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The Department of Energy is teaming up with the Tennessee Valley Authority and Oak Ridge National Lab to make it easier than ever to charge electric vehicles.

Last week, the Electric Power Research Institute broke ground on one of Tennessee ’s first solar-assisted charging stations for electric vehicles in Knoxville. Chattanooga and Nashville are next in line.

“In this market, if anybody wants to drive an electric vehicle, Tennessee will be one of the places in the United States where they can,” says James Ellis, spokesman for TVA.

In addition to the solar charging stations, the DOE is giving away 1,000 home-based chargers. And TVA is looking to build 60 direct current fast chargers across the state.

The plug is standardized, which means it will work with the Nissan, GM Volt and all automotive manufactured vehicles for the United States.

The charging stations will be set up so that they use the sun to generate power needed to offset the effects of the charging during peak power demand periods. While vehicles are charging, the stationary batteries and smart grid controls will provide additional localized support to mitigate any impacts on the power system.

The TVA Fact Sheet (PDF) also discusses re-use of automotive lithium batteries stating, “Stationary battery storage will provide additional localized grid support to mitigate the impacts of charging multiple vehicles in one centralized location. Stationary storage will also provide future opportunities to re-use automotive batteries that are no longer ideal for vehicles. These batteries may have 60 to 70 percent life left in them and can be used to support the power grid.”

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U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman announced the selection of a team led by Oak Ridge National Lab for an award of up to $122 million over five years to establish and operate a new Nuclear Energy Modeling and Simulation Energy Innovation Hub.

The Hub will use the capabilities of the world’s most powerful computers to work on nuclear reactor design and engineering. I recently reported that 8 million processing hours will be directed to designing new and better reactors.

The Nuclear Energy Innovation Hub will allow engineers to create a simulation of a currently operating reactor that will act as a “virtual model” of that reactor. They will then use the “virtual model” to address important questions about reactor operations and safety. This will be used to address issues such as reactor power production increases and reactor life and license extensions.

The Nuclear Energy Innovation Hub will be located at ORNL in Tennessee. In addition to ORNL, the members of the team are:

• Electric Power Research Institute, Palo Alto, California
• Idaho National Lab, Idaho Falls, Idaho
• Los Alamos National Lab, Los Alamos, New Mexico
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge Massachusetts
• North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina
• Sandia National Lab, Albuquerque, New Mexico
• Tennessee Valley Authority, Knoxville, Tennessee
• University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
• Westinghouse Electric Company, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

The Hub will be funded at up to $22 million this fiscal year. The Hub will then be funded at an estimated $25 million per year for the next four years, subject to Congressional appropriations.

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The “Jaguar” - the most powerful computer in the world - will be used to design the next generation of nuclear reactors, according to an Oak Ridge National Lab press release.

The goal is to integrate existing nuclear energy and nuclear national security modeling and simulation capabilities with high-performance computing to simulate radiation in order to support the design and safety of nuclear facilities, improve reactor core designs and nuclear fuel performance and ensure the safety of nuclear materials, such as spent nuclear fuel.

John Wagner, technical integration manager for nuclear modeling at ORNL says, “We’re now simulating entire nuclear facilities, such as a nuclear power reactor facility with its auxiliary buildings and the ITER fusion reactor, with much greater accuracy than any other organization that we’re aware of.”

“Software for modeling radiation transport has been around for a long time,” he adds, “but it hadn’t been adapted to build on developments that have revolutionized computational science. There’s no special transformational technology in this software; but it’s designed specifically to take advantage of the massive computational and memory capabilities of the world’s fastest computers.”

The project has been awarded eight million processor hours on Jaguar for the purpose of developing a “uniquely detailed simulation of the power distribution inside a nuclear reactor core.” This is expected to cut years off the process of designing new and better reactors.

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Through new collaborations totaling $6.2 million, ORNL will be partnering with industry to overcome challenges facing lithium-ion manufacturing. Partners include A123 Systems, Dow Kokam, Porous Power Technologies and Planar Energy. In each case, industry cost-share exceeds 50 percent of the total project cost.

“By leveraging our expertise in materials science and manufacturing, ORNL will assist these partners with their individual energy storage challenges and address opportunities to surpass non-domestic secondary battery manufacturers that dominate today’s market,” says ORNL’s Energy Materials Program director Craig Blue in an ORNL press release.

The research teams will focus efforts on safety, service life and cost reduction.

Secondary Li-ion cell manufacturing encompasses a broad range of disciplines including formulation chemistry, film casting, polymer processing, materials and composite design, interfacial science and component engineering.

According to ORNL’s David Wood, co-principal investigator and technical lead on the project, collaborative research is expected to take place during the next 18 months. Wood adds, “This is a unique and timely opportunity for ORNL to help government and industry set the course for a new generation of energy storage technologies.”

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Credit: LLNL

According to a release from the Lawrence Livermore National Lab, a new element has been discovered, one that resides in a tiny slice of paradise called the island of stability. Element 117– yet to receive a formal name – is the fifth new element scientists have discovered in the past decade.

“The discovery of element 117 is the culmination of a decade-long journey to expand the periodic table and write the next chapter in heavy-element research,” says Yuri Oganessian, scientific leader of the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions at the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research and spokesperson for the collaboration. JINR is a Russia-based international intergovernmental research organization.

Although these elements only appear in the lab, some researchers say they may occur in nature as extremely rare, fleeting by-products of supernova.

The quest has increasingly been driven by what nuclear physicists call the island of stability – a range of very heavy elements, not yet created, that theory suggests should remain stable far longer than many of the elements researchers have created in the lab so far.

Finding element 117 took patience. According to the LLNL website, the effort took two years. It began at the High Flux Isotope Reactor at the Oak Ridge National Lab with a 250-day irradiation to produce 22 mg of berkelium. This was followed by 90 days of processing at ORNL to separate and purify the berkelium. Then, lab in Dimitrovgrad, Russia, had to prepare the berkelium target. Finally, calcium ions were fired at the target for 150 days. And, that was cutting it close: Berkelium has a half-life of only 320 days.

The result: six atoms of element 117. The atoms existed for between 21 and 45 millionths of a second.

The team included scientists from the JINR (Dubna, Russia), the Research Institute for Advanced Reactors (Dimitrovgrad), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Vanderbilt University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“This is a significant breakthrough for science,” LLNL director George Miller says. “The discovery of a new element provides new insight into the makeup of the universe and is a testimony to the strength of science and technology at the partner institutions.”

The team now is gearing up to probe element 117’s chemical properties. The team’s results appear in a research paper accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Check out the animation of the creation of element 117 here.

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