OTT Poster Series Spotlight: SLAC, NREL, and BNL

Increased airport security, better electric vehicle batteries, super powered medical imaging – did you know some of the incredible technologies affecting our everyday lives are thanks to the ground-breaking work coming out of our DOE National Labs?

The Advancing America through Technology Transfer poster series from the Office of Technology Transitions (OTT) celebrates the many innovations coming from our 17 National Laboratories across the DOE complex. For this series, each Lab selected their favorite story, and we transformed it into a work of art that captures the spirit of the Lab and its surrounding area.

Over the next several weeks, we will be taking a closer look at these technological successes and the brilliant work our Labs are producing each and every day. First up in the series: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Renewable Energy Lab, and Brookhaven National Laboratory! 

Are you a fan of stargazing? SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory sure is! SLAC is transforming our understanding of the universe by building the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), including leading the construction of the massive LSST camera. This will be the largest digital camera ever constructed for optical astronomy and will survey the night sky for 10 years, catalog 17 billion stars and 20 billion galaxies, generate millions of gigabytes of data and the largest non-proprietary dataset in the world, and bring together a collaborative international community. Discoveries from LSST will provide unprecedented data into the nature of dark energy, dark matter, galaxy formation, and more. The prospects are out of this world.

To learn more about SLAC’s Large Synoptic Survey telescope, download the poster here.

Talk about a power move! Scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in collaboration with industry partners, were able to utilize the test environment at NREL’s Energy Systems Integration Facility to replicate Hawaii’s power grid and safely push the emulated grid to its limits, helping to demonstrate the power grid’s solar power tolerance. As a result, the allowable Hawaiian solar power ceiling more than doubled, permitting wider adoption of customer-owned photovoltaics (PV) technology. In turn, this validated a replicable global model to manage distributed renewable energy.

To learn more about NREL’s work towards clean, reliable, and efficient energy, download the poster here.

Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) scientists teamed up with partners from the University of Pennsylvania and the National Institutes of Health to revolutionize cancer diagnosis and management and brain research with the synthesis of Radiotracer 18-FDG. Radiotracer 18-FDG is a diagnostic beacon that spotlights metabolic activity in the body, used during use of Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanning. Scientists found the use of FDG results in less invasive treatments, better health outcomes, and improved quality of life for patients and their families. This discovery also opened an extraordinary exploratory window on a wide range of diseases, conditions, and treatments, much of that helping to detect early cancer diagnosis and improve treatment.

To learn more about Brookhaven’s work in early cancer detection and diagnosis of diseases, download the poster here.

Keep an eye out for our next installment of this series, as we continue to spotlight the incredible work of our National Labs!