Materials vital to NSF and DOE strategic plans
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Materials vital to NSF and DOE strategic plans science.energy.gov www.nsf.gov
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dvances in materials research play an essential role in the strategic plans released by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the spring of 2011. The strategies are agency-specific, but both respond to recent changes in the economic, international, and political landscapes by emphasizing innovation and transformative research.
DOE’s Strategic Plan Energy security, climate change, and national security are the main challenges currently facing the United States, according to the Department of Energy’s new strategic plan. The plan lays out an aggressive strategy for meeting these challenges through investing in research, developing new technologies, and deploying innovative approaches. DOE/CF-0067
MAY 2011
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MRS BULLETIN
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VOLUME 36 • AUGUST 2011
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This strategy will require the continued engagement of the materials research community, according to Harriet Kung, Associate Director of Science for DOE’s Basic Energy Sciences program. “For research that is driven by energy needs, many of the challenges have their foundation in materials sciences and engineering. As outlined in the plan, almost every barrier to more effective use, generation, storage, or transmission of energy has an associated materials challenge,” she said. The plan lays out four primary goals for DOE related to clean energy, economic prosperity, nuclear security, and an operational framework, but the overarching science goal is to transform the country’s energy system to be modern, clean, reliable, and secure. This will require a better understanding of the fundamental interactions of matter at the atomic and near-atomic levels, how materials interact with their environment, and how to predict and model materials in different environments, said Kung. An essential aspect of the strategy is discovering the potential and the limits of energy-efficient technologies such as lithium-ion batteries and high-efficiency solar cells, and decreasing the time it takes them to become commercially available. Other DOE efforts will focus on modernizing the electrical grid to offer more efficient and reliable power and enable clean energy technologies to be seamlessly integrated
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into the system. The new strategy strongly supports promising technologies through the entire laboratory-to-production process, in conjunction with the private sector. Over the last several years DOE has built a portfolio of projects to this end, which includes a number of collaborative structures that bring together people from the materials community and many other disciplines to address specific energy technology challenges. Two examples are Energy Frontier Research Centers, which focus on specific barriers to breakthroughs in energy research and Energy Innovation Hubs, which pay particular attention to potentially commercial technologies. “The emphasis on the full range of research—from basic scientific discovery to applied research to
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