News Releases

(IDAHO FALLS, Idaho) – For the first time, researchers from Idaho National Laboratory, the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Purdue University used a geographically distributed control system to remotely and automatically adjust the power of a research reactor in real time, with the reactor’s own safety systems retaining full control throughout. Working with PUR1, a low-power research reactor at Purdue, the team first demonstrated remote power adjustments through an automatic adjustment system called a digital control loop, then made the loop further autonomous using a reinforcement learning model running in software that simulates how physical forces interact within the reactor. The demonstration linked three sites operating together in real time: high-performance computing systems in Idaho, the PUR1 reactor in Indiana, and a Microsoft Azure cloud environment in Virginia.

Ahmed Arabi Hassen, group leader of Composites Innovation at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been recognized as a Fellow of the American Society for Nondestructive Testing, one of the highest honors bestowed by the organization.

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s National (ORNL) Transportation Research Center have developed a novel electric motor drive design that meets the performance demands of aircraft, marine vessels and heavy-duty trucks while reducing excess heat and premature wear.

Hong Wang, a senior distinguished R&D scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Transportation Research Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been named a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers earned five of nine awards presented by DOE’s Transportation Technologies Office during its 2026 Annual Merit Review, held in Arlington, Virginia. 

Robert Wagner, associate laboratory director for the Energy Science and Technology Directorate at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been awarded the prestigious 2026 Henry Laurence Gantt Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). 

Tom King, a longtime leader in electric grid research at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has been named director of the Next-Generation Data Centers Institute (NGDCI). The institute aligns ORNL’s capabilities across computing, energy systems and applied engineering to provide the scientific foundation for the next generation of affordable, efficient, reliable AI data centers integrated with the U.S. electric grid.

ORNL developed JACC, an open-source framework that enables Julia applications to run efficiently on CPUs and GPUs from multiple hardware vendors using a single codebase. The software improves performance portability for high-performance computing systems and reduces the need for architecture-specific code.