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Fuel Cell Powered Japanese Trains on Trial in July
ScorpFromHell writes "As per this yahoo! news item, "East Japan Railway Co. is to conduct a test run of the world's first fuel-cell-powered train in July.
The fuel cells, which generate power from a chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen, will help reduce environmental pollution compared to the existing electric and diesel engines, the company said."
But I wonder how much energy did it consume to produce those huge amounts of Hydrogen & Oxygen? Will it be lesser than the power generated by the reaction between them?
In other words, can this technology be used by countries with not so deep pockets as Japan?"
" I wonder how much energy did it consume to produce those huge amounts of Hydrogen & Oxygen? Will it be lesser than the power generated by the reaction between them? " But of course! Now you take the energy generated and then produce more Hydrogen and Oxygen, then put it back in the cells and generate yet even more energy. The world's energy problems are solved at last! And who would have thought -- by a Japanese train and an observant Slashdotter.
Well, sir, there's nothing on earth ...
Like a genuine,
Bona fide,
Electrified,
Six-car
Monorail!
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Do you know some secret method for separating oxygen and hydrogen out of water that doesn't require energy? If so, please share it with me, I want to get rich
But to address the question raised in the article: It most certainly did consume more energy to produce the hydrogen and oxygen than the fuel cell can recover from them. To do otherwise would be to break the laws of thermodynamics -- you can't get more energy out of a system than was already in it to start with.
The only reason people think otherwise is because they are so used to fossil fuels, where all the energy has been "put in" to the fuel for them, by millions of years of natural processing.
Sorry folks, that's the exception, not the rule. But the good news is, there is a (for all practical purposes) infinite supply of energy available to us. It's just a matter of capturing the energy as it falls from space.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Fuel Cell Powered Japanese Trains on Trial in July
What are they on trial for?
Huh? Ohhhhhh....
my pet machine
Wikipedia calls it an "Electrochemcial" reaction.
I hope you took the time to fix the mistake!