blending” is processed, packaged, and shipped from the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge. (File photo by John Huotari/Oak Ridge Today)
The National Nuclear Security Administration and the Tennessee Valley Authority announced last week that they intend to enter into an agreement to “down-blend” highly enriched uranium to low-enriched uranium in order to help produce tritium, a key “boosting” component in nuclear weapons.
The highly enriched uranium used for the “down-blending” is processed, packaged, and shipped from the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, according to the NNSA. Y-12 is the main storage facility for certain categories of highly enriched uranium, which can be used in nuclear weapons and in naval reactors.
Low-enriched uranium, or LEU fuel, is used in a commercial power reactor run by TVA at the Watts Bar Nuclear Plant Unit 1 near Spring City in Rhea County, southwest of Oak Ridge. Tritium is produced there by irradiating lithium-aluminate pellets with neutrons in rods known as tritium-producing burnable absorber rods, or TPBARs.
The irradiated rods are then shipped to the Savannah River Site, an NNSA production facility near Aiken, South Carolina. The Savannah River Site extracts the tritium from the irradiated rods, purifies it, and adds it to the existing inventory, according to the NNSA’s Fiscal Year 2018 Stockpile Stewardship and Management Plan.
Tritium is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that has two neutrons and one proton. It has been described as an essential component in every nuclear weapon in the U.S. stockpile. It occurs naturally in small quantities but must be manufactured to obtain useful quantities. It enables weapons to produce a larger yield while reducing the overall size and weight of the warhead in a process known as “boosting,” the U.S. Department of Energy said in an environmental impact statement about 20 years ago.
But unlike other nuclear materials used in nuclear weapons, tritium decays at a rate of 5.5 percent per year—its half-life is about 12 years—and it must be replenished periodically.
The NNSA, a separately organized agency within DOE, said the agreement with TVA that was announced last week is for management of the down-blending campaign and the resulting material. It’s separate from an existing interagency agreement for irradiation services that started in 2000 and is in effect until November 30, 2035.
“Without this down-blending campaign, we would need to accelerate the development and execution of a strategy to provide LEU fuel for tritium production by nearly a decade,†said Phil Calbos, NNSA’s acting deputy administrator for defense programs.
The new agreement follows a determination by U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry on August 21 that allows the NNSA to continue transfers of enriched uranium from DOE’s inventories in support of national security, the NNSA said in a press release.
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Buddy Bland (Photo courtesy ORNL)
Arthur “Buddy†Bland, program director of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has received the Secretary’s Appreciation Award for his nearly four decades of achievements in providing high-performance computing resources for science, a press release said.
Bland was cited by U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry for his work “in recognition of nearly 40 years of leadership in delivering high-performance computing resources to address the nation’s science and engineering challenges across a wide array of disciplines and for critical contributions to the success of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility and sustained U.S. leadership in high-performance computing and computational science.â€
Bland led the project to deliver the Summit supercomputer, launched June 8 at ORNL as “the world’s most powerful and smartest supercomputer†with a peak performance capability of 200 petaflops, or 200,000 trillion calculations per second. Summit was listed number one in the TOP500 list released on Monday. [Read more…]
Pictured above being interviewed by a CNBC television crew before a ceremony on Friday afternoon, June 8, 2018, for the new Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory are Ginni Rometty, left, chairman, president, and chief executive officer of IBM; Rick Perry, second from right, U.S. Department of Energy secretary; and Jensen Huang, right, founder, president, and CEO of NVIDIA. (Photo by John Huotari/Oak Ridge Today)
Note: This story was last updated at 6 p.m. June 9.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory again has the world’s most powerful supercomputer. It’s also the world’s smartest supercomputer, a machine that can learn—and run software that will write software.
The supercomputer, called Summit, is capable of 200 petaflops, or 200,000 trillion calculations per second. During a Friday afternoon ceremony, U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry said Summit can save 30 years worth of desktop data in one hour. It is millions times faster than a really good high-end desktop, said Ginni Rometty, IBM chair, president, and chief executive officer.
A water-cooled IBM system, Summit is presumed to have bumped China from the top spot, at least among open-science systems or supercomputers that aren’t classified. It has successfully run the world’s first exascale scientific calculation.
“We know we’re in competition, and it matters who gets there first,” Perry told several hundred people at the Friday afternoon ceremony at ORNL, a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory. “We reached a pinnacle today.”
Researchers at ORNL could find the cure for Alzheimer’s disease or cancer, Perry said. Winning the global supercomputing race could have benefits for all of humanity, said Jensen Huang, NVIDIA founder, president, and CEO. [Read more…]
Rick Perry
U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry will visit Oak Ridge National Laboratory on Friday to make a supercomputing announcement, a media advisory said.
The advisory doesn’t provide any additional information about the announcement, which will be made at noon at ORNL.
Perry will tour ORNL, meet with employees, and deliver remarks at the supercomputing event. He will be joined by several elected officials from Tennessee, the media advisory said.
More information will be added as it becomes available.
Rick Perry
Note: This story was last updated at 12 p.m.
The U.S. Department of Energy announced a new supercomputing program on Monday that could be worth up to $1.8 billion and deploy two systems, with one at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, that would be 50 to 100 times more powerful than today’s computers.
The new systems are called exascale computers. DOE said the new supercomputers will solidify United States leadership in exascale computing.
The initiative was announced by U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry in Washington, D.C., on Monday. Perry announced a request for proposals, or RFP, for the development of at least two new exascale supercomputers to be deployed at DOE national laboratories sometime around 2021-2023.
“The new supercomputers funded through this RFP will be follow-on systems to the first U.S. exascale system authorized by Secretary Perry this past June, named Aurora, which is currently under development at Argonne National Laboratory and scheduled to come online in 2021,” a press release said. The RFP announced Monday envisions the possibility of upgrades to Aurora or even a follow-on system in 2022-2023, “depending on an assessment of needs and opportunities at that time.” [Read more…]
A rendering of the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex. (Image from May 2017 courtesy of NNSA)
Federal officials have authorized the start of construction of the three main buildings, including one for enriched uranium operations, at the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge. It’s the largest federal construction project in Tennessee since World War II.
The authorization was announced Friday by the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is part of the U.S. Department of Energy. Y-12 is an NNSA site.
The authorization came from DOE leadership, NNSA said in a press release on Friday. The authorization allows the NNSA to start construction on the Main Process Building, Salvage and Accountability Building, and Process Support Facilities subprojects, the press release said.
UPF will replace an early-Cold War plant with a modern, more efficient, and safer facility for conducting highly-enriched uranium operations at Y-12, the NNSA said. Federal officials have been saying for a while that the facility is expected to be completed by 2025 at a cost of no more than $6.5 billion. [Read more…]
