Sandia National Labs working on the big questions of our time, I see ;-)
Disclaimer: I love New Mexico -- I'm just taking the piss. It's probably one of the most underrated states in the union.
Disclaimer: I love New Mexico -- I'm just taking the piss. It's probably one of the most underrated states in the union.
e.g. Vick's Vittles, Tia Betty Blues, Golden Pride, and of course the old standby Grandma's K & I Diner which has been feeding nuclear engineers for 62 years.
El Parasol: https://elparasol.com/
Google Street View of the sign to the Chile Works, off Trinity Drive: - https://www.google.com/maps/@35.8796938,-106.3006991,3a,75y,...
For those who do find themselves bothered by this kind of thing, these projects are almost always a few layers deep on what they're actually researching. I would assume this is more fun demo with a potential economic application in large scale roasting but that the research value (and intern training value) are in the general research area of broad solar concentrator R&D. If you look at the publication history for the folks involved you'll see a lot of papers on molten salt solar concentrators (materials, plant design, physics of etc).
Sandia does a lot of really interesting and valuable research (across all the sites but NM and CA in particular).