Hydrogen Fuel Balls from a Gas Pump?

navalynt writes "New Scientist reports that the Department of Energy has filed a patent for hydrogen fuel balls. From the article 'The proposed glass microspheres would each be a few millionths of a metre (microns) wide with a hollow center containing specks of palladium. The walls of each sphere would also have pores just a few ten-billionths of a metre in diameter.' They are supposedly safe and small enough to be pumped into a fuel tank in the same manner as gasoline."

Comments

Re:Not being a chemist

[Kadin2048]

True, but every car on the road today in the U.S. (or at least the great, great majority of them) have a fairly substantial mass of palladium already: in the catalytic converter. I'm not sure exactly how much palladium a car would need in order to hold a full charge of hydrogen, but I think if you started recycling the stuff that's in catalytic converters, you'd have a good start towards the amount you'd need to start using it as a hydrogen carrier, at least to start out.

Also, from an environmental standpoint, the fact that it's valuable and rare is probably better than if it were currently cheap, since it keeps it from be being implemented as a throwaway, and creating shortages and problems later on. At least this way, we'll implement the full reclamation cycle from the beginning.