Welcome to the EFRC Community Website

A collaborative space for the more than 1,800 senior investigators, students, postdoctoral fellows, and technical staff involved in the EFRC program and the extended energy science community.

Newsletter

Spring 2023

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Revolutionizing Nuclear Waste Management: Treating the Nuclear Waste Stream for Contamination-Free Discharge

Nuclear power is expected to play a crucial role in America's clean energy future as it provides a reliable and low-carbon source of electricity. However, the generation of nuclear energy produces radioactive waste products that require proper management, processing, and disposal to prevent potential harm to human health and the environment. This highlights the importance of developing advanced technologies and science to ensure the safe and efficient treatment of nuclear waste products.…

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EFRC: Thermal Energy Transport Under Irradiation (TETI): Predicting Thermal Energy Transport in Actinide Materials in Extreme Environments

Heat transfer is essential to our daily life—from heating a pot of water to complex carbon-free energy technologies that aim to achieve zero carbon emissions. Examples of these technologies include concentrated solar power generation, thermoelectric generation, and nuclear power generation. Approximately 20 percent of America's carbon-free energy comes from nuclear energy. A nuclear reactor is very similar in principle to a fossil energy plant in which the thermal energy is used to generate…

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Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRCs)

The EFRC Program is a basic research program funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences (BES) that brings together creative, multidisciplinary, and multi-institutional team of scientific researchers to address the toughest grand scientific challenges at the forefront of fundamental energy science research.

These centers provide the foundation for collaborative efforts that targets both discovery science and use-inspired basic research, they aim to address priority research directions and opportunities identified by a series of BES workshop and roundtable reports. They take full advantage of powerful new tools for characterizing, understanding, modeling, and manipulating matter from atomic to macroscopic length scales. They also train the next-generation scientific workforce by attracting talented students and postdoctoral researchers interested in energy science.

Jun 06

2021 EFRC-Hub-CMS-CCS Virtual Principal Investigator’s Meeting

The 2021 EFRC-Hub-CMS-CCS Principal Investigators’ Meeting was held virtually on October 18 -19, 2021. The meeting had over 1200+ attendees that included participants from Energy Frontier Research Centers, Energy Innovation Hubs, Computational Chemical and Materials Sciences Awards, and DOE staff. The meeting featured Team Science Talks, a Graphic Art Contest, as well as overview posters from participating centers and hubs and over 200 scientific poster presentations.

Learn More

Contests

The Energy Sciences Energy Frontier Research Program traditionally sponsors a community contest during the biannual EFRC Principal Investigators’ Meetings. These contests, from Poetry of Science to Life at the Frontiers of Energy Research Video to Sound of Science Podcasts, challenge members of the community across a wide range of team science endeavors. The aim of these competitions is to educate, inspire, and entertain an intelligent but not expert audience about the extraordinary science, innovation, and people in the Energy Frontier Research Centers (EFRC), Energy Innovation Hubs (Hub), and Computational Materials and Chemical Sciences Awards (CMS/CCS). Navigate below to learn more about each of the competitions held previously.

Science in the time of covid.

First Place

Nevertheless she persisted (over Zoom)

Quantum Sensing and Quantum Materials (QSQM) Led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Winners All Entries

IDREAm

Overall Winner

Sound to Analyze, Interpret, and Understand Data from Experiment and Theory

Interfacial Dynamics in Radioactive Environments and Materials (IDREAM) led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Winners All Entries

Poetry

First Place

Afterlife of a photon

Life was so short.
Born in a fiery dance of heat and pressure and...

Center for Lignocellulose Structure and Formation

[...]

Winners All Entries

Powering your car

Overall Winner

Powering your car with sun light

Center for Lignocellulose Structure and Formation led by Pennsylvania State University

Winners All Entries

Energy Frontier

For exemplary explanation of the role of an Energy Frontier Research Center

Heart of the Solution - Energy Frontiers

Center for Solar and Thermal Energy Conversion led by the University of Michigan.

Winners All Entries

OVERALL WINNER

Salt for the Earth

Molten Salts in Extreme Environments (MSEE) led by Brookhaven National Laboratory.

Winners All Entries