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Hydrogen Fuel Station in Iceland
klang points to this blurb about Iceland opening a hydrogen refueling facility. While it isn't, as the blurb states, the world's first hydrogen station, it is notable because it produces the hydrogen onsite with electricity from geothermal energy and electrolysis, making it an almost perfectly clean energy source.
I don't understand why creating water instead of carbon-monoxide is better for the environment. If we suddenly replaced all fossil fuel engines with hydrogen engines, we'd have the same problem: excess waste.
How many tons of waste do we humans send into the air every year? Do we think that equivalent amount of water is better? Instead of air pollution and all of the problems associated with it, we'd have to worry about the oceans being diluted, excess humidity, or some damn thing we can't think of.
I actually am not of the opinion that it's as bad as people think it is anyway. So talking about changing from one form of waste to another is just an unnecessary expense.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Hydrogen is a method for energy storage. If you're lucky like the icelanders you have cheap geothermal energy you can convert to hydrogen. But if the energy is coming from fossil fuels it only means that they will be burned at the power station instead of in your car engine.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
And will they let you fill your balloon or are they going to insist on wasting it on a car?
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if only we could somehow harness the pent up sexual frustrations of all the slashdot readers and turn it into electricity....
The abundance of geothermal energy in Iceland is probably a large part of making this shift to hydrogen energy possible. They have an abundant source of clean electrical generation capacity, something that pretty much no other nation in the world comes close to. For years ore has been shipped all the way from Australia to Iceland for smelting because of the incredibly cheap electricity rates there - it takes a lot of energy to smelt bauxite (to create aluminum), so it turns out to be cheaper to transport the bulk ore thousands of miles by ship rather than smelt in Australia. Thanks to the abundant, cheap energy available in Iceland, hydrogen production should be no problem.
You cannot honestly label water as "waste". For as you and I are 90+% waste then ;)
Some would argue that to be a higher number. I personally find most people I interact with can be replaced by a small shell script, and thereby be a 100% waste (from my frame of reference).
I'm more interested in technology to remove stupid people from driving on freeway systems. Smart drive systems can save more resources because there will be less traffic jams. They aren't mutually exclusive, and I'd like to see both being developed, but that's where my interests lie.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
Burning hydrogen creates about an electron volt of energy per molecule or so. FUSING hydrogen into helium, what a hydrogen bomb does, generates several MILLION electron volts of energy per atom. So unless you have a hydrogen tank for your car that is at EXTREMELY high pressure, you don't have a hydrogen bomb. There are dozens of chemicals that generate far more explosion energy for a chemical bomb, such as, say, GASOLINE!
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
This process seems to use alot of Dihydrogen Monoxide.
You think more people would be concerned.
All these people saying hydrogen is just as bad as burning fossil fuels because after all the hydrogen has to be produced by burning fossil fuels are annoying.
You would think all these people claiming to be programmers would grasp the idea of an abstraction layer.
Once everyone is filling their car up with hydrogen up at the pump you can change where the hydrogen came from without changing the cars. This is the whole point.
Got a windy plain? use wind power to make the hydrogen. Got geothermal energy? use that. Got huge rivers? use them. Got some new idea no one thought of yet? Try to use that! You can use whatever you want.
That's the whole point.
For now, there is only one vehicle in the country that runs on hydrogen fuel, they put 1 kg of hydrogen in it at the ceremony: http://skeljungur.is/uploads/images/Raðherra dælirC.jpg That car will be sent back to Mercedez soon I think. For the nearest future, 3 hydrogen fueled busses have been ordered and will arrive in august. The sole purpose of this hydrogen fuel station is to service these 3 busses (for now). Actually, this means that 4% of all the busses in the capitol will run on hydrogen :)
The next step is to start powering our fishing ships with hydrogen, which make a big part of the CO2 that comes from Iceland.
Hydrogen is for now mostly useable for big machinery such as busses and ships, the personal car will come hydrogen fueled later on (it's not very practical at this time).
My other UID is 1337
Most places don't have access to the abundant geothermal energy that Iceland has access to, located on a spreading center as it is. Spreading centers (places where two plates are moving away from eachother, creating new crust) bring magma very close to the surface of the Earth, much closer than pretty much anywhere else (except volcanoes, but those are a little tricky to harness the thermal energy from). I can't think of a single place (dry place, that is) besides Iceland that sits right on top of an active spreading center, so they are in a pretty unique situation (sure, there are failed rifts in Africa, but those are not active. Also possibly failed rifting in the U.S., but again, not active)
So unless you find a way to get energy from dozens to hundreds of kilometers underground, much deeper than we have ever even drilled, then we will have to be stuck with our few spots of high geothermal activity for producing energy in that way. Oh yeah, and depending on geothermal energy just delays the problem - the Earth is cooling, albeit very slowly.
I suggest you read Slashdot
Mod parent down or don't mod at all (why mod up something that is wrong??????)
Chatting sh1t is not informative, it is flamebait/trolling.
> Carbon monoide is not poisonous
Uh, no.
> Carbon monoxide is not a problem... we have the technology
You have the technology? We have the technology to make diamonds from dust... how about using it instead of creating more CO???
> Carbon dioxide... the normal result of combustion. (That means it's unavoidable)
Yes, it is not the same or as disasterous as CO, but CO2 is still a problem. And it is avoidable - use energy sources which do not combust where alternatives exist. There is a big difference between normal bodily functions (breathing) and burning millions of tons of oil and coal every day. Do you understand that?
> Your problem is that you are not only ignorant
So, are you not ignorant and talking rubbish, or you are ignorant?
Its a pity you clouded some reasonable points such a lens effect and conflicts of different global warning theories (indeed, whether they really exist) with such ridiclous cr4p.