News

Nestled in Washington’s Snohomish County, Seattle Paine Field International Airport—while unremarkable to travelers—is a crucial hub for aviation innovation and maintenance. An initiative from Washington State University (WSU) and Snohomish County leaders is aiming to make Paine Field a nexus for testing and improving sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) made from non-petroleum materials like municipal waste and biomass.

biomass

Material that comes from living things, including trees, crops, grasses, and animals and animal waste. Some kinds of biomass, such as wood and biofuels, can be burned to produce energy.

Source: EPA Global Climate Change Source

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) supported the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in conducting a first-of-a-kind streamlined environmental review and environmental impact statement for the Generation-IV advanced reactor, part of Kairos Power LLC’s Hermes molten salt test reactor project.

As electricity grids incorporate renewables,

renewable energy

Renewable energy comes from unlimited, naturally replenished resources, such as the sun, tides, and wind. Renewable energy can be used for electricity generation, space and water heating and cooling, and transportation.

Source: U.S Department of Energy Source

several factors will constrain future output, and scientists point toward important avenues for future research to fully understand the challenges. Electricity demand, climate change,

climate change

A change in the average conditions — such as temperature and rainfall — in a region over a long period of time.

Source: NASA Climate Kids Source

and the limited availability of minerals and land for wind, solar, and transmission lines are among the biggest unknowns, according to a new paper published in the journal Springer Nature.

Wind energy now represents more than 10 percent of the nation’s electricity mix, making it the largest source of renewable power generation in the United States. This energy source enables many states to meet their renewable energy goals—but implementing wind energy comes with challenges to be overcome, such as improving wind forecast accuracy and mitigating environmental risks associated with wind farm development.

A new nickel-rich, single-crystal battery technology is on track for rapid deployment. A seemingly simple shift in lithium-ion battery manufacturing could pay big dividends, improving electric vehicles’ (EV) ability to store more energy per charge and to withstand more charging cycles, according to new research led by the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory is teaming up with partner laboratories, minority serving institutions

minority Serving Institution (MSI)

A term used to describe colleges and universities that primarily enroll and serve minority populations. These groups can include African Americans, Hispanics, American Indians, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Asian Americans.

Source: U.S. Department of the Interior Source

(MSIs), and a key industry partner, FedTech, to launch a pilot fellowship program that will connect top entrepreneurial talent within the MSI community with opportunities to commercialize DOE technologies.

MIT researchers and colleagues have demonstrated a way to precisely control the size, composition, and other properties of nanoparticles key to the reactions involved in a variety of clean energy and environmental technologies. They did so by leveraging ion irradiation, a technique in which beams of charged particles bombard a material. They went on to show that nanoparticles created this way have superior performance over their conventionally made counterparts.

In 2022, the United States government established a 2050 goal to reach net-zero emissions by decarbonizing our economy, removing CO2

carbon dioxide (CO2)

An important heat-trapping gas, also known as a greenhouse gas, that comes from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels (such as coal, oil, and natural gas), from wildfires, and natural processes like volcanic eruptions.

Source: NASA Source

from the atmosphere and storing it at the gigaton scale (at least a billion tons per year). Roads to Removal lays out a road map to this goal and answers the question: How much CO2 is it possible to remove in the United States and at what cost?

As scientific facilities get more powerful, the amount and complexity of the data they generate will only grow. Advanced computing resources and techniques will be required to keep up with the sheer volume of data flowing from next-generation facilities. One of those will be the upgraded Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science invites applications for support under the Early Career Research Program (ECRP): DE-FOA-0003176. This opportunity includes the Biological and Environmental Research (BER) Program’s Earth and Environmental Systems Sciences research. BER is seeking research applications on Southeast U.S. Atmospheric Processes Through Use of Observations from the Third Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Mobile Facility (AMF3) Bankhead National Forest (BNF) Atmospheric Observatory.

A team of Los Alamos National Laboratory employees and a recent decision by the Environmental Protection Agency are ensuring that streams around the Lab that flow seasonally or with rainfall and spring snowmelt, known as intermittent and ephemeral waterways, continue to be protected from pollution.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science has announced $264 million in funding for 29 projects to develop clean energy solutions that will pave the way to achieving a net-zero-carbon economy by 2050. This funding is part of DOE's Energy Earthshots Initiative, an effort designed to accelerate breakthroughs of more abundant, affordable, and reliable clean energy solutions within the decade.