Warming a crystal of the mineral fresnoite, Oak Ridge National Laboratory scientists discovered that excitations called phasons carried heat three times farther and faster than phonons, the excitations that usually carry heat through a material.

“Neutrons were ideal for exploring these sources of heat transport because they interact with both phasons and phonons,” said Michael Manley, who led the study with Raphael Hermann.

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.

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.

With larger, purer shipments on a more frequent basis, Oak Ridge National Laboratory is moving closer to routine production of promethium-147.

That’s thanks in part to the application of some specific research performed a decade ago for a completely different project.