This time of year finds many of us busy with holiday shopping. While PNNL might not be developing the latest video games or hoverboards, we are working hard to deliver a few presents you might like.
Steve Short, a nuclear engineer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, has been selected as a fellow of the National Society of Professional Engineers.
PNNL is world-renowned for its expertise in glass formulation and processing — knowledge that is instrumental to the work done in partnership with the DOE Office of River Protection to develop the vitrification process.
April 26 marks the 31st anniversary of the explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant's Unit 4 reactor. Battelle researchers at PNNL were involved in an international consortium to look at long-term safety and containment of Unit 4. T
Cleaning up Hanford is no easy task: it is one of the world's largest and most complex environmental remediation projects. The nation's top engineering firms are on the job and the Department of Energy's PNNL is helping.
Oil spills could be cleaned up in the icy, rough waters of the Arctic with a chemically modified sawdust material that absorbs up to five times its weight in oil and stays afloat for at least four months.
PNNL takes pride in advancing scientific frontiers and developing solutions to vexing problems. In particular, we apply our technical expertise to address national needs in security, energy and the environment.
On October 22, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC)granted Tennessee Valley Authority's (TVA's) Watts Bar Nuclear Generating Station a 40-year operating license for its new Unit 2 reactor. This is the first nuclear reactor to be granted an operating license by the NRC in two decades.
Pressurized water nuclear reactors in the United States generate about 13 percent of U.S. electricity. Though efficient, these reactors face a unique challenge with stress corrosion cracking (SCC). This type of corrosion is one of the primary life-limiting degradation mechanisms of nickel-base alloy pressure boundary components, such as instrumentation and control rod nozzles, the welds that attach these nozzles to the reactor vessel, and welds that connect feedwater piping to the reactor vessel. As interest grows in a more sustainable and efficient fleet of nuclear reactors across the world, there is increasing interest in characterizing SCC initiation response.
