DOE

More than 2,500 scientists and community members have signed a petition calling on Fermilab to loosen cumbersome visitor access procedures. Lab management says safety and security concerns are driving access policies, but also that improvements are on the way.

The six-month Molten Chloride Reactor Experiment that TerraPower and Southern Company plan to conduct at Idaho National Lab would be a rare case in which highly enriched uranium is used for new domestic civilian purposes.

House appropriators for the Department of Energy previewed their priorities at a hearing on DOE’s budget request for fiscal year 2024, the first since Republicans won control of the House.

Science agencies are releasing details of President Biden’s fiscal year 2024 budget request, which prioritizes research related to emerging technologies and climate change and includes a new emphasis on fusion energy.

Congress provided increases in the range of 7% to 8% for the Department of Energy’s three main applied energy R&D offices in fiscal year 2023 and the department is gearing up to distribute billions of dollars appropriated through the infrastructure law enacted in 2021.

FYI presents its annual list of 10 science policy stories to watch in the year ahead.

The National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Lab has performed a nuclear fusion experiment that released more energy than was applied to it. The accomplishment realizes an idea first posited six decades ago and will have applications in nuclear warhead stewardship, but using the method for practical energy generation remains a distant prospect.

DOE has finished allocating a one-time $1.55 billion boost to facilities and equipment projects across its Office of Science. Major priorities included shoring up funding for international projects and moving light source upgrades forward, while projects still in their earlier phases tended to receive lesser shares of the total.

A month into fiscal year 2023, federal science agencies are facing a budget situation more complicated than any they have encountered in recent memory. While some programs are busy handling an influx of money from special spending legislation, others face uncertainties surrounding stopgap funding and whether Congress will meet targets set out in the CHIPS and Science Act.

Over the last several years, Congress has passed multi-pronged policy initiatives and provided billions of dollars in funding to spur the deployment of “advanced” nuclear reactors, and a sprawling array of projects are now in progress.