Pumped-storage hydropower offers the most cost-effective storage option for shifting large volumes of energy. A PNNL-led team wrote a report comparing cost and performance factors for 10 storage technologies.
Scientists have uncovered a root cause of the growth of needle-like structures—known as dendrites and whiskers—that plague lithium batteries, sometimes causing a short circuit, failure, or even a fire.
PNNL researchers have created a chemical cocktail that could help electric cars power their way through extreme temperatures where current lithium-ion batteries don’t operate as efficiently as needed.
Energy storage is slowly shifting utility planning practices from the current paradigm, which ensures grid reliability by building reserve generation resources, to ensuring grid reliability by optimizing grid services.
PNNL helped teach the next generation of principal investigators about aerosols—tiny atmospheric particles that can affect the Earth’s climate—during the 2019 Aerosol Summer School.
The inner Salish Sea’s future response to climate change, while significant, is predicted to be less severe than that of the open ocean based on parameters like algal blooms, ocean acidification, and annual occurrences of hypoxia.
PNNL researchers demonstrate how the excitation of oxygen atoms that contributes to better performance of a lithium-ion battery also triggers a process that leads to damage, explaining a phenomenon that has been a mystery to scientists.
After 10 years, a specialized research aircraft operated by PNNL for the DOE completed is final campaign. PNNL staff are leading efforts to instrument a new plane for future research.
PNNL researchers are developing and evaluating bat tagging and tracking tools that will help design solutions to protect the bat population from wind turbines.
A study co-led by PNNL and reviewed in Science investigates how nanomaterials—both ancient and modern—cycle through the Earth’s air, water, and land, and calls for a better understanding of how they affect the environment and human health.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and PNNL partnered to complete—in record time—an environmental impact statement for the nation’s first small modular nuclear reactor, to be sited at Clinch River, Tenn.
Installing new access holes (up to 6 feet in diameter) could reduce the overall time and cost to retrieve waste from Hanford's underground storage tanks, according to a structural analysis of the tank domes by PNNL and Becht Engineering.
"It's sort of like using infrared goggles to see heat signatures in the dark, except this is underground." PNNL and CHPRC implemented a state-of-the-art approach to monitor the process of remediating residual uranium at Hanford's 300 Area.
Researchers used novel methods to safely create and analyze plutonium samples. The approaches could prove influential in future studies of the radioactive material, benefitting research in legacy, national security and nuclear fuels.
