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US Department of Energy researchers have invented a process to extract rare earth elements from the scrapped magnets of used hard drives and other sources. They have patented and scaled up the process in lab demonstrations and are working with ORNL's licensee Momentum Technologies of Dallas to scale the process further to produce commercial batches of rare earth oxides.

Researchers at Iowa State and Ames Laboratory are using neutrons at Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Spallation Neutron Source to improve the process of metal-flux synthesis used in manufacturing solid-state materials used to make advanced technologies such as renewables and electronics.

Collaborators at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and US universities used neutron scattering and other advanced characterization techniques to study how a prominent catalyst enables the 'water-gas shift' reaction to purify and generate hydrogen at industrial scale.

Raphaël Hermann of the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory conducts experiments to better understand materials for energy and information applications. He uses Mössbauer spectrometry to study diverse materials for applications in sustainable energy ranging from thermoelectric devices to batteries.

Construction has begun on VENUS, a state-of-the-art neutron imaging instrument, at the Spallation Neutron Source at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory. This new instrument will provide a platform for studying in real time the makeup and performance of a wide range of functional materials under varying environments.

A team of researchers led by Bill Tang of the US Department of Energy's (DOE's) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and Princeton University recently tested its Fusion Recurrent Neural Network (FRNN) code, a novel artificial intelligence (AI) resource designed to predict plasma instabilities, on various high-performance computing (HPC) systems. A reliable way to predict and mitigate disruptions could accelerate the adoption of fusion as an environmentally friendly, virtually unlimited source of energy.