At the heart of PNNL’s science and technology strategy are six strategic initiatives—five- to ten-year commitments of the laboratory’s resources harnessing signature strengths in pursuit of bold societal outcomes. PNNL’s strategic initiatives focus on problems that are complex, urgent, and important—problems uniquely suited to the mission and capabilities of a national laboratory.

Each of PNNL’s strategic initiatives embodies a bold vision and seeks to answer a pressing question: How could our success transform the world by 2025?

Reinventing Chemistry: developing new chemical catalysts and materials and using them to develop bioenergy and electricity storage technologies.

Uniting Extreme Scale Data and Computing: designing software, machine learning, and data analytics tools to maximize the potential of the world’s largest computers and data sets.

Revealing Key Properties of Irradiated Materials: understanding key traits of radioactive wastes, origins and movements of nuclear materials, and performance of materials in high radiation environments.

Creating a Secure and Resilient Electric Power Grid: modernizing the U.S. electricity system with new tools, controls, software, and sensors to improve operations and efficiency and prevent cyberattacks.

Understanding Earth Systems: gaining new insights into ecosystem functions and responses to change and integrating them into powerful, predictive computer models.

Defending Infrastructure from Cyberattack: developing new software and analytical tools to safeguard U.S. networked systems from intrusion and disruption.