Group items tagged

Tom Wilbanks, a corporate fellow at ORNL and a significant contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change work that shared a Nobel Prize with Al Gore, said the reports emerging out of the University of East Anglia's climate research unit are embarrassing and indefensible. But he said he doesn't believe there will be a huge effect long-term on studies of global climate change. Wilbanks said he was stunned to read reports of the e-mails, including some reported to be from scientists he knows well from Lawrence Livermore and the National Center for Atmospheric Research and other institutions.

Tom Wilbanks, a corporate fellow at ORNL and a significant contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change work that shared a Nobel Prize with Al Gore, said the reports emerging out of the University of East Anglia's climate research unit are embarrassing and indefensible. But he said he doesn't believe there will be a huge effect long-term on studies of global climate change. Wilbanks said he was stunned to read reports of the e-mails, including some reported to be from scientists he knows well from Lawrence Livermore and the National Center for Atmospheric Research and other institutions.

A new audit by DOE's Office of Inspector General takes a close look at how the agency is following up on directives to improve energy efficiency and to reduce energy costs. The report focused on energy associated with information technology, and Y-12 and ORNL were among the facilities audited and cited for less-than-laudatory practices. "Despite its recognized energy conservation leadership role, the Department had not always taken advantage of opportunities to reduce energy consumption associated with its information technology resources," the report said. Among the findings was that DOE had not fully reduced the power consumed by laptop and desktop computers.

In this remember-when photograph, a big crowd gathered on Nov. 4, 1963 to witness the shutdown of the historic Graphite Reactor at Oak Ridge. Note the relative dearth of women in the crowd. The Graphite Reactor, of course, was built during World War II as a prototype facilitiy for production of plutonium. It was the world's first continuously operated nuclear reactor and went critical for the first time in the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 4, 1943. The reactor operated for 20 years, contributing greatly to the nation's development of radioisotopes for medicine and other uses and for pioneering work with neutron-scattering experiments, etc.