R&D 100 Award: And the Oscar goes to…SRNL

Welcome to “Science at Work,” a podcast from Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, South Carolina. I’m your host, Michael Ettlemyer. Science at work is a production of the Savannah River National Laboratory Office of Communications. With this podcast, we’re trying to increase understanding of what a national lab is and what it does so that the non-scientists among us understand how SRNL puts science to work in advancing our key mission areas of national security, environmental stewardship and energy resilience.

With each episode, we enjoy talking with the scientists, engineers, and other professionals who are at the heart of who we are, what we do, and why it matters to the nation. SRNL is the winner of a prestigious 2025 R&D 100 award, which recognizes the world’s 100 most innovative technologies each year and is often called the “Oscars of innovation.”

I kind of like that. In this case, for an innovative technology aimed to convert landfill bound materials into high value products. And we’ll learn more about what that is or what those high value products are. The technology, known as Advanced Engineered Cellular Magmatics, was developed by SRNL researcher Dr. Cory Trivelpiece and his team in partnership with Silica-X.

Cory joins us here to explain how the technology works and why it’s important in nuclear waste remediation. And for the benefit of our listeners, we’re speaking on November 13th. Cory will receive this honor on behalf of SRNL and his team on November 20th in Scottsdale, Arizona. Congratulations, Cory, and welcome to the “Science at Work” podcast.

Cory: Thank you.

Mike: Great to have you here. So, I’ve got some questions for you, and I thought this would make for some good conversation in terms of this award. The technology is really fascinating, to me. How did SRNL win this award? And what did it mean to you as a lead researcher and inventor on this project? And for context, what kinds of organizations are considered for the R&D 100 awards?

Cory: It really is quite an honor. How we won it was, we have a new lab director, and new positions, a new director of innovation, innovative strategies Daren Timmons, and our new lab director, Johney Green, take these kinds of things very seriously. And Dr. Timmons encouraged me and my team to apply for the award and kind of guided us through the application process, which is extensive.

Cory: And you submit your application package. And then there’s a panel of, I’m not exactly sure how many, judges

Mike: okay 

Cory: Companies, fortune 500 companies, universities, other national labs. There’s a ton of submissions that get that, get put in the pool every year. And I’m not sure exactly how many applications they had this year, but they first rank them into a slate of finalists.

And to be honest, I was really just hoping that we would make it to the final stage, because that’s a big deal in and of itself. And then, I didn’t really understand how prestigious or how big the award was, until we were notified that we were finalists. And then I started looking at who the other finalists were, and I saw names like General Electric, Mitsubishi, MIT and started to realize, oh, yeah, these are really the premier – DuPont [is another].

Mike: Some heavy hitters, right?

Cory: Yeah. And these are the Premier research institutions in the world. I think that, you don’t think of the place where you go to work every day in those terms.

Mike: Right.

Cory: But, you know, Savannah River is also one of the premier research institutions in the world…so.

Mike: It is.

Cory: We belong there.

Mike: That’s right.

Cory: And so it was really in that regard, it’s a huge honor, but also very humbling…

Mike: Right.

Cory: That we get to compare ourselves, and have an equal footing with, again, some of the most prestigious research institutions and companies in the world.

Mike: Right, right. No, that makes sense. Can you tell us about the project or the technology you and the team developed and, you know, maybe what problem were you trying to solve?

Cory: Yeah. So, AECMs, I might switch back to old vernacular ECMs came about.

Mike: And if you could just define what are those two?

Cory: Yeah. So, advanced engineered cellular magmatics. They are synthetic, so not naturally occurring pumice-like material. So, if you think of, if you go into the beauty section or bath section of your department or grocery store.

Mike: Pumice stone, right?

Cory: Yeah, yeah, it’s like that. And I meant to bring a piece with me, and I left it in my car.

Mike: That’s alright, it happens.

Cory: As I was clearing my pockets out, and that’s what people would picture when they think of pumice. That’s exactly what we’re making.

Mike: Okay.

Cory: And the difference is that, you know, pumice that occurs out in nature is made through volcanic, volcanic events. What we do is we take things like, you know, we started with recycled glass cullet. So that’s, you know, when we recycle bottles or other containers, mostly container glass, at curbside and somebody comes and picks it up, that gets crushed up into powder or size reduced before it goes into any recycling application. 

And so we started with that. And that’s not anything new. I mean, people have been making foam glass out of, out of, you know, crushed recycled glass for a long time.

Cory: Foam glass has been around for a century. The novelty and what kind of revolutionized foam glass technology was in how we prepare the material before we do the foaming process. And that came from several years ago. ARPA-E — so the Advanced Research Projects Agency for the Department of Energy — there was a program manager there who wanted to take a look at making extremely durable concrete.

Mike: Okay. 

Cory: And one of the types of concrete that we know is extremely durable because it’s still around today — the concrete that ancient Roman engineers made. 

Mike: And I found that absolutely fascinating, that we were actually looking at that process…

Cory: Right.

Mike: From the ancient world.

Cory: And a lot of people are if you could replicate that. I mean, think about it.

Cory: If you pour a slab of concrete in your driveway today, it’s maybe five or 10 years before you start to get cracks. And in 25 years to 50 years, it’s going to be completely replaced.

Cory: There are ancient Roman structures that were built thousands of years ago that are still being utilized today. 

Mike: Yeah.

Cory: I mean, people you know, when you think about ancient Rome and you think about the Colosseum…

Mike: Right?

Cory: And you might think that it’s a dilapidated, you know, relic, but that was built, and for the most part, the structure is still there and it was built millennia ago.

Mike: It’s amazing that it’s still there in any form. Yeah. 

Cory: Right. And there are other structures that are still in use today. Like, literally people still use them that were built in ancient Roman times. So, how do we get to ECMs or AECMs from that? There was a researcher at the University of Utah, Dr. Marie Jackson, who has spent her entire career studying ancient Roman concrete. And about the time that ARPA-E was looking at how, you know, how are we going to replicate and make extremely durable concrete.

And they were talking to Marie, a colleague and I, who was a very well-known glass scientist from Savannah River, Dr. Carol Jansen. [She] published two papers on a theory that we had about something that happens in nuclear waste, glass corrosion.

Marie actually read those papers, and she thought, hey, I think this is what they’re describing happening in nuclear waste glass is exactly why I think is the mechanism that that occurs that makes the Roman concrete so durable.

Mike: Oh, wow. And put the two together. 

Cory: Yeah. And so that mechanism was, you know, not to go into the nitty gritty, but, but just something that a chemical reaction that’s happening on certain materials that the Romans used.

Mike: Yeah.

Cory: In their concrete.

Mike: Yeah.

Cory: And that we know that the Romans knew these materials were very important. And the way we know that is because we found shipwrecks, that the only cargo on the entire ship was pumice. These pumice rocks that were from, geological deposits that are outside of Rome. And so we know that that the Romans knew this was important. And also, there’s historical records for that.

Mike: Yeah.

Cory: By like Pliny the Elder and things like that. But we know that they knew these things were important.

Mike: Right.

Cory: And so, you know, as we wanted to try to replicate this Roman style concrete, we were thinking, what kind of a glass form would we use? And originally we weren’t thinking about foam glass. And one of the challenges that ARPA-E put on us was whatever solutions we come up with has to be cost competitive with modern OPC concrete.

Mike: Right.

Cory: So, it’s going to be very difficult because as I’m sure everybody knows, concrete is the second most widely used material on the planet behind water.

Cory: And so, it’s very cheap. And so, you know, our original ideas, at one point we had considered fiber, but  it’s so capital intensive to make glass fiber that nobody’s really going to do that. And literally, I’ve told this story like a thousand times at this point. I was really starting to get nervous, like, what are we going to do?

Cory: We can’t just recycle glass and crush it up and put it in a concrete, because the chemistry isn’t right.

Mike: Right.

Cory: It would make very, very weak concrete. And I was literally in the shower one morning and there was a piece of pumice in the shower, and I was like, I knew what foam glass was. I was like, oh my gosh, we should use foam.

Mike: There’s the answer, right?

Cory: Yeah. If we can tweak the chemistry and foam glass just a little bit, I think I could, you know, we could eliminate the problems that are associated. If we just took regular foam glass, it would be just like putting crushed glass in. And I think we could mitigate or eliminate these problems. And, and I remember, like, coming into the office, going to the guy who introduced foam glass to me, who’s Dr. G. Ramsey, also listed as a co-inventor from SRNL on the award and asking him, hey, is there anything that would stop us from adding materials to the foam glass batch before we foam it?

And he’s like, I don’t think so. And I told him what I wanted to do, and that literally that day, he set up a call with the people who are now Silica-X.

And they were operating under a different name at the time. The chief innovation officer of Silica-X. So that day we were on the phone talking to them. And that’s where, you know, everybody kind of met. It was to come up with a solution to that ancient Roman concrete problem.

Mike: Right. That’s great. Yeah. So, I was going to ask you about…so University of Utah you worked with and Silica-X obviously. So this is a great example of, you know, a public private partnership. You know, working through, we have the new Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative. And that’s going to be a great way to do partnerships like this. You know, and there’s so many examples that we could give, but it’s great that this came about and, now you’re going to be getting an award for this at R&D 100, so that’s fantastic.

So how, how did Silica-X, contribute to this or what is their role in it?

Cory: So that’s a really obvious and solid question. And I think one of the things that, kind of, is as a hallmark of why we’ve been so successful is the relationship with Silica-X, one of the things that kind of got ingrained into our partnership very early on, and I think that was a direct result of us being, funded by ARPA-E. ARPA-E is an agency that’s very dedicated to commercialization, not just doing science for the sake of science.

Cory: You know, I firmly and strongly believe that science does need to be done for the sake of science. But ARPA-E just has a different charter, right?

Mike: And that, again, is through the Department of Energy.

Cory: Right. Yeah, and their charter is to very quickly develop technology and get it into the U.S. economy as quickly as possible. And what that kind of ingrained in all of our minds was, okay, as we’re developing new things, we need to also be looking at what’s the commercialization potential of this.

Mike: Sure.

Cory: What’s the scalability. And that’s become kind of a term that we’ve come up with — we call it the Industrial Scalability Index. And so, kind of literally every, every project that we’ve worked with Silica-X, which I can’t even count the number of CRADAs and things like CRADAs or SPPs or whatever that we’ve had with them at this.

Mike: And again, if you could just define what is it? What is CRADA?

Cory: Yeah. CRADAs are, the acronym stands for Cooperative Research and Development Agreement.

And that is just a contract between, a non-national laboratory partner and a national laboratory that kind of just establishes things like how well the intellectual property will be handled, who’s contributing what, It’s a contract, contractual vehicle to kind of cement the partnership.

And literally every project we’ve had with them, we’ve kind of developed this model of doing things that is kind of focused on that industrial scalability index, where as we as scientists, our star — and Silica-X does innovation too.

But as we’re really starting to kind of look at the fundamental aspects in the laboratory, kind of the very early stages of research, we design the programs so that in parallel with that, Silica-X, is looking at, okay, are these solutions that these scientists developing going to scale to something that’s commercially viable?

Mike: Okay.

Cory: And so, you know, say we’re doing experiment A, B and C in the lab, and experiment C says, you know, we’re going to put this much waste. This is just an example of how this would work.

Mike: Yeah.

Cory: We’re going to put, you know, 10, 20 and 30% of recycled glass into whatever thing we’re trying to make. And it’s kind of a bad example because nobody would really care about recycled glass because it’s not dangerous. But yeah, say Silica-X is going out and they’re doing their analysis on their side and they come back and they find some regulation that says, you can’t have 30% glass in the product that you’re trying to sell in these 25 states. Then they would go out and say, okay, well, what’s the market in the 25 states for this product? And ultimately through that collaborative effort in that parallel thing, we might decide, okay, you know what? We’re not going to look at experiment C anymore because there’s just no market for it. And so, it’s kind of this positive feedback loop where we come up with solutions and, and in real time.

And they’re a tech company and they have a proprietary AI platform that does this kind of stuff that enables keeping track of all these variables in real time. That enables us then to make, to kind of not just guide our research by what we’re interested in and what we think is cool, but also by how is this going to scale and how we’re, really, I feel like it’s really cool because it gives me the sense that we are really, you know, like part of our responsibility as national lab employees is to be good stewards of the taxpayers’ money.

Mike: Right.

Cory: And I feel like this is one way that we can contribute to optimizing the benefit of the taxpayers’ money.

Mike: Well, and it’s a great example of, you know, the idea that we’re an applied science, a premier applied science laboratory, and partnering with someone like that, we can take that to the next levels and do something impactful with that science.

Cory: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And it really is it. What you just said is exactly right. It’s, you know, our mission or statement is we put science to work. And while we still do fundamental science here, I feel like that’s our kind of bread and butter at heart now. And what we started many decades ago before we were even a national lab.

Mike: Right.

Cory: And I and I really like this because we’ve taken the skillsets that we developed through all of those previous missions. And now we’re kind of leveraging those into completely new areas.

Mike: Yeah, that’s really cool.

Cory: And continuing that legacy of applied science in our own way that I really think is very unique to the national laboratory complex.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. So, this next question that we may have covered a little bit of this, but, you know, many of us understand recycling because we all do it in our daily lives or we’re, at least, encouraged to do it. Why is it important to reuse materials, as part of nuclear waste remediation?

Cory: So, we all think we recycle is what I would say. And especially when it comes to glass, unfortunately, even if, you know, we’re recycling 100% of the glass that goes through our household, about 75%. And I would say this is an optimistically low number, but about 75% of the glass that enters the municipal solid waste stream. So, garbage. Right, residential garbage, municipal solid waste. Yeah. About 75% of that ends up in a landfill.

Mike: Okay.

Cory: And so, you know, in other parts of the world, it’s very, very — much higher than that. In the United States, one of the things that kind of works against recycling is we have a lot of space for landfills.

Mike: Okay.

Cory: And so, where in places where the population density is much higher, that’s not the case.

Mike: Right.

Cory: What I think is, you know, it’s important. Of course there’s environmental impacts.

Mike: Sure.

Cory: And environmental safety and there’s ecological and societal responsibility. I think one of the things that gets overlooked when we talk about recycling is especially glass, as glass is essentially an infinitely recyclable product. So, it’s one of the very few materials that you can honestly say that about. So, we melt glass, it forms a piece of glass. If we melt that again and we call it again, it’s going to be pretty much exactly the same. And you can do that. And, you know, not really an infinite number of times, but you can a lot.

Mike: Yeah.

Cory: And so, the other part of that is to make glass requires extremely high temperatures-

Mike: Okay.

Cory: And a lot of energy. And so, when we take that bottle, this is the way I think about it. When we take a glass bottle that’s a brand-new bottle and we throw that in the trash, not only is that bad for the environment and, you know, glass is safe in the landfill.

Mike: Right.

Cory: But we have just wasted so much money and so much energy. And so really, you know, the AECM is kind of an alternative approach. You know, I think when most people probably I would venture a guess to say 99.99% of the people here glass recycling, they picture a bottle in their head.

Mike: Sure.

Cory: A bottle getting broken, but I think we have to, you know, we coined this phrase. Like we must think outside the bottle. And what are alternative methods for that? Because it’s pretty clear that container glass manufacturers in the United States, it’s just not economical for them to recycle glass. Otherwise, they would be doing it.

Mike: Sure.

Cory: And so, what else can we do with that that keeps it out of a landfill? And can we turn that into and it’s not just nuclear waste that were, you know, the products these AECMs, Roman concrete.

Mike: Right.

Cory: Filtration materials.

Mike: Right. Water filtration.

Cory: Yeah, agricultural amendments. Plants love this kind of stuff. Biological substrates. One of the patents pending that we have is we have guys that figured out a way to freeze dry biofilms. So, colonies of bacteria, freeze dry these bacteria onto the AECMs. And what’s special about these bacteria is it’s a group of 12 different bacteria that when they all are working together, they eat hydrocarbons.

Mike: Okay.

Cory: They metabolize hydrocarbons. So, think of oil spills and contamination from things like fracking, stuff like that. So, there’s a huge, huge spectrum of applications that we, you know, after that initial Roman concrete work that we kind of thought to ourselves, what else can we do with that?

Mike: Yeah, what other things can this be applied to — that’s pretty cool.

Cory: And that’s where, you know, and it is also neat. I would be remiss not to point out that, you know, all of this got started really because of nuclear waste glass and, and the nuclear waste remediation, is the newest thing that we’re working on. So, it’s kind of like the story coming full circle.

You know, and we’ve gone through all these other applications and we always kind of thought about the nuclear waste remediation stuff. It’s just that, that recently that became a possible thing for the cleanup mission at Hanford Site.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah.

Cory: To dispose of their low activity waste.

Cory: So, so it’s really just as an aside. Yeah, the circular part of that is pretty cool.

Mike: Yeah. So we’ve gotten into this a little bit already. But, you know how are national labs like SRNL, I would say uniquely qualified to solve these big challenges that you’re talking about, such as advanced engineered cellular magmatics? Easy for me to say, which we’ve called AECMs, created in partnership with industry and academia. Like what? What role do we play in that or what’s our vital role in that situation?

Cory: So I read that question earlier and I thought about that and I was thinking about that and,

Mike: Because we have, we have a pretty unique role to play.

Cory: Well, yeah. I mean, you know, the concept was, was developed here, in conjunction with Silica-X.

Mike: Right.

Cory: Just as a little background like I’ve been in professional in academia, I was on the research faculty at Penn State before I came here. So, I’ve seen that side of things. I’ve never been in industry, but I’ve also been, you know, now at the national lab for almost 10 years. And so, I read that question. I was thinking about that and having those experiences. And I think what is unique about a national lab that sets us up, especially a place like SRNL that has always had that applied science focus that sets us up uniquely for this type of opportunity is we have people with a lot of different backgrounds academically, you know, professionally, a lot of academic and scholastic diversity, working in very close proximity together. In a university, that’s not necessarily the case if you’re in the Department of Material Science and Engineering, everybody around you is working in material science and engineering.

Mike: Right.

Cory: I mean, and there’s obviously cross-collaboration.

Mike: So, it’s a depth of experience here, right?

Cory: I think it’s so, for example, my office mate has a Ph.D. in chemistry. So, if I have a chemistry question, I’m going to turn around and ask Matt. And so and that’s a way to get an answer.

Mike: Yeah.

Cory: And so I think it’s…

Mike: It sounds like it can be a pretty entrepreneurial environment that way. Hey, I’ve got a problem. Maybe you can help me with this.

Cory: And it’s super entrepreneurial. And it’s also a good way to filter your ideas through people who have real expertise.

Mike: Right.

Cory: That might not occur in other environments. I don’t know if that makes sense or, you know, like, I could walk out of my hall, walk out of my office, and there is an environmental compliance authority sitting there.

Mike: Yeah.

Cory: I look at the chemical engineer.

Mike: Yeah.

Cory: On the other side a material scientist. My office mate’s a chemist. And so, you can go right across the building and there’s biologists and zoologists and microbiologists and biological engineers.

Mike: Yeah.

Cory: And so having everybody working in that close of approximately it, it allows us to bounce ideas off of each other.

Mike: Yeah. And you know, there’s an agility there.

Cory: That’s a good description that allows us to filter ideas very quickly. And so, you know some things that you come up with as a scientist or an engineer are just absolutely crazy and not feasible. And so, one of the nice things about having everybody in that close of a proximity, you can find out very quickly that it’s a silly idea.

Mike: Right. Or you can iterate to something else.

Cory: Oh, absolutely. Right. Yeah. But there’s always the but if.

Mike: Sure.

Cory: Or the, you know, instead of, no, because it’s a yes if type situation. And so that I think is what sets national labs apart from nearly every, every other type of institution. I mean, why national labs, especially ones like SRNL who have that focus on applied science.

Mike: Yeah.

Cory: Are super unique across the entire, research and development complex in the United States.

Mike: Yeah. Well, I think your description is really helpful. I haven’t heard it put quite that way before, but that makes a lot of sense. I think that’s really helpful. So, you know, in trying to get to know you a little bit, tell us a little bit about how you got interested in science and what was the path you took to SRNL.

Cory: Yeah. I don’t remember when I got interested in science. Exactly. I know my third grade teacher, Miss Crepps, who also goes to my parents church and, and still often remarks about how that was back. I don’t want to date myself, but that was back when the Hubble Telescope was being launched. And apparently, I would come into class every day with updates on the Hubble Telescope.

Mike: All right.

Cory: And had, parents who, very, very much supported that kind of thing and, you know, would buy books about science and supported me. And in my academic pursuits. And I, you know, one of the other cool things about a national lab, and this isn’t necessarily unique to just a national lab, but if somebody told me I would have been working with garbage, essentially, trying to find value in garbage, somebody would have told me that, you know, the day I got my Ph.D., I would have been like, you’re insane. Because at that point in time, I was focused on thin glass films for neutron imaging, which is like taking X-rays.

Mike: And that sounds a lot sexier than working with garbage.

Cory: Yeah, I actually, I don’t know, I’m okay with working with garbage. I don’t know if we would have gotten an R&D 100 award, for thin glass.

Mike: There you go. Right.

Cory: So, that, you know, I have always been interested in science, and, and a lot of support. And ultimately, one of the things that I had, and so I take this very seriously, too, is I had really super good, especially when I got further along in academia. I had really good mentors. And that’s something that I think is super important for us. You know, as we get older, as scientists to remember we didn’t learn what our craft in a vacuum.

Mike: Right.

Cory: So, my Ph.D. advisor was an excellent mentor. And then, my mentor at Penn State was my PhD advisor Jack Brenizer. And my son, my first son, is actually named after him.

So, a pretty great man. And then my mentor, when I got on to the faculty at Penn State was Carlo Pantano. And just super solid, good mentorship and, again, support and kind of freedom to explore and learn. And it was Carlo that really kind of got me interested in glass and nuclear waste glass. And then likewise, when it came time, when it was when I realized that, you know, I didn’t need to be in academia to be happy. Maybe I could try things at a national lab.

Mike: Yeah.

Cory: Another amazing scientist I mentioned earlier, Carol Jansen. You know, I called her and had a conversation with her about SRNL and was fortunate enough to get hired here.

Mike: Yeah.

Cory: And she was my mentor here. And I continued to learn from her. And, you know, just build that knowledge set and, and then kind of, you know, the roles have reversed now. And now I get to mentor younger folks and less experienced folks.

Mike: Yeah, yeah.

Cory: And again, it’s just, that’s probably the most rewarding part of the to me — that genuinely is the most rewarding part of the job is getting to see younger folks that are just as excited about science as I was at some point, or engineering and getting to help them along. Because it really was, you know, I don’t feel like I did anything special.

What I do think was special was I had a ton of support at every stage in my life that kind of kept me on track, and even up through when I started to become more of even, like a mid-level professional, I guess I still am, just support. That’s what I think we need to be doing.

Mike: That’s great. Yeah. That’s great. Well, Cory, thanks again for joining us today. Great to have you here. This has been fun.

Cory: Yeah!

Mike: And thank you all for tuning in. Science at Work is a production of the Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, South Carolina.