New report outlines opportunities to remove CO2 at the gigaton scale

ORNL’s expertise in biomass analysis informed a multi-institutional report on carbon dioxide removal potential in the United States, charting a path to achieve a net-zero greenhouse gas economy by 2050. The report concludes that with today’s technologies, removing 1 billion metric tons of CO2 per year is achievable by 2050, with a cost of roughly $130 billion annually, or about 0.5% of current gross domestic product. Read more

SCIENCE WATCH

Custom software speeds up, stabilizes high-profile ocean model—To help address the challenge of simulating two categories of waves simultaneously, a team from DOE’s Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, and Sandia National Laboratories developed a new solver algorithm that reduces the total run time by 45% for the ocean circulation component of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model. Read more

Lifecycle of US hydropower facilities—ORNL researchers created a visual overview of the critical data resources available through HydroSource, the nation’s key repository for open-source hydropower data. The data informs a comprehensive examination of facilities from initial research and assessment to facility retirement. View here

Examining pharmaceuticals in streams—From public health to economics, the health of waterways has an impact on lives on both small and large scales. ORNL’s Louise Stevenson is working alongside researchers from Bowling Green State University to determine the effects that pharmaceutical contaminants in waterways have on ecosystems. Read more

How the quantum world can help scientists engineer biology—This DOE highlight describes how ORNL scientists used artificial intelligence to better predict the behavior of the CRISPR-Cas9 tool when editing non-model organisms. The approach also applied the rules of quantum mechanics to better understand how molecules interact, resulting in more accurate predictions for better guide RNA design. Read more

A week of climate science—DOE Office of Science Director Dr. Asmeret Asefaw Berhe detailed her day-to-day experiences and impressions visiting SPRUCE, ARM, and NGEE Arctic field sites in the fall in an Office of Science article. Read more

STAFF SPOTLIGHT

Sanders wins FY24 LDRD Early Career award—Brian Sanders joined seven other early career researchers at ORNL who won funding for their proposals as part of the FY24 LDRD Early Career Competition. Sanders’ winning project, “Targeted Contrast Probes for Non-Invasive Imaging of Plant Microbe Soil Systems,” also nets him the opportunity to participate in the second cohort of the ORNL Early Career Development Program.

ESD announces 2023 Distinguished Achievement Awards—The Environmental Sciences Division presented its 2023 Distinguished Achievement Awards in December. Rocio Uria-Martinez won the Stanley I. Auerbach Award for Excellence in Environmental Science, while the Science Serving Society Award went to ESD’s Energy Economics Analysis team: Gbadebo Oladosu, Rocio Uria-Martinez, Megan Johnson, and Paul Leiby. Rachel Pilla won the Post-Graduate Research Award, Michael Jones won the Research Support Award, and Marla Colberg was named Administrative Support Person of the Year. Read more

Wang, co-authors win Best Paper Award—Dali Wang was first author with colleagues Peter Schwartz, Fengming Yuan, and Peter Thornton on “Toward Ultrahigh-Resolution E3SM Land Modeling on Exascale Computers,” which won Computing in Science & Engineering magazine’s 2022 Best Paper Award, conferred last month. CiSE is published by the IEEE Computer Society. Read more

NCA5 contributing authors featured by DOE—ORNL colleagues who contributed to the Fifth National Climate Assessment discussed their science in short videos for DOE. Videos from Rebecca Efroymson, John Field, and Christa Brelsford were highlighted on the DOE Office of Science’s social media streams. View here

RESEARCHER PROFILE

Louise Stevenson: Tiny life forms yield big insights into ecosystem health

Stepping into the Aquatic Ecology Lab at ORNL, you can hear the sound of bubbling water. It’s background music for Louise Stevenson as she moves about her day, exploring what aquatic species like fish, algae, or tiny crustaceans can tell us about how contaminants may be affecting the nation’s water.

Projects in the “tox” lab, as Stevenson calls it, aim to characterize the impact of human-made stressors on natural systems. For aquatic systems, this includes water discharged from industrial, municipal, and agricultural sources that flows directly into surface water.

“We’re trying to mitigate ecological risks on these systems as a whole. Extrapolating effects from individuals up to populations and communities can help scientists understand ecological risks at higher biological levels, where processes and interactions become more complex.”

Stevenson is the principal investigator for the Environmental Toxicology Laboratory, which sits within the Aquatic Ecology Lab facility. In the Biodiversity and Ecosystem Health group at ORNL she uses her expertise as an environmental toxicologist to evaluate the effects of stressors such as chemicals and other contaminants on aquatic systems. Read more

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science .