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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."
Most nuclear plants are located in areas with rural populations. (or at least, areas that were rural when they planned and built the plants).
You can build the plant in the boonies, but you still need to operate in a region where you can attract enough workers to staff the plant.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Simple: Cost.
You'd have to build something on the same scale as the current oil pipeline system, but with the added hurdle of being able to hold hydrogen.
The current system won't work since it can't hold hydrogen.
Also with no immediate profit, people tend not to like investing is something they won't see return on in the short term.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?)