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Orbiting Lasers for Hydrogen Power
DerekLyons writes: "Yahoo is carrying a story about a Japanese scientist who plans to use giant orbiting lasers to extract H2 from seawater. The interesting part of the scheme is that design uses solar pumped lasers, which avoid the loss of efficiency (and increased launch weight) from powering the laser with electricity from solar cells. Is the way to finally break the main dilemma of the hydrogen economy? (That it takes more energy to make the hydrogen than you gain in using it.)"
I don't think that it would be wise to let the Japanese have that much power that they can point anywhere. It would take up valuable government resources to monitor the direction the laser is pointed and its use. And what if they decided to just blow a city away, then what? Sounds shady to me.
All known solid state laser gain substances have fairly narrowband excitation spectrums. This presents a two fold problem: 1) fairly little power is available in that window (the sun is a blackbody raditator) 2) Energy outside of that window tends to just heat the medium and either cause breakdown or unacceptable thermal lensing.
I've built a solar pumped nd:yvo4 laser, but it was a waste: because of those factors I could have extracted more power and probably energy from a solar electric system.
Without some serious new developments in laser substances with ultra broadband pump inputs, this won't work too well.
Is the way to finally break the main dilemma of the hydrogen economy? (That it takes more energy to make the hydrogen than you gain in using it.)
You always use more energy to store than to take out. This includes petroleum and regular agriculture. If you think about it, almost every stored chemical energy from earth comes from the sun. In the case of petroleum, we are just using a little energy to EXTRACT the energy BANKED underneath for years.
The question becomes what is our desired medium for energy storage? Batteries can't store a lot of energy. Hydrogen stores a lot per weight but takes too much space. Hydrocarbon/gasoline/liquid fuel is good mix of high energy density for a given weight and a given space. If the US finally able to provide Hydrogen fueling infrastructure, this solar technology might make a lot of sense.
...hydrogen than what you get using it?
We're mere miles (precisely, an average of just under 1.01 AU's) from a source of fusion sending out more energy in one hour than our current electricity needs add up to in a billion years.
The problem? The Sun doesn't fit nicely in a portable fuel cell.
Hydrogen, on the other hand, does.
Therefore, if we can use a bunch of solar energy that isn't useful right now, to make a little clean-clean-clean hydrogen power, all the better! The ONLY question is, "If we add up the cost to the environment and the cost of labor and materials required to produce a plant (or in this case, an orbiting laser) that gives us X amount of hydrogen, how does that compare to X amount of hydrogen as seen on Ebay?"
Preface: I have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm just proposing a theory to provoke thought, that's all.
This whole idea sounds really cool and I'd love to live in a world of hydrogen energy, but I've thought for a long time that alternate energy sources have been developed more extensively than we are allowed to know. The political ties between OPEC, car manufacturers, governments around the world, power plants, etc. seem to me to be so entangling that they could easily, and in my opinion have easily, squashed new ideas for alternate power sources. I've heard of everything from water powered cars to solar panel arrays that are 50 times more effecient than those in use today... yet none of these technologies has been allowed to flourish, and I suspect it has something to do with the trillions of dollars that are hauled in by oil companies and any company associated with them. When you think about it in terms of history, oil is the gold of the modern day. People who have it want to make money off of it, so they want to keep supply down (just enough to get by) and demand up, way up. I have no doubts that the people in the oil industry would do anything and everything to keep it the most valuable substance today, just look at some of the evil that came out of the pursuit of gold.
"NASDA and the Institute for Laser Technology in Tokyo set about joint research development of this system. And it is under application for a patent in cooperation with NASDA, ILT and Mitsubishi Research Institute Inc, which is a private think tank company," Dr. Mori wrote SPACE.com in an email interview.
Now, doesn't it strike you as odd that Mitsubishi has their hands in this? OK so it says "a private think tank company," but really, I think this "private" think tank company named "Mitsubishi" wouldn't resist some "inspiration" by the automotive industry (heavily linked to Big Oil) and somehow sabotage or discredit this research.
Anyway, I'll stop ranting, but I'd like to know if anyone has any facts that go along with what I'm saying or if I've just been reading the Drudge Report too much.
~ now you know
Not quite correct on using less power to produce hydrogen than you gain consuming it - fundamentally that's against thermodynamics, and a source of infinite energy
Burn hydrogen, use energy produced to make more, sell surplus, repeat.
It is quite an old concept, that of an orbiting solar power plant. The medium for energy transferrence is slightly different, but the idea is the same (I seem to recall the early forms of the idea used microwaves beamed down from orbit. Shudder).
Nothing new and revolutionary, but if they can get it working we have tapped another energy source (yes, I know we already have solar power, but an orbital power station doesn't have the limits on size that a ground based one does.)
The point here is fuel, and there are two types of fuel: Efficient and Inefficient. An inefficient fuel is one in which you must spend more energy to obtain and process the fuel into usable energy than you get back when you're done. An efficient fuel is the opposite. You put less energy in than you get out.
Right now, fossil fuels are an excellent example of efficient fuels. We put minimal effort in and get an incredible return. However, once we run out of what the Earth has stored over the last several million years, fossil fuels will become extremely inefficient, so it is to our advantage to find much more plentiful efficient fuels.
If this technology makes hydrogen into a more efficient fuel then we should probably support it, as there is a LOT of hydrogen around. :)
Most of the "conventional" space solar power ideas (not this one, of course) are based on that. Big-assed focusing mirror (can be very, very thin and very, very cheap in orbit, since you don't have to worry about it collapsing under its own weight) aimed at a boiler. Steam spins turbines, turbines produce electricity, electricity generates microwaves, microwaves beamed to earth. Way more efficient than photovoltaics.
Of course the envirowhackos are going to throw a clot if this idea ever looks like it might take off.
Production of Hydrogen with electricity is one of the most interesting ways to "store" the energy produced by wind generated power. The problem with all natural power sources is that it isn't always there are the peak demand period. The sun shines (almost) the same at noon as 4. By producint hydrogen via electricity you can effecticely "store" that energy for peak demand periods.
The article mentions that these satelites would be in low earth orbit, yet have a stationary generation plant on the surface. Would you not require a geostationary orbit at 36K km in order to do this? And the best place to put your generation plant would probably be on the equator to reduce atmospheric effects.
My 2c.
I remember about plans to win energy from the sun by solar panels in low orbit and then emiting this energy to relay stations on earth by way of a narrow focus ion beam or something -- sorry, I ain't no rocket scientist.
I also distincly remember this being a bad idea because the chance of failure and was too high -- the thought of a high power beam coursing it's destructive path along the earth ad random would make you think twice even about the lowest chances of failure.
Wouldn't this system be prone to the same kind of risks?
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"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
A giant orbital laser that fires to the ground into a giant salt water swimmingpool.
What is the impact of fried birds dropping onto this pool?
What can this concentrated energy do to some of the earths outer layers that are important for climate? Atmosphere, stratosphere, and so on.
Impact on the ozone layer, which is already (by definition, not by human interaction) quite thin and easy to disturb?
What are they going to do with all the Oxygenium? Since the air we breathe consists to more than 70 percent of Nitrogen, not Oxygene, simply freeing large volumes could be problematic. (And can be quite a risk for the installation itself. Think of "no smoking".)
What if a mislead plane happens to fly into the beam? A weather balloon?
Impact on clouds? Hitting them (and the H2O within them) will also split the H2O, and then Ozone will react from the Oxygenium radicals. And: Ozone is only good in exactly the right height over ground. Every Ozone lower than that is poisonous and, in the volumes we're talking about, could lead to quite interesting weather effects within these clouds.
Don't talk about what happens if this cloud of ozone happens to drift over some city. In cities, we usually call this "smog" and try to avoid it.
Sulfur dioxide, raising up in clouds from big cities or other things that burn fuel (oil plants?) is known to react to Sulfur Acid in the athmospere, with the help of the power of sunlight. A while after, we call this "sour rain" or "acid rain". What amount of acid could react if a cloud like this is hit by this _very_ strong artificial sun?
Nice idea, but done by company scientists for company scientists. IMHO, this could cause far too many things to be implemented.
And, remember: "They" are not fiddling with a x square miles big sector of air above their installation. They're fiddling with the atmosphere that is shared by some billion of people. There is hardly a thing like local effects with wind, clouds, and weather. Ask your European friend if he sometimes finds a thin layer of very fine sand outside his house or on his windows. This comes straight from the Sahara desert in Africa. (No, I'm not kidding.)
When the reactor in Tchernobyl went "blob", the radioactive dirt was distributed over half of Europe, 1000s of kilometres, which still ended up with enough dirt to have them throw away every vegetable in their gardens.
And: Science doesn't have any data about what happens to the very highest layers above us when hit by a concentrated stream of energy on a single point that is several times stronger than the strong rays of the real sun around it. It might well cause something or, doing this several months in a row, burn a hole into a layer of gases that we not even know about yet. We Just Don't Know.
Fiddling with this is just stupid.
42. Easy. What is 32 + 8 + 2?
The main problem of all renewable energy schemes is that fossil fuels are formed by millions of years of solar energy accumulated by the biosphere and millions of years of geological pressure. It isn't that these fuels are more fundamentally efficient - in fact, they are relatively innefficient from many perspectives. It is that nature has done all the work for us - leaving us to liberate the value at our leisure. Convenient, and in the extremely narrow and short-sighted view we've taken of energy, cheap.
The problems, of course, are that we are stuck with relatively dirty fuels like coal and oil, and that these fuels are not renewable in the short term. Hence, any renewable fuel will face us with a cost-benefits problem: it will cost more to produce than an equivalent unit of coal or oil. Until we start measuring the environmental, political and future stability/planning impacts as part of the cost of burning fossil fuels, it will always seem economically preferable to stick with our old standbys.
The real issue of hydrogen or any alternative fuels (biomass derived, ethanol, etc.) is to find the most efficient way to use a renewable or sustainable energy source. Hydrogen has the convenience and benefit of being a fuel: useful from points of view of storage and self-containment.
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