Natural gas furnaces not only heat your home, they also produce a lot of pollution.

Even modern high-efficiency condensing furnaces produce significant amounts of corrosive acidic condensation and unhealthy levels of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and methane. These emissions are typically vented into the atmosphere and end up polluting our soil, water and air.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists set out to address one of the biggest uncertainties about how carbon-rich permafrost will respond to gradual sinking of the land surface as temperatures rise. Using a high-performance computer simulation, the research team found that soil subsidence is unlikely to cause rampant thawing in the future.

This permanently frozen landscape in the Arctic tundra, which has kept vast amounts of carbon locked away for thousands of years, is at risk of thawing and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers demonstrated that window shades with a cellular or honeycomb structure provide higher energy savings during winter compared to generic venetian blinds and can save millions of tons of carbon emissions. 

When aging vehicle batteries lack the juice to power your car anymore, they may still hold energy. Yet it’s tough to find new uses for lithium-ion batteries with different makers, ages and sizes. A solution is urgently needed because battery recycling options are scarce.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have begun operating a unique system designed to enable a variety of testing to characterize the performance of an advanced heat transfer fluid for renewable energy.

Known as the Facility to Alleviate Salt Technology Risks, or FASTR, the system’s inaugural run evaluated the viability of using a mixture of magnesium, potassium and sodium chloride-based molten salt technology for solar thermal power.