Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham Breaks Ground On Nation's First Nanoscale & Nanotechnology Research Facility at Oak Ridge National Lab 7/18/2003
From: Joe Davis or Jeff Sherwood of the Department of Energy, 202-586-4940, or Billy Stair, 865-574-4160 OAK RIDGE, Tenn., July 18 -- Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham today broke ground on the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS) at the Oak Ridge National Lab, a $65 million dollar research and development facility dedicated to the study of nanoscale research. The Oak Ridge facility will be the first of five Energy Department centers. "This facility will assist scientists in reaching new frontiers in the study of nanoscale research and its practical application," Secretary Abraham said, presiding over the groundbreaking for the new center. "It represents a beginning of a revolution in science, opening up a broad array of innovation in materials science, biology, medicine, technologies for environmental research and national security." "Nanoscale research will, in many respects, represent the new building blocks for new technologies and applications across the science and industry spectrum. Understanding the properties of materials on the tiniest scale will have an impact on everything from medicine to manufacturing," Abraham said. "Oak Ridge is blessed with tremendous research resources from the computational science center to the CNMS and the Spallation Neutron Source. I'm confident that this lab and its facilities will continue to lead the way in scientific research." The five centers are part of the department's contribution to the National Nanoscience Initiative, part of the Bush administration's broad-based science initiative. Abraham was joined at the groundbreaking by: U.S. Senator Lamar Alexander; Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, Director of DOE's Office of Science; Dr. Bill Madia, Director of Oak Ridge National Lab; Dr. Carl Kohrt, Battelle President; Dr. John Shumaker, University of Tennessee President; and Gerald Boyd, DOE Oak Ridge Operations Office manager. The CNMS will be a world-class, one-of-a kind facility for the fabrication and characterization of materials on the nanoscale. The 80,000-square foot facility is scheduled for completion of construction and initial operation in spring 2004, with all equipment and research technology installed and operational by September 2006. The center will be a national user facility for nanoscale research, serving up to 300 scientists annually from universities, industries, and federal laboratories. The Oak Ridge facility will be built adjacent to the department's Spallation Neutron Source, thus providing researchers ready access to the world's most powerful neutron source for samples analysis and characterization of nanoscale research. The University of Tennessee, partner with the Battelle Foundation in managing the department's Oak Ridge National Lab, is investing $2.5 million in a nanoscale research and education center that will complement the CNMS. They will be developing unique analytical equipment for atomic-scale characterization. The new center at ORNL is a Department of Energy Office of Science Nanoscale Science Research Center (NSRC) operating as a highly collaborative and multidisciplinary user research facility. The center is one of five DOE NSRCs that form an integrated, national network. Each NSRC is associated with other major national research facilities at one of DOE's National Laboratories, enabling their application to nanoscale science and technology. Other department facilities for nanophase research will be located at the department's Argonne, Berkeley, Brookhaven, and Sandia/Los Alamos national labs. What is Nanoscale Research? Nanomaterials -- typically on the scale of billionths of a meter or 1,000 times smaller than a human hair -- offer different chemical and physical properties than the same materials in bulk form, and have the potential to form the basis of new technologies. Understanding these properties may allow researchers to design materials with properties tailored to specific needs such as strong, lightweight materials, new lubricants and more efficient solar energy cells. By building structures one atom at a time, the materials may have enhanced mechanical, optical, electrical or catalytic properties. The fundamental properties of materials and systems are established at the nanoscale. Melting temperature, magnetic properties, charge capacity, and even color are dictated not only by the arrangement of nanoscale structures, but also by the size of the structures. The realm of molecular biology -- life sciences -- also operates largely at the nanoscale. Scientists have known about the physical properties and behavior of isolated molecules and bulk materials. The properties of matter at the nanoscale, however cannot necessarily be predicted from those observed at larger or smaller scales. Nanoscale research enables scientists literally to build novel structures atom by atom. The CNMS, housed next to the department's Spallation Neutron Source (SNS), will afford unique opportunities to utilize the SNS in the fundamental research ongoing at the CNMS. The main CNMS building will comprise both wet and dry laboratories, as well as areas for collaboration and communication from the various users of the facility. The 10,000-square-foot Nanofabrication Research Laboratory, house in a one-level wing of the building, will include clean rooms and an area designed to meet the requirements of electron-beam imaging and writing instruments like low electro-magnetic field, low vibration and low acoustic noise. The Nanomaterials Theory Institute will provide collaborative workspaces, visualization equipment, and high-speed connections to the terascale computing facilities at Oak Ridge National Lab's Center for Computational Sciences. Additional information on the CNMS is available at: http://www.cnms.ornl.gov |