argonne national laboratory

energy trust

We need to start thinking outside the box to find new ways to fund investments in the infrastructure upon which the future prosperity of our country and our world depends.[read more]

Argonne National Laboratory

Obama emphasized the need for research on alternative energy technologies and called for an energy security trust to fund such research, pulling $2 billion in royalties from oil and gas leases over 10 years.[read more]

A few weeks ago I was thrilled to speak at the inaugural Summer Institute on Sustainability and Energy, organized by the University of Illinois-Chicago in partnership with Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern University, Illinois Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago. The students were from diverse fields and...[read more]

Earlier this week, I attended a meeting on Capitol Hill sponsored by the Illinois Science & Technology Coalition.  The purpose of the meeting was to meet with Hill staffers and discuss the importance of research and development funding for advanced battery technology.  Speakers from Argonne National Laboratory and the...[read more]

This morning I received an emailed press release announcing that the Altamont landfill gas facility in California had been recognized by the state's governor for its achievement in sustainability. What makes this facility unique is that the methane gas generated by the landfill waste is collected and turned into liquefied natural gas (...[read more]

Nuclear Green has in the past offered sketches of the early history of reactor design. The classic reactor design was created by Enrico Fermi, and featured a solid core. Fermi was a physicist, and in a way designed his first reactor as a physics experiment. From the view point of process, materials were placed in the nuclear core and...[read more]

This is a very cool development from Argonne National Laboratory and could make plastic bags even more valuable. Argonne chemist Vilas Pol found a way to recycle waste plastic bags into either carbon nanotubes (using a cobalt-based catalyst) or carbon spheres, which can be used in various applications such as electronics, paints,...[read more]

(Yoon Chang and Barry Brook discuss the IFR over a good wine, June 2009). The following post in the Integral Fast Reactor Facts and Discussion series centres around two important diagrams prepared by Dr Yoon I. Chang – Distinguished Fellow at Argonne National Laboratories, a key figure in the development of the IFR between 1984...[read more]

It will be factory built with 20-year fuel loads and is based on the historically significant design of EBR-II Among the many offerings being developed in the small reactor category, one has a unique legacy. Advanced Reactor Concepts LLC (ARC) is based on technology used over a 30-year period by the EBR-II program at Argonne...[read more]

No one knows how much a renewable post-carbon grid would cost, but renewable advocates like Greenpeace, and Rocky Mountain Institute, and the proposed Google Clean Energy 2030 plan, all seem to think it will be cheap. However it is impossible for any planner to know if an all renewable grid will work, and if it will work, how much an...[read more]

Technology Review has an article on the potential for ultracapacitors to augment conventional batteries in hybrid vehicle designs - Ultracaps Could Boost Hybrid Efficiency.Energy storage devices called ultracapacitors could lower the cost of the battery packs in plug-in hybrid vehicles by hundreds or even thousands of dollars by cutting...[read more]