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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.
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.
if only we could somehow harness the pent up sexual frustrations of all the slashdot readers and turn it into electricity....
I'm trying to decide whether the parent is simply confused or a clever troll. It has enough things wrong with it that I suspect the latter. But just in case, I'll "reply not moderate" (although I'd like to know who modded this up to 4):
- Burning fossil fuels produces carbon dioxide as the primary pollutant (on a global scale at least; locally smog etc. could be considered more important). This is carbon dioxide that was not previously in the atmosphere, since the carbon came from stores in the ground. In comparison, using renewable biomass for fuel, for example, adds no additional carbon to the atmosphere.
- The system described here is closed cycle. Water goes in, hydrogen and oxygen come out; then when the hydrogen is burned it recombines with the oxygen to become water again. Diluting the oceans is impossible in this case (and rather ridiculous in the fossil fuel case; consider the volumes involved).
- The biggest win is probably on the local scale I mentioned. I don't think working to eliminate smog is an "unnecessary expense". Unless you think changing from breathing smog to breathing water vapor is just from "one form of waste to another", in which case I'll take the water and you can have the smog.
I'm personally open to debate about exactly how bad global climate change is. But it's dangerous and dishonest to hide behind bad science to resist progress.
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.
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
IMHO, Algae is the most likely source of renewable hydrogen in the foreseable future.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,5445 6,00.html
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.
and unfortunately many places do not have handy geothermal vents
Obviously you are new to slashdot, where many of the posters vent a lot of hot air.
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
Ahhh water:
;)
1: In its vaporous state, it can cause severe burns....
2: It is found in high quantities in cancerous tumors.
3: It is a major component of acid rain....
How dare you say water is OK?
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