Feature Stories

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Workers prepare and load a shield plug crucial to the former Chicago Pile-5 Reactor, which has long been dismantled. The plug was decontaminated and shipped for waste disposal.
 Argonne makes great strides in reducing legacy nuclear waste

Argonne National Laboratory took a significant step in reducing its legacy waste earlier this week by ridding itself of a 22,000-pound device once associated with a historic reactor.

 August 10, 2010
DOE awards Argonne projects 200 million hours of supercomputer time

Five researchers at Argonne National Laboratory will lead projects that have been awarded almost 200 million processor-hours of computing time at Argonne’s Leadership Computing Facility.

 July 28, 2010
Argonne's Ali Erdemir has been named a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
 Argonne scientist Ali Erdemir named ASME fellow

Argonne Distinguished Fellow Ali Erdemir of Argonne National Laboratory has been named a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

 July 20, 2010
Ethanol engineers found that ethanol-fueled engines produced more horsepower than traditional racecar engines with environmentally unfriendly leaded fuel. Photo credit: Darryl Moran / Creative Commons.
 Ethanol-fueled racecar engines outpower lead-fueled engines

A group of automotive researchers from Argonne National Laboratory and industry have shown that a fuel-injected racing car engine fueled by E-85, an ethanol-based fuel, outperforms the same engine with a carburetor and leaded racing fuel.

 July 7, 2010
Above, the project that pushed the ACLF over two billion processor-hours: a visualization of Rayleigh-Taylor instability, which is the result of the mixing of two fluids at different densities. The heavy fluid (top) is accelerated by the light fluid (bottom), yielding bubbles of light fluid and spikes of heavy fluid, each penetrating into the other fluid, followed by the development of a chaotic mixing layer. Gravity is going down in the plot. Accurate simulation of the turbulent mixing of two fluids is a long-standing challenge. Image courtesy Research team from SUNY at Stony Brook, Department of Applied Mathematics & Statistics.
Over two billion hours served

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, located at Argonne National Laboratory, has run over two billion processor-hours of computations at a mind-boggling speed of over 557 trillion calculations a second as it enables scientists and engineers to conduct cutting-edge research in just weeks or months rather than years.

 June 18, 2010
Students from the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute (Albuquerque, NM) pose with their windmill, constructed for the Indian Education Renewable Energy Challenge hosted by Argonne National Laboratory.
 Tribal internship students energize alternative fuel science

Argonne National Laboratory, together with the U.S. Department of the Interior, are working together to help educate future tribal leaders on energy resource development and environmental evaluations by offering several hands-on learning opportunities such as Tribal Energy Internships and the Indian Education Renewable Energy Challenge.

 June 15, 2010
Modeling nickel fractures and next-generation reactors

A multidisciplinary team of physicists, chemists, materials scientists and computer scientists from Argonne, the University of Southern California, Harvard University, Pennsylvania State University, and California State University at Northridge simulated the introduction of small amounts of sulfur into the boundaries between the nickel grains to investigate a material property known as “embrittlement.”

 June 1, 2010
Today manufacturers are meeting to agree on a standard plug for the home hub, cars and appliances. But it turns out that American manufacturers already agreed on a standardized electric vehicle plug—in 1913! In the early days of cars, electric vehicles seemed a likely competitor for gasoline-powered engines and 30,000 were on the road; thus, the plug seen here—complete with wooden handle.
 Argonne helps the grid get smart

A multidisciplinary mix of scientists from Argonne National Laboratory is working to help develop a "smart grid" that will not only adapt in real-time to handle larger electricity loads, but also operate more cheaply and efficiently than the existing grid.

 March 25, 2010
Argonne scientists Ken Kemner (right) and Ed O’Loughlin work to better understand exactly how bacteria chemically changes uranium.
 Argonne scientists seek natural remediation for uranium-rich sites

While most of us are focused on life above ground, scientists at Argonne National Laboratory are trying to understand the drama unfolding beneath our feet. Their work centers on the more than billions of tons of bacteria living within the Earth’s subsurface, below the root zone, and how they change the chemical composition of the rocks and minerals they touch, including uranium. The result could prove useful in a surprising way.

 March 18, 2010
Researchers Guldem Kartal (left) and Alyssa Skulborstad operate Argonne’s pilot-scale ultrafast boriding reactor.
Scaling up Argonne’s ultrafast boriding process

U.S.

 March 1, 2010
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