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Creating Hydrogen With (Very) Hot Water
carbonman writes "NYTimes is reporting that a public-private research team will announce on Monday that they have discovered a new technique to produce pure hydrogen that is far more efficient than conventional methods. The advance could be a significant development in attempts to realize the dream of the hydrogen economy in taking gasoline-powered vehicles off the road, and without releasing carbon dioxide emissions that are linked to climate change. It does, however, require the use of advanced high-temperature nuclear reactors, none of which have been built on a production scale before."
swiftstream adds a link to the same story at the no-reg Indianapolis Star, and summarizes the method as "electrolysis of very, very hot water."
Why not put the nuclear power plant way out in the boonies (i.e., no one's back yard) and run pipelines to where hydrogen is needed?
I have nothing against nuclear power, until efficient solar power comes along, as long as the nuclear power minefield can be navigated.
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
One would be better to invent mini-nuclear reactors than introduce yet another step in the creation, storage, and use of energy.
I suggest you read Slashdot
I thought of this when someone first told me about fuel cells. To anyone familiar with conventional thermal cycles and the basics of thermodynamics, the approach is obvious. Thermal cycles take advantage of thermal energy gradients. That such a potential could be exploited with fuel cells seems to be an obvious extention. Hot water is easier to separate than cold water, duh! So you heat the water up, separate it and then combine it in a cold fuel cell. The difference is energy you can use but the devil is in the details. It seems easier than using a turbine but you'd want one of those too if you can't extract all of the heat in electrolysis.
I'm glad someone is finally working on it. People are so slow. I expect the petroleum and coal industries to step in and kill it before anyone can use it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The article doesn't state why it has to be a nuke reactor, only that the thing requires 300 megawatts to produce 2.5KGs of Hydrogen. What if it were 300mW from a hydro dam or some other source, would that work?
Or is it somemehow tied into the hot water system of a nuke powered steam turbine?
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
to provide enough H2 to replace our use of gasoline for personal transportation, according to google (about 1.18B gallons/year). While there are certainly some risks to mitigate with nuclear power, such an H2 infrastructure could be built in the near future. Once done, the nuclear portion could be replaced by whatever better power source comes next (He3 fusion, perhaps), without requiring any changes to the infrastructure. Mark
Why the hell not? I'm sure you're just another zealot who thinks these fat cats are all about the oil. But they're all about making money. So if this became a viable way of producing a medium to transport cheap energy, why wouldn't they want to get their hands on this?
They're not oil companies! They're energy companies.
If you remove all the CO2 prducing energy sources you reduce the amound of 'Green House' gasses that trap heat on the Earth and replace those emmisions with H20, would that not create more clouds causing energy to be reflected from the Earth and therefore cause 'Global Cooling'?
The people that run the Country rely on oil as the controlling mechanism - the middle east problems have nothing to do with terrorism - but everything to do with oil.
The power people OWN the oil. If there was anything that started to interfere with that mechanism, then you will see Government refusal to grant licences to build facilities etc to produce an alternate energy supply. Mark my words.
Think of the oil people as a big version of MS.
This one won't fly with the tin foil hat crowd who are convinced that the only reason we don't have a hydrogen economy today is because of the evil conspiracy of greedy oil companies.
Now that there is a viable means of producing hydrogen, they'll have to retreat to the real fringe of the 'Free Energy' devices. I can hear it now: The CIA wants oil or nukes. The CIA will fight and kill to prevent any sort of clean alternative.
Theres only two compelling reasons to abandon the current energy paradigm. 1) A new energy source. It has to be so much better than the last one that the profits will outweigh the investment within 5 years. 2) The old energy runs out.
Always going forward, 'cause we can't find reverse.
While I agree that nuclear power is dangerous, and the waste products are a long term issue, many people (myself included) view it as the lesser of two evils.
Ignore, for a moment, advanced passive power generation and fusion power. What do we have now to power our civilization? Fossil fuels and nuclear energy. If we could reduce our power consumption, or rely more on existing passive generators (like solar and hydro), then we would need less actively generated power. We could never reduce our power requirements to zero without our civilization collapsing (see Dyson's theories, as well as conservation of energy and thermodynamics). This means that we're still stuck with waste products, nuclear or otherwise.
Given only those two choices, I choose nuclear. I recognize the risks and long term hazards of it, but it is still a better alternative to climate change and air pollution. Moreover, in the long term, fossil fuels will run out far sooner than fissile fuel. My hope is that we get working fusion power, and alternative energy sources, but in the meantime nuke plants are the better route.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Basically, yes.
This system works on the heat production to heat the water. So hydro or wind wouldn't work efficiently. Other systems that use the steam cycle to power turbines probably would.
Using a hydrocarbon based power plant would be defeating the purpose, besides, there's more efficient methods of making hydrogen from hydrocarbonds than even hot water electrolysis.
The mirror type solar power plant might work too, but they cost an order of magnitude more to make per megawatt than a nuclear plant. And they're not manintenance free once built.
I don't read AC A human right
I don't understand why this hydrogen production method requires the unobtainium of a high-temperature nuclear reactor - it sounds like the breakthrough is in the electrolysis method. Couldn't this be applied to (say) a solar furnace?
radioactive waste, which is not only poisonous
So isn't the stuff that comes out of a coal plant's stacks. Except the nuclear stuff is safely in a pool, rather than in the air that I'm breathing.
but a geopolitical crisis
Just because it's a political "crisis" doesn't mean that it's ultimatly a geological crisis. There are ways to handle the waste.
And factoring in the energy to build these reactors reduces their efficiency
The build energy argument can be used for every technology. Heck, Solar and Wind both have much higher build costs per megawatt.
How about biomass reactors that generate hydrogen from agricultural waste, which are neither radioactive nor wasteful?
Research is progressing on this option too. May the best technology win. Changing economics as well as scientific developments will favor one or the other depending on the situation. People in my area often have multiple fuel heating systems. We'll heat with everything. Wood, Oil, Corn, Electric, and Natural Gas. Price of electricity goes up? Switch to Gas. Gas/Oil goes up? Use electric. Are you really cheap? Chop down some trees. Or buy some dry feed corn and burn that.
I don't read AC A human right
You know, I've never seen a post answered by its own sig before ...
No one person shoulders the cost of "total destruction of our environment", it is spread out among everyone. Yet, in your scenario, one person (or corporation or government) shoulders the entire cost, and thus risk. There will be many large corporations looking for this to fail, so you've got your work cut out for you. Until you can find a rich saviour, this won't ever get off the ground.
All we can do is point out the reasons why consumers want this, and the reward/risk ratio will change as consumers will demand it. The risk goes down (the competing energy sources won't be able to cause failure at this point), the reward goes up (there are consumers just waiting to empty their pockets into this rather than traditional fuels), and there will be competitors looking to get their own pieces of this pie.
This, by the way, is exactly how the capitalist "invisible hand" is supposed to work: consumers demand something, whether for purely selfish reasons (materialist), or for purely environmental reasons (it's a cause they're willing to pay for), or for any other reason. Point is, consumers demand what they want, and someone will eventually come along to give it to them. Thus, the key is to drive demand, in order to drive supply.
The key phrase here is efficient conversion of water into Hydrogen.
Oh, I agree that electolysis is great, but it takes power to make it happen, but it's a inefficient process.
The other way is by using chemicals.. I had the name of the compound that creates hydrogen at the tip of my tougne for years since my last chemistry lesson, but once agian, the key phrase efficiency in energy useage for the cracking of water, rears it's ugly head.
The use of nuclear reactions to crack water shows promise, but neutron activation of the water must be moderated and contained so that contamination will be kept to the utmost minimal levels.
Remember, you can make any gas radioactive by pouring enough rems into it to make the it ionize. The repair crew of the nuclear missile submarine K-12, AKA, The Widowmaker, saw the ionization firsthand.
Not to mention the helicopter crews that dropped carbon and boron on the exposed reactor core at Chernobyl...
Few live to tell the tale for very long...
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
Remember, life is a sexually transmitted terminal disease. If you wait for the perfect solution before you do anything then you will never do anything.
Now, perhaps I missed the part of your post where you offered some real alternatives to the existing carbon based fuels?
--- Liberty in our Lifetime
I'm happy to let the best tech win, as long as I'm not paying taxes to subsidize the loser's victory. Which I am, with coal, oil, gas, and nuclear. Sometimes, like solar, the benefits are a cost saving to the public, there is a case for investment, rather than just subsidy.
--
make install -not war
yay! so we can still say our cars only put water in the air... but making the hydrogen results in nuclear waste
Which is solid, containable, and produced at centralized facilities which can be scrutinized easily, instead of being pumped out the back of millions of individual cars straight into the atmosphere every day.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I doubt that a reactor will put out enough fuel to cover a city, or even two gas stations for that matter.
There's an estimated 360 million gallons of gasoline consumed daily in the US. This plant will produce 400,000 kilos. This may not be enough for a truly large city but it's more than you think it is. It's certainly more than two gas stations worth. To put it into a bit more of a prospective; a gas tanker (semi truck type) holds 9,000 gallons of gas.
We're gonna need a bigger source than that if we want to use hydrogen.
Sure, it's not a singular solution but fuel creation today isn't a singular solution either. It's actually encouraging that we're going to have so many potential sources. If we weren't so reliant on our current sources of oil we'd probably not be in the situation we're in today. Also consider that in all reality fuel cell is a long way off. Is it still going to take a kilo of hydrogen to produce the same energy as a gallon of gas? doubtful. And this plant, if it takes off, will be modified and output will likely be increased.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I'm not paying taxes to subsidize the loser's victory
I wonder, what do you count as "subsidies"? At least right now, solar and wind are receiving far more in the way of subsidies than coal or nuclear. If nuclear's so subsidized, then why haven't any new plants been built in the last thirty years? Yucca mountain can't really be called a subsidy, they paid a tax per megawatt to build it.
I don't read AC A human right
Whenever you convert energy from one form to another, you will always end up with less useful energy than you started with. Otherwise, you'd have a perpetual motion machine.
However, there are also considerable losses in transmitting electricity over the grid. There is the ability of hydrogen-powered fuel-cell cars to act as peak-power generators and remove the need for expensive extra generation capacity; given all that it might work out more economically efficient than the current grid if the losses from hydrogen production are not too large.
You're also missing another factor. Our current distributable, mobile, and convenient energy sources (crude oil derivatives) are an environmental disaster, have to be imported from nasty, unstable parts of the world, and are running out. So even if it's not super-efficient, if we can make hydrogen from non-fossil-fuel using energy sources with reasonable efficiency it might be a feasible alternative just as a mobile energy source.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Yeah, I know, the ocean is salt water, not fresh water. But, if you are super-heating the water with a nuclear reactor, it'll seperate from the salt anyhow. Just have to clean the salt (and other dissolved minerals/metals) that accumulates in the evaporator out periodically (daily?), and, probably, dump most of the salt back into the ocean (not directly though - use it for road salt or table salt or whatever - it'll get back to the ocean eventually).
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So, what's the problem? I don't think there's any shortage of water in the ocean. .
And before anyone goes on a rant about making the oceans gradually more and more (or maybe less and less) concentrated by this process, remember that 1) the water will eventually go back in the ocean as rain, and 2) The salt will probably end up back in the ocean eventually, also. As for the minerals, I doubt the oceans will miss the small amounts of minerals we pull out, and I suspect we will find them usefull.