Risø DTU National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy

55.693°N 12.100°E / 55.693; 12.100DTU Risø Campus is a satelite campus of the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) north of Roskilde, Denmark which covers an area of more than 2.6 square kilometres. It houses a number of DTU's institutes, as well as Aarhus University's Department of Environmental Science and Department of Bioscience.

Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy seen from Roskilde Fjord: The two cylindrical buildings outermost on the peninsula contained the two nuclear reactors DR-2 and DR-3. The red-white meteorological tower is 117 m high.

The campus was formerly the site of the Risø National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy (Danish: Nationallaboratoriet for bæredygtig energi), a scientific research organization. The national laboratory had been founded in 1956, and merged into DTU in 2007, before finally being dissolved on 1 January 2012.

History

Risø National Laboratory was founded in 1956, but not officially inaugurated until 1958. Niels Bohr played a key role in the founding of Risø and was chairman of the Nuclear Energy Commission charged to promote the peaceful use of nuclear power.[1] The mission of Risø was "to create new knowledge based on world-class research, and to ensure that our knowledge is used to promote the development of an innovative and sustainable society".

The Risø National Laboratory employed about 700 staff (660 person-years) in 2005, at which point it was a research institute under the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation and consisted of eight research departments: Biosystems, Polymer Department, Fuel Cells and Solid State Chemistry, Materials Research, Optics and Plasma Research, Radiation Research, Systems Analysis and Wind Energy. On 1 January 2007, the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) merged with several national research institutes, including the Risø National Laboratory. The following year in 2008, it was made an official institute of DTU. On 1 January 2012 the institute was dissolved and its facilities were transformed into a separate campus. The location is now called DTU Risø Campus and is home to a number of DTU institutes.

Risø National Laboratory research

In its first three decades, the Risø National Laboratory's activities were centred around research on peaceful use of nuclear energy and was the site of three research nuclear reactors: DR-1, DR-2 and DR-3. All three reactors are no longer in use, and have undergone decommissioning in the 21st century.[2]

Name Reactor type Thermal power Operating years Decommissioned
DR1 Homogenous reactor 2 kW 1957–2001 2003–2006
DR2 Pool reactor 5 MW 1958–1975 since 2003
DR3 DIDO 10 MW 1960–2000 since 2003

In its later years, the organization's focus shifted towards other energy sources, and was particularly noted for its involvement in wind energy and solid-oxide fuel cells. The National Laboratory had strong competences in climate change effects studies and had "state of the art" facilities for realistic climate change experiments and monitoring. These included the Risø Environmental Risk Assessment facility, a phytotrone controlled environment growth facility; the Sorø beech forest, a field station in an 80-year-old beech forest measuring carbon inputs, outputs and turnover processes by advanced techniques (e.g. eddy covariance); and CLIMAITE, a field scale climate change experiment conducting multifactor experiments with elevated CO2, night time warming and altered precipitation.

The laboratory's facilities were also used by the National Environmental Research Institute of Denmark (Danish: Danmarks Miljøundersøgelser) until 2011 when it too was dissolved.

Current research

Wind Atlas Analysis and Application Program (WAsP) is a tool used in the wind energy industry to simulate wind flow over terrain and estimate the long-term power production of wind turbines and wind farms. It has been in development by Risø and DTU Wind Energy for over 30 years, and runs on PCs using Microsoft Windows. The name WAsP is short for WAAAP ("W, some A's, and a P"), the acronym of the software name. Current version is 12.6 [3]

See also

References
  1. Henry Nielsen, ed. (1998). Til samfundets tarv - Forskningscenter Risøs historie. ISBN 87-550-2380-0.
  2. Henrik Knudsen (2006). "Risøs reaktorer" (PDF). p. 3. Archived from the original (PDF) on 9 September 2016.
  3. The official site of WAsP
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