News Releases

The Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) awards recognize outstanding achievements in the successful transfer of technology from laboratory to industry. The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory was recently awarded six FLC awards, including the 2026 Excellence in Technology Transfer Award, for technology commercialized by Element3 that enables the extraction of lithium from oil and gas wastewater.

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory and General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems have signed a memorandum of understanding to explore advanced manufacturing for extreme environment materials with energy and national security applications.

Jennifer Morrell-Falvey, a senior staff scientist at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or AAAS, one of the world’s largest general scientific societies and publisher of the Science family of journals.

A new biosensor developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory detects the emerging presence of fungus on plants at the molecular level, paving the way for next-generation crop protection and the development of stress-tolerant plants. The innovation advances technology for the U.S. agricultural and biomanufacturing sectors. 

The U.S. Department of Energy and the National Reactor Innovation Center are proud to announce the establishment of the Nuclear Energy Launch Pad. This NRIC initiative will promote the rapid development and implementation of advanced nuclear technologies by private industry.

(IDAHO FALLS, Idaho) — The U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho Operations Office has approved a key safety document for the MARVEL microreactor at Idaho National Laboratory. The approved document, called a Preliminary Documented Safety Analysis (PDSA), marks a major milestone toward building and operating the microreactor for research, development and end-user demonstrations.

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory is propelling grid resilience through a partnership with regional utility EPB of Chattanooga that will demonstrate advanced microgrid capabilities to reduce customer power outages. 

Researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and collaborators found a new way to control how heat moves through certain ceramic materials. By applying an electric field, they changed the behavior of tiny vibrations in the material (called phonons), making heat travel much more easily in the direction of the field—nearly tripling thermal conductivity compared with other directions. The discovery could help create solid-state devices that manage heat more efficiently in electronics, energy systems and other technologies.

Vipin Kumar, a composites manufacturing researcher at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been named one of 21 rising professionals nationwide for the 2026 Emerging Leaders Program of the American Composites Manufacturers Association.