The Building Energy Asset Score, developed by PNNL for DOE's Buildings Technology Office, takes the car fuel economy sticker approach and applies it to buying and leasing buildings. The new tool assigns a score of 1 to 10 to buildings based on user inputs such as... read more.

Phosphorus helps grow the algae used to make biofuels, but there is only so much phosphorus available. Researchers at PNNL discovered a way to recycle nearly 100 percent of the phosphorus, paving the way for sustainable... read more.

Researchers at PNNL helped DOE finalize two appliance standards in the month of December. Together, they are expected to save 0.22 quads of energy - enough to power an estimated 5.9 million households in the United States... read more.

Technetium-99 is a long-lived radionuclide byproduct of the nuclear fuel cycle, making it a major radiological concern at nuclear waste repository sites that requires on-site monitoring. PNNL researchers have developed a new approach to detect and quantify the radionuclide, using highly selective and sensitive platinum salt. The new approach has potential as a field-deployable... read more.

A decades-long study by PNNL and collaborators of a surface cover for isolating underlying waste from intrusion and reducing or stopping the movement of precipitation into the waste beneath shows promising results for use at DOE's Hanford Site. Known as the Prototype Hanford Barrier, the cover... read more.

To better understand how stream temperature is influenced by climate change and human activities, scientists at PNNL developed a new modeling tool that simulates stream temperature over complex river systems. The new module... read more.

Researchers at PNNL developed a new tool that optimizes monitoring well networks for carbon dioxide storage. The Designs for Risk Evaluation and Monitoring tool, referred to as DREAM, processes simulator data to identify monitoring strategies that minimize the time to detect a leak. With user input that includes simulator data, leakage parameters, budget, and location, DREAM recommends... read more.

Safe, Secure Spent-Fuel Shipping

When a nuclear power reactor is shut down, the used nuclear fuel must be stored safely and securely. A multi-laboratory team led by PNNL recently finished analyzing options for removing spent fuel from twelve sites that no longer have operating reactors. Each site was found to have at least one off-site transportation mode option for removing spent nuclear fuel and other... read more.