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The (Possible) Future of Alternative Energy
Sponge! writes: "The stuff that turns oil into margarine. The stuff that made the Hindenburg float. The stuff that combines with oxygen to make water and with carbon to make methane. The stuff that sends the space shuttle skyward and could someday power your car, office building, house, cell phone, even your hearing aid. That "Stuff" is hydrogen, and according to Amory Lovins, it is the future of energy. Here is an interesting article on Lovins and his view of hydrogen as the number one fuel."
We have been able to transfer a lot of our daily consumer power needs off the grid for years.
Unfotunately, any large scale production of alternative energy using consumables would require a massive capital investment by government and private enterprise that they have been postponing later and later.
We could have hydrogen powered cars and solar powered houses right now, if 40 years ago somebody had started a small factory making consumer goods that used these energy sources. By now, there would be lots of factories making the goods, and cheaper production methods would have resulted.
The short term planning orientation of energy companies and their associated enterprises is what keeps us dependent on fossil fuels today.
Only now are corps like BP investing in alternative energy. And BP isn't advancing the field much, it seems to be buying up small alternatives industry firms and keeping them in a technological and marketing holding pattern.
In my opinion, private enterprise and government won't invest the massive amounts required to scale alternatives production until the cost of fossil fuels is so prohibitive that they are (short-term) forced to do so.
By then, it will be too late.
I wish I knew what to do about this.
Goat sex free since 2001
Not really. Fusion "containers" are massive electromagnetic coils which are themselves suspended in a vacuum chamber. The idea is to magneticly contain a 100,000+ C plasma until fusion occurs and hopefully produce more energy than you use. This is a ways off.
In answer to a question further down the page, hydrogen fuel cells are better than batteries because of the rate they can deliver energy. It's difficult to make an electric car that can make a decent top speed. Hydrogen fuel cells pack the punch to give you a good boost.
Last point -- Someone else was asking where the energy for this will come from, pointing out that you will always come up short if you're using water as your source of hydrogen. A reply indicated that other more hydrogen rich molecules would be used. I wish to clarify that this is the case, but only until either more advanced solar systems can be developed or until fusion power becomes more practical. The idea is not hydrogen as an energy source, but as a storage medium.
That is all.
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Hydrogen is a clean fuel, in that it can be burned without harmful emissions. Because water is plentiful, hydrogen is also a sort of a battery. Electrical current can be used to separate it from water molecules, and some of this energy can be recovered in fuel cells.
Hydrogen extracted from fossil fuels necessarily produces less energy than the raw fuels themselves. Hydrogen produced from water by electrolysis is an energy sink.
Hydrogen may be extracted from water by using solar energy. That is solar energy, not hydrogen energy.
Whether hydrogen is a suitable fuel for vehicles depends on whether the energy costs are worth the emissions benefits. If so, this will make energy more scarce, because of the inefficiencies of converting energy in some other form into the energy of electrolysis.
Whether electrolysis of water is the right method for storage of solar energy depends on the comparative costs, risks and benefits of alternative storage technologies.
In neither case is hydrogen competing with fossil fuels as an energy source. It is competing with fossil fuels and batteries and flywheels and passive heating media as an energu storage system in both cases.
There are no significant pools of free hydrogen on the planet that can be used as an energy source.
Hydrogen is an energy storage strategy and not an energy supply strategy. It may have its uses as the former. Proposing it as a replacement for fossil or nuclear energy is complete nonsense.
All the above should be fully understood by anyone trying to venture an opinion on this subject.
Sorry to be blunt, but anyone who misses this point is one of the following: 1) not seriously interested in the subject 2) incompetent or 3) dishonest.
mt
Such a plant could generate enough electricity to pump seawater up and crack it into hydrogen and oxygen. It would be a whole hell of a lot cleaner than oil rigs on offshore platforms, and could in fact be set up on oil platforms in tropical regions (like the Gulf of Mexico) that no longer produce enough crude oil to be profitable, or that must be shut down over environmental concerns. OTEC plants are very clean, very safe, and fairly inexpensive to run. They could be a viable method for producing hydrogen almost for free.
And the brethren went away edified.
Why is everyone so affraid of Nuclear power? Pound for pound, Nuclear Energy is far cleaner and environmentally friendly then coal power plants, that's been proven already. The chances of a catastrophic reactor melt down are not very likely, as long as they are properly maintained and staffed. While I'm all for new forms of energy, we are currently not even using what is within our grasps. How can we expect power companies, who have a lot of money sunk into their current operations, to change their way of thinking? I doubt they see it as a viable thought to try these things out when they may flop. I have little faith that anything such as this article describes will be used, when we are not even using Nuclear Energy to what it could be. Look at the Navy, they have tons of nuclear reactors on their ships. Have there been any indicents with them? Not that we know of, and it'd be hard to hide something like that. Of course, those are smaller reactors, but none the less, it just proves the government knows what is going on. They are using the technology we already have, while the power companies are still stuck back a 100 years ago.
Couldn't agree more. It's been done. Read Natural Capitalism by (among others) Amory Lovins.
Or, to paraphrase The Natural Step, every business, regardless of industry, produces only two things: Product, and non-product. Selling product makes money. Non-product is, at best, worthless and is frequently a liability.
The ratio varies by industry of course, but when you trace through the entire supply chain, usually only 5-10% of the materials stream winds up in product. Improving this figure is a huge opportunity to add money to the bottom line, and generally speaking, there is alot of room for improvement!
As far as the political process goes, the main thing the government needs to do is to:
1) Stop subsidizing waste.
2) Correct the legal structures that currently allow industries to externalze costs. Just to give a timely example, a gallon of gas would cost alot more than $1.50 if the oil companies had to foot, say, 25% of the nation's defense budget every year to preserve access to the oil (the ethical considerations notwithstanding, of course.) As it is, the taxpayers pick up the tab instead. A whole lot of "fringe" and "green" technologies would be much more in demand if the users of current technology had to pay the true costs of that technology.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
3 points.
;)
First, engineers do not regard nuclear power as a dirty source of energy that must be contained, lest it kill everyone. I live in a small city in Arkansas (Russellville, population ~25,000) that is the site of a large nuclear power plant. I know many engineers who work at the plant and a few people involved with the construction and design of the plant (such as my father, who did the environmental impact work on the 'steam cycle,' more on that later). Those engineers regard nuclear power as an extremely safe, potentially cheap form of power. The total number of American deaths from nuclear power is incredibly small compared to that of coal/oil/natural gas and their related activities (such as coal mining).
Second, nuclear power plants can be built very cheaply. The cost of construction is only about a third of the cost of building a plant (a large plant would, if built today, cost in the neighborhood of 300 million dollars, depending on location (i.e., availability of natural cooling sources like lakes and rivers) and output). Whenever a nuclear power plant is built, the design documents, environmental impact studies, evacuation plans, etc, must all be submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as though no nuclear plants had ever been built before. Read that again. The majority of the cost of building a nuclear power plant in the United States is red tape. Nuclear power is cheap. Nuclear power plants can be cheap. In France, most of the power plants follow the same, well-tested design.
Third, the water used in the steam cycle is extremely clean. During construction of the plant, the chemists (such as my father) had a valve system in place such that they could take samples of the water at every stage in the cycle. After testing the water, the chemists would often wet their whistles with the excess. The water was just plain, distilled water. The only thing that happens to it is being heated and cooled over and over again. The steam (water vapor, technically) put off by cooling towers is likewise incredibly pure. In the Russellville case, the only thing in the water vapor other than H20 is a small amount of (non-radioactive) Xenon, which, for those of you who slept through chemistry, is inert. Perhaps you meant the coolant itself? Well, the coolant is heavily laced with Boron (in the form of Borax soap, actually), which is a neutron absorber. It's only a 'coolant' in the sense that it absorbs neutrons. Even if the Boron did become radioactive (and I'm fairly certain it doesn't), that water isn't part of the steam cycle and the Boron can be removed from the water anyway.
The majority of your fears (and the public's fears) about nuclear power are unfounded.
PS He's 'fission' and you bit, but then I bit off of your line. Who is worse, the troll, the troll who followed him, or the idiot who responded to both?