The story of manufacturing unfolds in hubs, and in the U.S. since the aftermath of World War Two, federally-funded national laboratories have played a major role in helping those hubs develop and thrive. Sponsored by the Department of Energy (DOE), this network of seventeen national laboratories has been a continuous catalyst behind R&D into the world’s most complex engineering topics, especially those related to nuclear power.
The latest chapter in this history of innovation involves South Carolina’s Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL), which just opened a 60,000 square foot, $50 million site on the University of South Carolina (USC) Aiken campus, called the Advanced Manufacturing Collaborative (AMC). Additive manufacturing (AM) will be among the technologies featured at the AMC, with nuclear fusion and AI also at the top of the new facility’s agenda.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, along with multiple members of the South Carolina congressional delegation, joined the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the AMC that took place on August 7. At the ceremony, Wright framed the AMC as part of a regional emerging technology cluster akin to Silicon Valley, and suggested that the site could make key future contributions to the U.S. data center landscape…