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."

Comments

The oil men (read Bush)

[Skiron]

Will not allow technology like this.

Re:Blowing up a reactor

[khrtt]

It's full of liquid sodium, lithium, and what not, just like the Chernobyl reactor. If you blow up a hole in the cooling system, the whole thing will burn the fuck up, dispersing several tons of radioactive oxides all over the place, also like the Chernobyl reactor. The Chernobyl dead zone is hundreds of miles across, but even a tiny reactor core getting dispersed in the middle of a city would shut down that city for several hundred years. No matter how large the city and how small the reactor. The radioisotopes in hospitals have a lot less curies in them than even a small reactor core, and a shorter half-life too.