How Five Scientists Will Use Stimulus Funds

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She also takes the long view: "What we do will not be part of new technologies in one or two years, but in 10 or 20 years hydrogen fuel cells will be a standard technology, and our research will have contributed to it."

Delia Milliron, the Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory:

Milliron's research is aimed at understanding the basic mechanisms underlying the operation of nanostructured materials, specifically inorganic nanocomposites. "The unique properties that arise from combining materials on such a small scale can be useful for improving the performance of technologies crucial to our energy future," she says, including next-generation dynamic windows and rechargeable batteries.

Working on such a small scale promises not just to improve the performance of all manner of next-generation products, it should also reduce production costs. "Because our materials are assembled entirely by solution processing and with low thermal budgets, they offer the possibility of low-cost fabrication, even over large areas," Milliron says. "Our research may inspire new technologies capable of high performance at low cost."

Andrew Gaunt, Chemistry Division, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Chemistry Division:

If nuclear power is to have a future in the U.S. energy mix, proponents and detractors alike agree that methods must be devised to secure or dispose safely of highly radioactive waste from spent nuclear fuel. Part of Gaunt's research focuses on aiding one proposed solution, a process called partitioning and transmutation: partially recycling spent fuel by removing the radioactively long-lived actinide elements such as plutonium and "burning them up" in new fuel or inside a particle accelerator into much shorter-lived radioactive isotopes.

The hope, Gaunt says, is to reduce drastically both the volume of waste generated and the storage time required to guarantee the integrity of the waste from hundreds of thousands of years to just centuries. "Figuring out which actinide separations are most feasible and how to develop them will help decision-makers to decide which radioactive waste processing options will offer the best solution for safe, reliable, and cost-effective disposal," he says.

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