The 660 Gallon Brewery Fuel Cell

An anonymous reader writes "Australia's University of Queensland has secured a $115,000 grant for a 660-gallon fuel cell that should produce 2 kilowatts of power. A prototype has been operating at the university laboratory for three months. This fuel cell type is essentially a battery in which bacteria consume water-soluble brewing waste such as sugar, starch and alcohol, plus in this instance produces clean water."

Comments

Re:Not entirely clean

[kkerwin]

"If you were to walk into the room where the vats are without first ventilating the room, you would pass out because the oxygen in your lungs feels like it is literally sucked out (not sure of the actual physical process involved)."

Diffusion of oxygen against a concentration gradient. It's basically the same process that happens when you sprinkle salt on a slug and it dies: the salt lowers the water concentration outside of the slug, and water flows out of the slug to balance the water concentrations in and out of the slug.

Partial pressure of oxygen outside of the lungs (pressure produced only by oxygen molecules, nothing else) is much lower than the partial pressure of oxygen inside the lungs. Oxygen flows out of the lungs to equalize the partial pressures. CO2 flows into the lungs to replace the displaced oxygen.

And, you die, just like the slug. :-)

Re:Not entirely clean

[fractoid]

Integral fast reactors consume any transuranic element.

From Wikipedia:

Compared to current light-water reactors with a once-through fuel cycle that uses less than 1% of the energy in the uranium, the IFR has a very efficient (99.5% usage) fuel cycle. The basic scheme used electrolytic separation to remove transuranics and actinides from the wastes and concentrate them. These concentrated fuels were then reformed, on site, into new fuel elements. Non-trans-uranic (sub-uranic? pre-uranic?) waste products are a short term storage proposal only.

Another important benefit of removing the long half-life transuranics from the waste cycle is that the remaining waste becomes a much shorter-term hazard. After the actinides and transuranics are removed from the spent fuel, the remaining waste elements have half lives of a few decades at most. The result is that within 300 years, such wastes are no more radioactive than the ores of natural radioactive elements. In laymans' terms, it can't explode (no high-pressure radioactive coolant), it can't melt down (passive self-limiting design), it doesn't produce long-lived radioactives (any that it does produce it re-burns into short-lived waste). Nuclear looks pretty ideal short-term to me, and with this type of reactor it's good for mid- to long-term too. Solar will be good once solar cells can actually pay for the costs of their own manufacture in less than 20 years.

Re:Which is not that great for the space..

[M. Baranczak]

The electricity isn't the main point. From the article:

"It's not going to make an enormous amount of power -- its primarily a waste water treatment that has the added benefit of creating electricity,"