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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

Chlorine Nuclear Data Evaluation Aided Through New LANSCE Measurements

The collaboration between the Los Alamos National Laboratory Neutron Science Center (LANSCE) and TerraPower LLC enables the enhanced understanding of fast spectrum critical systems consisting of chlorine. Specifically, TerraPower is interested in updating the nuclear data for the stable isotopes of chlorine, 35 Cl and 37 Cl, because these nuclides are the primary constituents of the chloride fuel salt in the Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment (MCRE), for which TerraPower is leading the design. The Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) between the parties is funded by DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy’s Gateway for Accelerated Innovation in Nuclear (GAIN) initiative to provide the nuclear community with access to the technical, regulatory, and financial support necessary to motivate innovative nuclear reactor technologies toward commercialization. New measurements of 35 Cl(n,p total ) and 35 Cl(n,α total ) were completed at LANSCE to constrain the reaction theory models that are used to generate the updated evaluations. The updated evaluations were then tested across the sensitivities of the MCRE by TerraPower to provide direct feedback to the evaluation for application specific sensitivities.

38 RADIATION CHEMISTRY, RADIOCHEMISTRY, AND NUCLEA↗
DOE OSTI2024

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Annual Site Environmental Report for Calendar Year 2023

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), one of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science’s 10 national laboratories, provides innovative science and technology development in the areas of energy and the environment, fundamental and computational science, and national security. There are three DOE offices within the Richland area. Two are responsible for the Hanford Site, whereas the Pacific Northwest Site Office oversees PNNL. PNNL prepares an Annual Site Environmental Report to meet the requirements of DOE Order 231.1B, Environment, Safety and Health Reporting, and DOE Order 458.1, Radiation Protection of the Public and the Environment, thus assuring that the public is informed of any PNNL-Richland campus or PNNL-Sequim campus event that could adversely affect the health and safety of the public, site staff, or the environment. The report provides a synopsis of ongoing environmental management performance and compliance activities for operations that occur at the PNNL-Richland campus in Richland, Washington, and at the PNNL-Sequim campus near Sequim, Washington. It describes the location of and background for each facility; addresses compliance with applicable DOE, federal, state, and local regulations, and site-specific permits; documents environmental monitoring efforts and their status; presents potential radiation doses to staff and the public in the surrounding areas; and describes DOE-required data quality assurance methods used for data verification. The ASER report describes Compliance with Federal, State, and Local Laws and Regulations in 2023, Environmental Sustainability, Environmental monitoring and dose assessment, Natural and Cultural Resource Management, and Quality Assurance activities that took place during Calendar Year 2023.

40 CFR 61 Subpart H↗
DOE OSTI2025

US Department of Energy, Office of Science, High-Performance Computing Facility 2024 Operational Assessment Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility

The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) was established to accelerate scientific discovery by providing world-leading computational performance and advanced data infrastructure to the US Department of Energy (DOE) computing community. As a DOE Office of Science user facility, the OLCF has managed the successful deployment and operation of a succession of leadership-class resources dedicated to open science. In addition to these resources, the OLCF staff continually strive to develop innovative processes and technologies, improve security, and empower users through effective allocation management and comprehensive user support and training. These efforts support the advancement of science by the OLCF users and benefit high-performance computing (HPC) facilities around the world.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2023

U.S. Offshore Wind Energy Noise Reduction Associated with Installation of Fixed-Bottom Foundations: Workshop Report

As offshore wind energy development grows in the United States, solutions are needed to reduce the underwater noise and substrate vibration generated during fixed-bottom turbine installation to help protect marine life. Monopiles are currently the main turbine foundation type installed globally and impact pile driving, the primary installation method, can be a major source of noise and vibration generation during wind farm construction. Opportunities exist to reduce the amount of noise and vibration produced during future offshore wind farm development. The use of alternative foundation types and installation methods, as well as innovative noise abatement technologies, would help reduce the potential detrimental effects on sensitive marine species. To explore these opportunities, the Department of Energy’s Wind Energy Technologies Office, in collaboration with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, funded the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to organize, host, and facilitate a virtual workshop in December 2022. The goal of the workshop was to gather input from the offshore wind energy community on noise reduction strategies for the installation of fixed-bottom offshore wind turbines in U.S. waters across multiple regions, including the U.S. Atlantic Coast, Gulf of Mexico, and Great Lakes to inform recommendations on future research. The joint lab team convened industry representatives, subject matter experts, and regulators to discuss potential pathways to reduce noise and vibration associated with fixed-bottom turbine installation, including the practicality of using alternative foundations and installation methods, the effectiveness of noise abatement technologies, as well as research and monitoring needs. In preparation for the workshop, the team invited experts to be part of a steering committee and worked with its members to help focus activities to meet the workshop goals. Additional pre-workshop activities included developing the invitee list and workshop agenda, reviewing existing Construction and Operations Plans (COP) for proposed offshore wind projects, distributing a brief questionnaire to industry representatives, and drafting the workshop discussion questions and Mural boards. In total, 128 workshop participants provided over 600 comments in response to the 17 group discussion questions used over two workshop sessions. Overarching recommendations highlighted across themes included future investments to provide data sharing, consistency, transparency, and opportunities for sharing best available science, knowledge, and expertise. The joint lab team synthesized the comments and identified four key research and development themes that could help advance the successful implementation of noise and vibration reduction strategies (see report). This report provides an overview of the workshop goals and scope, reviews the pre-workshop activities, presents brief summaries of participant feedback, and concludes with detailed research themes and recommendations for future investments. Appendix A includes the group discussion questions, Appendix B includes the results of the COP review, and Appendix C includes the results of the industry questionnaire. Overall, there was a high level of interest and engagement in the workshop. The sessions provided an opportunity for significant exchange of information between workshop participants from across sectors. Participants identified a variety of opportunities for next steps towards the noise reduction of offshore wind turbine installation in U.S. waters, including recommendations for future investments to provide certainty in the use of new technologies associated with alternative foundation types, noise abatement systems, and efficacy monitoring.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Status of the ANNIE experiment

The Accelerator Neutrino Neutron Interaction Experiment (ANNIE) is a Gadolinium-loaded water Cherenkov detector located in the Booster Neutrino Beam at Fermilab. One of its primary physics goals is to measure the final state neutron multiplicity of neutrino-nucleus interactions. This measurement of the neutron yield as a function of the outgoing lepton kinematics will be useful to constrain systematic uncertainties and reduce biases in future long-baseline oscillation and cross-section experiments. ANNIE is also a testbed for innovative new detection technologies. It will make use of pioneering photodetectors called Large Area Picosecond Photodetectors (LAPPDs) with better than 100 picosecond time resolution, which will enhance its reconstruction capabilities and demonstrate the feasibility of this technology as a new tool in high energy physics. The status of the experiment is reported here in terms of the overall progress, the deployment of the first LAPPD and an overview of recently taken beam and calibration data. Additional future R\&D efforts and analysis opportunities involving the use of the novel detection medium of Water-based Liquid Scintillators (WbLS) are also briefly highlighted.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗
DOE OSTI2023

Biocatalytic Membranes for Carbon Capture and Utilization

Innovative carbon capture technologies that capture CO 2 from large point sources and directly from air are urgently needed to combat the climate crisis. Likewise, corresponding technologies are needed to convert this captured CO 2 into valuable chemical feedstocks and products that replace current fossil-based materials to close the loop in creating viable pathways for a renewable economy. Biocatalytic membranes that combine high reaction rates and enzyme selectivity with modularity, scalability, and membrane compactness show promise for both CO 2 capture and utilization. This review presents a systematic examination of technologies under development for CO 2 capture and utilization that employ both enzymes and membranes. CO 2 capture membranes are categorized by their mode of action as CO 2 separation membranes, including mixed matrix membranes (MMM) and liquid membranes (LM), or as CO 2 gas–liquid membrane contactors (GLMC). Because they selectively catalyze molecular reactions involving CO 2 , the two main classes of enzymes used for enhancing membrane function are carbonic anhydrase (CA) and formate dehydrogenase (FDH). Small organic molecules designed to mimic CA enzyme active sites are also being developed. CO 2 conversion membranes are described according to membrane functionality, the location of enzymes relative to the membrane, which includes different immobilization strategies, and regeneration methods for cofactors. Parameters crucial for the performance of these hybrid systems are discussed with tabulated examples. Progress and challenges are discussed, and perspectives on future research directions are provided.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗
DOE OSTI2022

Engaging a Diverse Workforce in the Building Sciences Through the JUMP Into STEM Program: Impact Study; Preprint

Ensuring inclusivity in building science professions requires engaging people from underrepresented demographics; unfortunately, many races, ethnicities, and genders continue to be underrepresented. The JUMP into STEM program works to rectify this, encouraging creative ideation and highlighting the unique perspectives of a diverse array of students. The top students are awarded internships that provide opportunities to work in building science research with close supervision from mentors in the field. In the research presented here, we investigate the impact of participation in JUMP into STEM on students' careers, including the impact on students from diverse backgrounds. Furthermore, we research students' awareness of career opportunities in building science, students' perception of their ability to meaningfully contribute to this field, and the career building opportunities that JUMP into STEM provides for students. Through participant interviews and data analysis, we measure program diversity, inclusion, and effectiveness at achieving goals. We find that among the hundreds of students who have participated in this program, more than 25 different majors and/or educational degree programs are represented and more than 45% of students attend minority serving institutions or historically black colleges and universities. The JUMP into STEM experience had a significant effect on career choices or career development for more than 80% of participants. Our results also indicate that the JUMP into STEM program is effective at promoting diversity in the building sciences and is successfully contributing to the larger effort within the building science industry to promote and ensure equity in technological progress and innovation.

building energy science↗
DOE OSTI2020

Data Collection and Analysis Challenges and Mitigation Strategies for Quantitative Human Factors Research Studies in Nuclear Power Plant Modernization

The United States (U.S.) Department of Energy (DOE) Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) program Plant Modernization Pathway is conducting targeted research and development (R&D) to address aging and reliability concerns with the legacy instrumentation and control and related information systems of the U.S. LWR fleet. In this effort, the application of human factors engineering (HFE) provides an important role in ensuring new digital plant technologies enable broad innovation and business improvement with continued operational safety. Evaluation is a key activity in HFE, which often occurs iteratively through the system design lifecycle. While qualitative methods are important in collecting information of how users perform tasks through observations, quantitative methods are equally important in assessing system design based on performance. In collecting and analyzing this quantitative data, there are notable challenges in the nuclear HFE domain that may threaten the validity and reliability of the inferences made in these studies. Notable challenges include small sample size and limited resources, large error variance and small effect size, an “adding test features to losing degrees of freedom” dilemma, non-normal distribution, and heterogeneity of variance. The results in control room usability studies are often statistically non-significant, which makes it hard to interpret. This work discusses these challenges across different scientific viewpoints and provides real-world examples of these challenges in practice. Collectively, the objective of this work is to position these challenges to the larger data science community as a means of identifying future opportunities to address these issues.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Idaho National Laboratory Fuel Cycle Science & Technology Overview

The Fuel Cycle Science & Technology Division delivers innovative leadership in the development and assessment of science and engineering-based solutions for the integrated nuclear fuel cycle, critical materials recovery, national security and space related applications through world-class staff and research capabilities.

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Integrating Immersive Visualization in Molten-Salt Reactor Waste Management for Experimental Design and Planning

The Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) represents a significant innovation in nuclear technology, offering several operational and safety benefits over traditional solid-fuel reactors. However, MSRs face uncertainties in waste management due to their flexible designs and variable waste compositions. To address these challenges, we propose a visualization platform that illustrates solutions and performance predictions for various waste management strategies, enhancing user experience and improving strategy and communication. Immersive visualizations are widely used in the nuclear industry for training, simulation, and safety enhancement. Our project aims to develop a visualization platform incorporating virtual reality (VR) technologies to illustrate MSR characteristics immediately following reactor shutdown. This immersive simulation will allow users to interact, explore, and understand different waste management strategies. The platform will display MSR reactor characterizations, including nuclide decay, salt solidification, and corrosion, which are crucial for assessing and selecting backend management strategies. Using the Meta Quest 3 VR headset with Unity software, our platform will provide real-scale visualizations, enabling users to experience and evaluate designs and plans as if they were physically present. This user-friendly interface will make complex data accessible and understandable for non-domain experts, aiding in decision-making for MSR waste management. Our proposed visualization workflow can be applied to other nuclear reactors, assisting in the design and planning of waste management strategies.

11 - NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS↗
DOE OSTI2023

A framework to centre justice in energy transition innovations

The important role of justice in energy transition technologies has been a topic of increasing interest in recent years. However, key questions remain about how inequities influence energy transition innovations (ETIs) from their design to their widespread use, which ETIs receive more funding, and who controls ETI research, prototyping and deployment. Here, in this work, we propose a framework to centre justice in energy transition innovations (CJI) and examine how three tenets of justice (recognition, procedural and distributional justice) influence each level of ETI, including niche, regime and landscape levels. We examine wind energy in Mexico and multiple ETIs in Los Angeles as use cases to show how our CJI framework can help reveal the specific inequities undermining just energy transitions at crucial analytical levels of ETI in practice. Our CJI framework offers a path for promoters, practitioners and underserved communities to target the problems these groups face and create ETIs that better address their specific aspirations, needs and circumstances.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Transformative Pathways for U.S. Industry: Unlocking American Innovation

The United States (U.S.) is undergoing an energy transformation that will depend on continued U.S. innovation. Although U.S. industry has been foundational to the nation’s economic growth and prosperity, it has also given rise to decades’ worth of industrial pollutants in our air and water, which acutely impact the most vulnerable communities, as well as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions contributing to climate risk. At the same time, U.S. industry is facing growing competitive pressures. Global investors and financial regulations are increasingly focusing on emissions footprints, governments are developing emissions-based trade adjustments and procurement specifications, and downstream demand for low-carbon products is emerging. Developing cost-competitive solutions to meet these needs provides an opportunity to fundamentally transform U.S. industry and sharpen its competitive edge, while reducing the GHG emissions and adverse environmental and health impacts (see Figure ES-1). Innovation is central to this transformation. Pathways to Commercial Liftoff: Industrial Decarbonization, which provides a descriptive fact base on what is needed to reach commercial scale in the marketplace, estimates that over 60% of emissions reduction for the industrial sector will need to come from technologies that are still nascent today. This report, Transformative Pathways for U.S. Industry,3 focuses on the pathways that rely on the nascent and innovative technologies that were too early for consideration in the Pathways to Commercial Liftoff report. Targeted and sustained public and private investment in research, development, demonstration, and deployment is required to catalyze innovation and meet this moment.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2021

2020 Cost Analysis of Hydropower Options at Non-Powered Dams

This report provides a cost analysis of potential hydropower development for representative non-powered dam (NPD) sites in the United States. The overarching objective is to support the establishment of a basis for evaluating progress towards improving the competitiveness of new hydropower development for electricity generation. The representative sites, herein referred to as “reference sites”, were selected from sites with detailed water resource data to support the cost analysis. Facility designs, capital costs, plant generation and efficiency profiles, capacity factors, and levelized costs of energy (LCOE) are presented for the sites under baseline and near-term innovation cases. The baseline case represents facility configurations using technologies that are already widely applied in the hydropower industry, whereas near-term innovations are technologies likely to reach wide acceptance within the next 5 to 10 years. Cost savings in the near-term relative to the baseline are discussed to illustrate the potential benefits to the hydropower industry from research and development (R&D) and adoption of these innovations. Medium- to long-term innovation options expected from ongoing private and government R&D efforts are also highlighted but are not quantified in this report because of a current lack of complete information on these options. The key findings of the cost analysis in this study imply that near-term innovations could reduce the baseline costs of hydropower development at US NPD sites. Thus, if remaining R&D issues with these near-term innovations can be resolved within the next 5 to 10 years, industry-wide adoption of these technologies and improved competitiveness of NPD hydropower development can be expected. Specific key findings of the analysis include the following: 1) Potential installed capacity at the NPD sites evaluated in this study vary from 200 kW to 70 MW, representing two orders of magnitude variation across nearly 20 sites; 2) Capital costs, not including development costs, for the sites evaluated in this study vary from $2,200/kW to $34,000/kW but are below $12,000/kW for most sites; 3) Baseline LCOE estimates for lake dams are from $79/MWh to $790/MWh with most sites under $400/MWh, whereas estimates for lock dams are from $134/MWh to $289/MWh with most sites under $200/MWh; 4) Reductions in capital cost per kilowatt under the near-term innovation case are from −77% to −14% for lake dams and −21% to −2.1% for lock dams (excluding one site with a 14% increase in per-kilowatt capital costs); 5) Combined changes in capital costs and capacity factors in the near-term case relative to the baseline lead to reductions in LCOE of −71% to −14% for lake dams and −21% to −14% for lock dams; 6) Overall, LCOE reductions lead to 8 of the 18 sites under the near-term case having LCOE values below $150/MWh compared with only 2 of 18 sites in the baseline case.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Leveraging a Southern California Energy Innovation Cluster to Pilot and Validate Emerging Energy Technologies

The EPIC Pilot Program, led by the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI), was designed to help early-stage clean technology startups accelerate technical validation, investment readiness, and market entry. The project focused on supporting startups in designing and deploying small-scale pilots with the guidance of EPIC Partners, a network of regional stakeholders in the Southern California energy ecosystem, including but not limited to: the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), the California Energy Commission (CEC), Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro), and Edison International, among others. Through mentorship, funding, and site access for technology deployments, the program provided a structured pathway for startups to test and refine their technologies in real-world settings.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Cleantech Innovations Launch to Market

The NREL Innovation & Entrepreneurship Center (IEC) brings economically viable cleantech innovations to market. We create technology incubation program and solutions that address gaps preventing innovations from getting to market and preventing market growth.

accelerator↗
DOE OSTI2021

Breast Cancer Imaging and Characterization

Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory are developing a suite of ultrasound-waveform tomography and super-resolution ultrasound imaging technology that, while investigational at this time, may be able to provide significantly improved image resolution and characterization of early-stage cancers in a non-invasive and cost-effective manner. Breast cancer is the most frequently diagnosed cancer in U.S. women. Although current medical imaging technologies have improved, false positive rates for mammograms still range 50-60% after 10 yearly mammograms. This innovative ultrasound-imaging technology is patented and copyright protected. It has great potential to differentiate between cancerous and healthy tissue without the negative side effects of mammography. We are seeking a commercialization partner to license these technologies or participate in a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) to further develop a practical suite of products for commercial purposes, and where applicable seek any necessary FDA authorization of the technology.

59 BASIC BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Large Area Projection Sintering Technology Development (CRADA Final Report)

This CRADA was formed through support of the Innovation Crossroads program, which has been an invaluable experience for Ascend Manufacturing and our additive manufacturing technology. Without Innovation Crossroads, the research, capital and operational requirements to develop our company would have been too high and Ascend Manufacturing simply would not exist. Our patented and federally funded technology would have gone to waste. Through this CRADA, Ascend has been able to collaborate with the worlds experts in additive manufacturing to assist in developing our state of the art technology. This project assisted in developing a fully scalable 3D printing process, developed an industrial and pilot system design, assisted in the fabrication of a pilot system, allowing us to print components with materials impossible by any other 3D printing process. This work has allowed us to achieve significant follow-on funding to fully commercialize this highly capable manufacturing technology.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2023

Ultrafast materials synthesis and manufacturing techniques for emerging energy and environmental applications

Energy and environmental issues have attracted increasing attention globally, where sustainability and low-carbon emissions are seriously considered and widely accepted by government officials. In response to this situation, the development of renewable energy and environmental technologies is urgently needed to complement the usage of traditional fossil fuels. While a big part of advancement in these technologies relies on materials innovations, new materials discovery is limited by sluggish conventional materials synthesis methods, greatly hindering the advancement of related technologies. To address this issue, this review introduces and comprehensively summarizes emerging ultrafast materials synthesis methods that could synthesize materials in times as short as nanoseconds, significantly improving research efficiency. We discuss the unique advantages of these methods, followed by how they benefit individual applications for renewable energy and the environment. We also highlight the scalability of ultrafast manufacturing towards their potential industrial utilization. Finally, we provide our perspectives on challenges and opportunities for the future development of ultrafast synthesis and manufacturing technologies. Here, we anticipate that fertile opportunities exist not only for energy and the environment but also for many other applications.

37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CH↗