In the wake of the Earth Week celebrations the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has declared the launch of an exclusive website focusing on green stories that will highlight the efforts and contributions of NNSA in improving the environment.
On day two of the Green Week, the website describes the efforts of the company in finding ways to supply clean drinking water at Pantex and to reduce the aerodynamic drag of semi-trucks.
In the website, NNSA has detailed how it introduced an eco-friendly method to disinfect drinking water at its Pantex Plant located in Amarillo, Texas. Earlier Pantex was injecting chlorine gas directly in untreated groundwater before its entry into the distribution system. Its employees found that mixed oxidants or MIOX enables quicker and systematic deactivation of a broad range of microbial pollutants than chlorine. The system introduced by them generates mixed oxidants by electrolyzing salt water or brine and sorting out the end products. The mixed oxidant solution is a combination of liquid chlorine and other chlor-oxygen combines that is produced through an electrolysis process by utilizing salt, water and electric power. The new system prevents the discharge of chlorine gas, betters both onsite and offsite safety by doing away with the need of transporting and handling of the toxic gas and also gets rid of bio-films from the pipes of the old water distribution system.
A video film at the website shows the efforts of the experts from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) of NNSA in formulating and introducing new mechanisms to bring down the aerodynamic drag experienced in semi-trucks and in improving their fuel efficiency by 12%. The new innovation has the potential to cut down over 36 million tons of carbon dioxide discharges every year, which can be equated to the carbon dioxide emissions from four 1-GW power generation plants annually. LLNL has completed the project in association with the U.S. Airforce, Ames Research Center of NASA, Navistar and other industries.
NNSA’s researchers at Sandia National Laboratories are moving to showcase a new gas turbine system that can augment the thermal-to-electric conversion efficiency by around 50%. The new machine is actually a jet engine that performs utilizing a hot liquid. It can improve the efficiency of nuclear power stations that use steam turbines by 50% and gas turbines by 40%. NNSA’s supercritical CO2 systems that use nuclear, biofuel, fossil fuel, geothermal and solar heat sources for power production draws more interest from scientific and industrial segments.