• The U.S. Water and Wastewater Crisis – How Many Wake-up Calls Are Enough?

    In February, much of Texas plunged into darkness when the state’s electricity grid failed due to extreme cold weather conditions. What started as a foreseeable blackout quickly became a life-threatening calamity. “This catastrophe illustrates what happens when aging and inadequate infrastructure is hit by extreme rain or snow—an increasingly regular occurrence due to climate change,” Lucía Falcón Palomar, Obinna Maduka, and JoAnn Kamuf Ward write. “And, the matter extends well beyond Texas. It is easy to forget that, within U.S. borders, communities have long endured the conditions seen in Texas in February.”

  • The U.S. Is Worried about Its Critical Minerals Supply Chains – Essential for Electric Vehicles, Wind Power and the Nation’s Defense

    When U.S. companies build military weapons systems, electric vehicle batteries, satellites and wind turbines, they rely heavily on a few dozen “critical minerals” – many of which are mined and refined almost entirely by other countries. Building a single F-35A fighter jet, for example, requires at least 920 pounds of rare earth elements that come primarily from China. That level of dependence on imports worries the U.S. government.

  • Retaining Knowledge of Nuclear Waste Management

    Sandia National Laboratories have begun their second year of a project to capture important, hard-to-explain nuclear waste management knowledge from retirement-age employees to help new employees get up to speed faster. The project has experts share their experience with and knowledge of storage, transportation, and disposal with next generation scientists.

  • Revolutionary Nuclear Heating Plant

    A team of scientists has come up with a radical solution to heat cities using spent nuclear rods, which they say is cost-effective and greener than natural gas. As the EU moves away from coal, many are interested.

  • Florida Governor Working to Prevent “Catastrophic Flood” of Toxic Wastewater in Tampa Area

    Florida governor Ron DeSantis has vowed to prevent a “catastrophic flood” near the major city of Tampa. A leaking toxic wastewater reservoir has the potential to cause an environmental crisis in the region.

  • The U.S. Needs a Macrogrid to Move Electricity from Areas that Make It to Areas that Need It

    Many kinds of extreme events can disrupt electricity service, including hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, wildfires, extreme heat, extreme cold and extended droughts. Major disasters can leave thousands of people in the dark. During such events, unaffected regions may have power to spare. For example, during the February blackouts in Texas, utilities were generating electricity from hydropower in the Pacific Northwest, natural gas in the Northeast, wind on the northern Plains and solar power in the Southwest. Today it’s not possible to move electricity seamlessly from one end of the U.S. to the other.

  • Integration Can Prevent Failures in Large Power Grids

    The recent power outages in Texas brought attention to its power grid being separated from the rest of the country. While it is not immediately clear whether integration with other parts of the national grid would have completely eliminated the need for rolling outages, the state’s inability to import significant amounts of electricity was decisive in the blackout.

  • New Initiative Aims to Ensure 5G Networks Are Reliable, Secure

    The transition to 5G will affect every device connected to the internet. Later this year, a team of Stanford researchers will demonstrate how a tight formation of computer-controlled drones can be managed with precision even when the 5G network controlling it is under continual cyberattack. The demo’s ultimate success or failure will depend on the ability of an experimental network control technology to detect the hacks and defeat them within a second to safeguard the navigation systems.

  • Batteries: Reshaping the Future of the Electric Grid

    Research begun at the Department of Energy’s Joint Center for Energy Storage Research and continued at spinoff company Form Energy may launch a new era of renewable energy.

  • How Should the United States Compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative?

    China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is the country’s most ambitious foreign policy undertaking in modern times and is central to Chinese President Xi Jinping’s legacy. BRI, which dwarfs the Marshall Plan in scale, has funded and built roads, power plants, ports, railways, fifth-generation (5G) networks, and fiber-optic cables around the world. While BRI initially sought to connect countries in Central, South, and Southeast Asia with China, it has since transformed into a globe-spanning enterprise encompassing 139 countries.

  • Almost 70% of ERCOT customers lost power during winter storm, study finds

    Texans in ERCOT’s service area who lost electricity were without power for an average of 42 hours, according to the study. They had been told to prepare for short-term, rolling outages.

  • Solving Problems for the World’s Freshwater Supply

    Water’s value to society goes far beyond quenching thirst. An indispensable resource, it is required not only to sustain life, but also for economic prosperity. Water, for example, is needed to generate energy and to manufacture nearly everything, from food to clothes, cars and electronics. Our future economy and national security highly depend on the availability of clean water. But there is a limited supply of renewable fresh water when and where it is needed.

  • Stepped-Up U.S. Investment in Fusion Energy

    An influential Department of Energy (DOE) advisory committee has recommended that the nation move aggressively toward the deployment of fusion energy, including investments in technology and equipment to support one of the missions of LLNL’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) — laying the groundwork for the development of inertial fusion energy (IFE).

  • Tsunamis It Comes in Waves

    Tsunamis pose a real threat to the California coast, even if the triggering earthquakes occur elsewhere. And it doesn’t take a 50-foot tsunami out of a science-fiction film to inflict severe damage. Researchers are helping ensure coastal cities are ready.

  • Drought May Lead to Elevated Levels of Naturally Occurring Arsenic in Private Domestic Wells

    An estimated 4.1 million people in the lower 48 states are potentially exposed to arsenic levels that exceed EPA’s drinking water standards.