Search  

Profile

Idaho mechanical engineer Josh Daw is devising methods for observing material properties during irradiation.Following through: Mechanical engineer leaves links for nuclear research

Joshua Daw enrolled in an undergraduate engineering program with hopes of growing up to be a golf club designer. He had been spending his days on the green, and wasn't quite ready to leave. Today, however, his career is going places — though not in the direction he first thought.

As is a Ph.D. student at the University of Idaho, he is completing his doctoral thesis work at DOE's Idaho National Laboratory, in the High Temperature Test Laboratory (HTTL). A serendipitous DOE-funded, UI and INL research opportunity at the HTTL led him to high-temperature instrumentation work.

Full Story

Feature

PPPL staffers monitor a closed-circuit screen during the historic 1993 experiment.Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the tritium shot heard around the world

Tensions rose in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) as the seconds counted down. At stake was the first crucial test of a high-powered mixture of fuel for producing fusion energy. As the control-room clock reached “zero,” a flash of light on a closed-circuit television monitor marked a historic achievement: A world-record burst of more than 3 million watts of fusion energy — enough to momentarily light some 3,000 homes — fueled by the new high-powered mixture. The time was 11:08 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 9, 1993.

“There was a tremendous amount of cheering and clapping,” recalled PPPL physicist Rich Hawryluk, who headed the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR), the huge magnetic fusion facility — or tokamak — that produced the historic power. “People had been on pins and needles for a long time and finally it all came together.” It did so again the very next day when TFTR shattered the mark by creating more than six million watts of fusion energy.

Full Story

See also…

DOE Pulse
  • Number 408  |
  • March 3, 2014
  • PNNL offers ‘virtual tour’ of Shallow Underground Laboratory

    Scientists use ultra-sensitive germanium detectors to perform low-background measurements on a variety of samples, addressing applications that span from environmental age-dating to international treaty verification. For the first time, some of the world’s most sensitive radiation detection systems and fundamental physics research can be seen from either your desktop computer or mobile device. DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory recently launched a virtual tour showcasing its Shallow Underground Laboratory (SUL), a facility dedicated in 2011 as part of the $224-million capability replacement project jointly funded by DOE, National Nuclear Security Administration, and Department of Homeland Security. The SUL is a one-of-a-kind facility most people may never be able to visit in order to protect sensitive instruments from outside contamination and even the slightest radioactivity.

    Full Story

  • Pond-dwelling powerhouse's genome points to its biofuel potential

    Duckweed, a small, common plant that grows in ponds and stagnant waters, is an ideal candidate as a biofuel raw material. Photo by Texx Smith, via flickr. Duckweed is a tiny floating plant that's been known to drive people daffy. It's one of the smallest and fastest-growing flowering plants that often becomes a hard-to-control weed in ponds and small lakes. But it's also been exploited to clean contaminated water and as a source to produce pharmaceuticals. Now, the genome of Greater Duckweed (Spirodela polyrhiza) has given this miniscule plant's potential as a biofuel source a big boost. In a paper published February 19, 2014 in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from Rutgers University, DOE's Joint Genome Institute and several other facilities detailed the complete genome of S. polyrhiza and analyzed it in comparison to several other plants, including rice and tomatoes.

    Full Story

  • NREL database WILD about cataloging wildlife's interaction with wind energy

    This photo of a red-tailed hawk was taken on NREL's campus. NREL’s WILD (Wind-Wildlife Impacts Literature Database) is a large, browsable collection of documents on the impacts to wildlife of wind energy, tidal and wave energy, power lines, and towers. (Photo by Dennis Schroeder/NREL)How do reindeer adapt to wind turbines in the tundra?

    Are porpoises spooked by the noise of pile driving when offshore wind turbines are installed on the ocean floor?

    Are bats more susceptible than birds to colliding with the huge turbines' slowly turning blades?

    Researchers, students, and the millions of people who consider themselves both environmentalists and animal lovers now have a one-stop shop for answers to these questions—and many more.

    WILD (Wind-Wildlife Impacts Literature Database) is a large, browsable collection of documents on the impacts to wildlife of wind energy, tidal and wave energy, power lines, and towers. Created by DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), wild.nrel.gov includes journal articles, conference papers, government reports, environmental impact studies, and more.

    Full Story

  • ORNL microscopy system delivers real-time view of battery electrochemistry

    A new in situ transmission electron microscopy technique enabled ORNL researchers to image the snowflake-like growth of the solid electrolyte interphase from a working battery electrode. A new in situ transmission electron microscopy technique enabled ORNL researchers to image the snowflake-like growth of the solid electrolyte interphase from a working battery electrode.Using a new microscopy method, researchers at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory can image and measure electrochemical processes in batteries in real time and at nanoscale resolution.

    Scientists at ORNL used a miniature electrochemical liquid cell that is placed in a transmission electron microscope to study an enigmatic phenomenon in lithium-ion batteries called the solid electrolyte interphase, or SEI, as described in a study published in Chemical Communications.

    The SEI is a nanometer-scale film that forms on a battery's negative electrode due to electrolyte decomposition. Scientists agree that the SEI's formation and stability play key roles in controlling battery functionality. But after three decades of research in the battery field, details of the SEI's dynamics, structure and chemistry during electrochemical cycling are still debated, stemming from inherent difficulties in studying battery electrode materials in their native liquid environment.

    Full Story