Slashdot Mirror
Aluminum Alloy Releases Hydrogen From Water
mdsolar writes "PhysOrg is reporting on a method of releasing hydrogen from water by oxidizing aluminum in an alloy with gallium. In the presence of water the aluminum oxidizes, leaving aluminum oxide, gallium, and hydrogen gas. The Purdue scientists who discovered the effect think this could help to overcome difficulties with hydrogen storage. Quoting: 'On its own, aluminum will not react with water because it forms a protective skin [of aluminum oxide] when exposed to oxygen. Adding gallium keeps the film from forming, allowing the aluminum to react with oxygen in the water.'"
This is a significant breakthrough, not because it enables the hydrogen economy (which is important), but because it makes it a more closed system. In their scenario, the aluminum and gallium are recyclable and more importantly *reusable*. It means that filling stations could exchange your car's waste products for recycled waste products from your neighbour's car. Granted, this has costs. Right now, the costs seem to be the prohibitive factor, but hopefully adoption of the technology will lower them, as it does with most new technologies.
libertarianswag.com
A car that runs on the same thing as Joe 6-pack. Um, how much a gallon is beer in a can these days anyways?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Is this reusable? I was under the impression that once particles are oxidized, they're fairly difficult to separate. Seems like there might be some weird energy investment issues.
Just another way of converting electrical energy into a form that can be used later.
We need to have a source of reliable cheap electricity to make the aluminum. And we don't at this time.
Dog is my co-pilot.
You could add sodium hydroxide (lye) or another base to the water, to dissolve the oxide layer. Their solution is probably safer, but mine you can buy at the drug store. And fill balloons with the H2. (Oblig warning: NaOH is nasty caustic, and H2 is ridiculously flammable with a *huge* explosive range in air. Don't do this without appropriate safety precautions.)
What I'm actually curious about is why they think this is useful. The energy released only partly goes into cracking the water; an awful lot of it comes out as heat, which is both wasteful and has to be removed from the system. And all that energy came from electricity to refine the aluminum from aluminum oxide ore. It seems to me you should just ship the electricity in the normal manner and use it to charge conventional batteries, which have really gotten rather efficient lately.
So what will the chemical element be like now? 2 Zero? I say we call it X2o. Don't question it.
Check the price on gallium. It's about $500 per kilogram, although there was a price spike a few years back and it passed $1000. It's a trace component in bauxite and coal. Way too expensive to be used as a fuel component.
Gallium is so expensive that it's not even cost effective in solar cells, where it works very well.
making the Hydrozxel group?
Electric cars/motors, dominate the pollution space, Sooo why by this "future" tech when i can
buy now ultra low emmision cars?
While I applaud the science, I doubt this is the "hydrogen revolution". It seems to be that we're suddenly talking about powering our cars with water (cheaply available) and massive blocks of a aluminium/gallium alloy. The article seemed to put forward the view that water was the fuel and the alloy acted as a catalyst. While this is indeed CHEMICALLY what is happening it's the cost of the catalyst driving (no pun intended) the reaction that's going to keep this off shelves for a while.
When/if they come up with a method for reactivating the alloy which is a) cheap and b) simple, then you can colour me interested.
Godless heathen.
The aluminum smelting process requires vast amounts of electricity.
quoting a random googled page : "On average, around the world, it takes some 15.7 kWh of electricity to produce one kilogram of aluminium from alumina. Design and process improvements have progressively reduced this figure from about 21kWh in the 1950's."
so it doesnt matter that it produces hydrogen. It's almost assured coal equivalent to or greater than the tank of gas it replaces was burned somewhere to get the aluminum.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Except that storage is one of the major hurdles that needs to be over come to use hydrogen.
With this, the car's power source has been decoupled from our choice of power supply. We can use what ever source for energy to turn the 2Al2O3 back into 4Al + 3O2. Today we can use coal burning plants for the electricity, tomorrow nuclear, the next day solar and wind, the next fusion. You don't need to upgrade your car every time we invent (and/or make economical) a cleaner power source.
"You saved 1968." - Ms. Valerie Pringle to the crew of Apollo 8
So their process uses as much power as they put in and they are basically hoping for free electricity to make it commercially viable. Because the anti-nuclear wackos are never going to let nuclear reactors to be built *anywhere at all*, the chances of building one cheaply is nil. Some folks even object to windmills and will tie then up in litigation forever. So forget that too. That leaves coal, natural gas, and oil (or hydro - but we don't build damns anymore, because it hurts the fish).
They might as well use the imaginary nuclear reactors to directly power electrolysis of water and skip the aluminum. I'm not sure that hauling around several hundred pounds of aluminum beads is any easier than hauling around compressed hydrogen.
Making aluminium out of any aluminium ore (including oxides) takes big frickin' huge amounts of energy.
Wake me again when they have found some sort of catalyst that works with the reaction
2 H2O + (some sort of cheap, abundant energy, preferably heat or sunlight, definitely not electricity) -> 2 H2 + O2
Call me a optimist, but instead of developing indirect ways to make energy, why dont we just focus all of our attention on developing non-toxic and high energy density batteries. We do have nuclear power plants after all which are not only zero emissions, but also can provide energy worldwide. Personally, if we can put a man on the moon and bring him back safely in under a decade during the 1960's, I think we can probably develop a battery that we can use in your cars of the future....
How do you do this?? Simple... Challenge and encourage NASA, DARPA, DOD, and all university/research centers to focusing specifically on this one goal... Put out in specifications of what it means to achieving this goal and wait to be stunned by the wonder of human ingenuity. Commit huge amounts of money to the grants for such things.... That would assume, though, that we have an administration that is willing to commit to doing this. Something that until now we are unable to do....
Weren't they talking about this like 10 years ago? I remember watching a video on a lazer disc in middle school on a "hyrdogen sponge" a metal that stored hydrogen.
well last time i checked aluminum beads don't go "boom" when hit..
but then again it's pretty much a given that the greater the number of indirections in a system the greater the efficiency lost..
i dare say this will be more energy intensive than the current gasoline system.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The author needs to work on his article titles.
Does the alloy release aluminum oxide AND hydrogen, or just hydrogen and/or oxygen??
If it just realeases hydrogen, then the title is correct. But, in the article, it says that aluminum oxide, gallium, and hydrogen are the result, yet it also says that the aluminum oxide isn't formed because of the gallium. Kind of a big difference between just hydrogen, and a bunch of other things.
The article doesn't seem to mach up with it's own chemistry.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
"With aluminum at $1.25 a pound, all it needs would be a large check from the government and someone to build as many nuclear or solar/wind power plants as it takes, and we could make this competitive with $3/gallon gasoline!"
Really... and while we're replacing 131 billion gallons of gasoline a year with aluminum pellets, will aluminum still be $1.25 a pound?
Write back when you get the funding for all of those nuclear plants for the sole purpose to recycle the pellets...
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
which also includes a steam engine ....
We get our precious hydrogen gas... and then we're left with Aluminum Oxide and Gallium. What do we do then?
Hydrogen will never be a good replacement for gasoline. It's unstable, highly reactive, hard to transport, and hard to produce in an efficient manner. Solar power has the most potential, assuming improvements to its efficiency are forthcoming. From what I've read, bio-fuels, particularly biodiesel will be ideal energy sources for the future. According to wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioDiesel , biodiesel could significantly help our energy dependence. As mentioned in the article, certain algae can produce 10,000 US gallons per acre, compared to 18gal/acre for corn. Since the process only requires sun, CO2 and marginal amounts of fuel for working the crops, it could easily replace most fuel used in the world. In addition, since all the CO2 released by burning the biodiesel is captured from the atmosphere, the net release is actually very close to zero. It's like having cake and eating it too.
Please, someone submit that photo to a Fark PS!
In addition to what you said, I just want to point out that any idea to crack H2O that doesn't release O2 is bad. The article mentions a way to get H2 out of H2O, but the O2 gets locked up in the aluminum. So that means, if you drive around in your Hydrogen car, it is sucking from the atmosphere O2 **that you didn't put there**
Let me say that again: Your Hydrogen car would be sucking O2 out of the atmosphere. If everybody did this, then our global climate change problem would no longer be adding CO2, it would be removing O2, which seems almost as bad.
We've got to have, as you suggested, a way to crack water using a catalyst.
Yes, making aluminum from aluminum oxide takes huge amounts of energy. And... making aluminum oxide out of aluminum *RELEASES* huge amounts of energy. This makes it perfect as an energy *STORAGE* medium. Thanks for pointing out that conservation of energy still exists.
The above is why I could never do post-graduate work. I'd love to do research - but the idea of having my discoveries and/or inventions stolen by some ossified... err.. tenured relic because that's just the way the system works just makes me angry.
Hmm, so you're using aluminum to turn water momentarily into hydrogen, only to turn it back into water moments later through combustion?
What did you need the hydrogen for then? Why don't you just extract the energy directly from the aluminum in one conversion step instead of 2? The more conversion steps you have, the more losses. The fewer conversion steps, the better.
Aluminum-Air batteries could have some really attractive properties, if anyone could get them to work.
I wonder if this hydrogen generation would be any better? Personally, I think there would be less loss if one could get an aluminum-air battery to work rather than going through the intermediate step of converting to hydrogen and then back to mechanical or electric power.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_battery
All these nutty attempts to build and maintain a whole new infrastructure with dangerous, poisonous, chemicals and just as dangerous high pressure wessels, and biodiesel produced from algae(as opposed to the stupidity of using corn and sugar), using what we already have to refine and transport it, never even gets an honorable mention. We could be using the stuff right now if it wasn't for our infatuation with pop science from "beyond 2000" distracting us from putting a very workable system into place with minimal costs and low risks to the environment, and to humans.
What?
From the article:
He's obviously a smart guy, but c'mon... holding up the revolution?
2 H2o + Me + Mexican + Beer + Lying on the Beach (SUN)= 100 CH4
Unlimited Energy!!!
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
If this article is accurate, aluminum based energy storage would have a number of applications as long term storage. Imagine backup generators running off of aluminum instead of gasoline. No more big tank of volatile gasoline sitting around indefinitely waiting for the lights to go out. Instead, you have a big tank of non-flammable, non-toxic aluminum pellets.
Which raises an interesting question: Can you store the fuel as pure aluminum, or does it have to be stored as aluminum-gallium alloy? Storing something that explodes whenever it gets wet is no fun at all.
http://xkcd.com/756//
The basic reaction is:
2Al + 3 H20 -> Al2O3 + 3 H2
Aluminium has an atomic mass of about 27, so 54g of Al will produce 6g of H2, i.e. it takes 9kg of Al to produce 1kg of H2. (We haven't been told how much gallium is required in the mix, so I'm ignoring this component.)
According to Wikipaedea, the goal for hydrogen storage in 2015 is 0.09 kg H2/kg. This process rates at 0.11 kg H2/kg before accounting for the gallium - so it is looking pretty good so far.
I've neglected the weight of water used in the reaction. If we include this, it doubles the required mass: 54g Al + 54g H2O to produce 6g H2. We may be able to recycle the engine exhaust to provide the required water. However, this scheme means that you gain weight as you run your car: everytime you use 6g of hydrogen, you turn 54g of Al into 102g of Al2O3, which you are still carrying.
I'm also worried about the efficiency of the fuel cycle, which will require returning large amounts of Al2O3 from fuel stations to a recycling plant, which then uses electricity to convert the Al2O3 back to Al.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Why?...it will just "mysteriously vanish" at the hands of some companies which feel this would threaten their bottom line..
*coughExonMobilcough*
Uh oh, he's comparing his research to that of Einstein -- that's like the Godwin's Law of research. Credibility just shot waaay down :p
My mistake and the stupidity of SI.
I wish everybody moved to metric.
Wikipedia has an article on the Hall-Héroult process, the major method used to refine aluminum oxide into aluminum. Ill save you the time.
"In the Hall-Héroult process alumina, Al2O3 is dissolved in a carbon-lined bath of molten cryolite, Na3AlF6. Aluminium fluoride, AlF3 is also present to reduce the melting point of the cryolite. The mixture is electrolyzed, which reduces the liquid aluminium. This causes the liquid aluminium to be deposited at the cathode as a precipitate. The carbon anode is oxidized and bubbles away as carbon dioxide. The electrical current used by many smelters, has a very low voltage, but massive amperage. This is typically 3-5 volts, but 150,000 amperes."
So now were back to greenhouse gasses and massive amounts of electricity.
Rust never sleeps.
Have gnu, will travel.
Finally, built-in obsolescence for aluminium boats!
I predict that sales of antifouling paint will skyrocket when boat manufacturers get hold of this formula.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
From TFA:
An energy input is still required for this 'fused salt electrolysis' and the question is: will the complete cycle (including the recharge) be more efficient than current electrochemical battery technology? Also, don't forget the system's weight. You've got to lug around aluminum, water and gallium. Additionally, you can't dump all the waste product out the tailpipe, so unlike a fuel that is consumed, you get to carry the aluminum oxide and gallium around for your entire trip.
Have gnu, will travel.
According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, 1000 Megawatt coal plant produces 250,000 tons of ash and 486,000 tons of sludge in a year.
So on a strictly weight-for-weight basis, nuclear is over 22,300 times cleaner than coal per megawatt. The nuclear waste is also highly regulated with stringent disposal requirements (if our politicians will get off their duffs and decide on a place to put it). A large portion of the ash and sludge from a coal plant is simply disposed into the atmosphere or sent to landfills where it ends up in our lungs and our water.
Yes, yes, everyone wants near-zero emission renewable energy. But given that that is currently not cost-effective enough to compete with coal, nuclear is a tremendously cleaner stepping stone that's available here and now, while we do the R&D to get the renewable costs down to where they're competitive.
Yes we do. Nuclear energy is cheap, clean, and plentiful.
Yes, and based on another limited and expensive resource about to peak and go into depletion: Uranium.
And if you bark about "breeder reactors make their own fuel", then you're ignoring the relationship between the necessity of universality in sustainable development and political realities. That equation is fulfilled with North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, and any number of smaller and unstable regimes scattered around the planet who will need electricity as much as anyone else.
Where nuclear energy comes into feasibility is with the IFR, but no one's been able to build one to work long enough to matter, make the liquid sodium safe enough, and when combined with the political will (absent), and the time (WAY too late - as we would have to put a 1 megawatt nuke plant on line every other day for 50 years to even vaguelly match the energy requirements of TODAY - which is 13 terawatts and climbing) it is clear that nuclear power, while it has some few advantages, is simply not going to come to the rescue.
And if you take breeders off the table, you're back to the problem of a limited and depleting resource: uranium.
Now, go home and do some puch ups.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Are you arguing in terms of efficiency loss? It it takes 15.7 kWh to convert alumina to aluminium, and the aluminium releases 15.6 kWh of usable energy when returning to alumina. then there's only a 0.1 kWh to laugh about.
While it is true that Aluminium smelting uses up a lot of energy, the rest of the process is remarkably pollution-free (most of the catalysts are recycled and reused in smelters). As for the energy, there are places in the world that produce vast amounts of clean energy that is used for aluminium smelter. One example of this is Iceland (where I live).
Guys don't you get it? This stuff is like a battery that the car carries around but isn't rechargable. The idea is you pull into a gas station which is more like a grain hopper and pour rocksalt sized particles into your "gas tank". Then you add water in controlled amounts so you only extract as much hydrogen as you need. This is actually one of the better solutions for creating hydrogen on the fly so you don't need to store that pesky gas.
As for using electricity to produce the stuff? Have any idea how much electricity is lost just in sending it over the high voltage lines and at substations and power transformers which then send it to your house? Something around 20% or more electricity is lost just moving it around the electrical grids. This is a good idea and look for other variations of it coming out soon. The only problems I see are that long term storage and transporation of a substance which will react with water in the air. Imagin if a truck carrying a load of this stuff crashes during a rainstorm!
The majority of electricity used to smelt aluminum is hydroelectric.
So, unless you want to argue that the hydroelectric generation burns coal...
*sigh* back to work...
http://www.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/woodall-hyd rogen3.jpg
Thar's Gold In them Waters!
Go easy on the anti-nuclear wackos - sometimes they are all we have to stop nuclear wackos building 1950's designs painted green to funnel government pork into their pockets.
Also I wonder why no chemists or materials scientists are involved. When I was at university there were a variety of cross-discipline projects - even if it just meant getting an applied mathematician in for a couple of weeks.
competitive prices if the recycling process were carried out with electricity generated by a nuclear power plant or windmills.
And hydrogen will be an EVEN BETTER energy source once we get the fusion reactors online to power the cycle.
GRRRRRRR. I'm going to start just laughing at hydrogen people uncivilly unless their proposals start including full cycle Calorie input and output ratios. Why, why, why are these people pushing the idea when we already have the electrical grid in place? Remember, most electric cars would recharge at night. Can we just evolve to the all-electric car? Please?
And who are these people who want a whole new distribution grid? An offshoot of the nuclear industry?
The aluminum is light (atomic weight 13) and you get up to three hydrogen atoms per aluminium atom. Unfortunately, the water is heavy (molecular weight 18) and you get only a single hyrogen atom from it. The resulting aluminum oxide is also very heavy.
What could really make this work is to extract the water from the air, react it with the aluminum and just dump the spent aluminum oxide / hydroxide on the ground. We are in no danger of ever running out of aluminum.
What matters is the incremental processes. If they can come up with a process that converts the residual aluminum oxide back to aluminum (this is the energy input step) while not affecting the gallium that is also present, then we might have a workable system. The efficiency will, of course, matter. If they could make this re-cycling step work from concentrated direct sunlight, that would be even better. So that's the next development phase we need. The initial acquisition of the aluminum won't be as important if we have a cheap efficient way to recycle it in this system.
Keep in mind that any energy system has to have an energy input somewhere and somewhen. A system that lets us recharge quickly is great. Even better if it doesn't lose any of the material used (especially if that material would be toxic or otherwise harmful).
Fossil fuels are the least efficient if you factor in the time it takes to charge them up with energy.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Yes, and based on another limited and expensive resource about to peak and go into depletion: Uranium
Which, of course, is a lie
as we would have to put a 1 megawatt nuke plant
Hint: no nuclear power plant produces as little as "1 megawatt".
Hint #2: over 50 years the existing power generation infrastructure will be replaced ANYWAY. Guess we might as well abandon civilization entirely, since according to you there's no way we can build replacement plants fast enough, right?
Now, go home and do some puch ups.
Now go home and learn the concepts of "honesty" and "numeracy".
"kmac06, aka clueless troll, wrote:..." pot:kettle:black, 'Ralph'
"1 mega-watt reactor"... this alone should clue everyone in that you're full of shit. SMALL ommercial powerplants begin around 1000 mega-watts. Now go away and try to scare some girl scouts.
Hydrogen cars are junk science. Sorry folks, but hydrogen takes MORE energy to make than you get back. A lot more. And Hydrogen is energy poor. Burning gas is cheaper, cleaner and more efficent in a hummer or any SUV. But because you've moved the pollution someplace else (just like the prius) you don't notice that you're paying more, and doing more ecological damage than the exxon valdez did.
Hydrogen power is a JOKE people. Doesn't anyone study physics anymore? What kind of geeks are you if you don't even understand the basics of thermodynamics? Everytime energy changes state you lose some. Fuel cells burning gasoline already generate a couple of orders of magnitude greater power than Hydrogen is capable of. Also we already have the infrastructure to deliver it in place.
I wonder if this would work with transparent aluminum. It might be hard to see the reaction, but you could always sprinkle some of Scotty's ashes in the mix to help make it more visible.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It was on one of those run your car on water sites. Obviously this is just another giant hoax.
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods
Read up on why the GM EV1 was treated as it was. It was illegal to sell the car because of the extremely (???) toxic nature of the batteries. So, they were leased and then returned to the company to be disposed of in a manner deemed safe by the toxic watchdogs. Or so it seems.
Today we have the technology to build a car powered by lead-acid batteries that would sell for not much more than an ordinary cheap car. But it would be a crime to sell such a car in California because of the carcinogenic nature of the lead, the toxic nature of sulfuric acid and on and on. The fact that every car today has a lead-acid battery in it already doesn't seem to matter to these people.
Until we get a sane view of what we are going to do about toxic materials, waste products and people an electric car has no possible future in the US. If one was made by a foreign car company with the understanding they would not be legal to sell in the US it might spur some action. Unfortunately most of Europe is even more wacky about such stuff.
Could South Korea build such a car for their market exclusively?
Engineer-Poet addressed this for "A company called Engineuity... is promoting a roundabout way of making hydrogen on-board vehicles, using the chemical reaction of either of the light metals magnesium or aluminum with water." at the Ergosphere http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/2005/10/from-bad-to -worse.html
The problem is that when AL burns so spectacularly it does not just create Hydrogen- it creates heat which must be used to get anywhere near the efficiency you need. So what, you have a steam engine to capture the energy of the reaction and a fuel cell to use the hydrogen?
This is just not an efficent way to move energy around.
I've been working on hidrogen production since i was in seventh grade, and i don't see very easy to oxidize the aluminium, but there are a lot of methods of H2 production since i went ECO. of course we have another wasted job, because anything i touch becomes GOLD.
?
You're full of shit and FUD. There is far more uranium that can be extracted with more advanced methods than the current mining styles. Beyond that, there are enormous supplies of thorium, which can be bred into fuel. As for breeders, political reality in the end cannot override energy needs. The most politically incorrect methods will be acceptable when the world gets starved from energy. There is NO other method that can provide the increasing energy needs due to progress and the industrialization of developing and third world nations. With green options, you'd have to cover the fucking planet with solar panels and wind mills to manage. With full development of the fission options, there will be more than enough time for the ITER project's fusion offspring to be in full operation. No serious scientist expects ITER to fail, and the world's foremost nations are pouring tens of billions into it for good reason.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
In which case, direct electrolysis of water would be simpler.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The most appealing idea I've heard is using electricity to generate hydrogen to make methane and using the methane in a fuel cell or burning it directly.
I think that "hoping" that there isn't enough carbon in the ground to screw up the atmosphere isn't exactly the best solution to the problem. We already know that there is enough carbon in the ground to have massive climate shifts. We need to be proactively seeking a solution to this issue and not passively hoping that this will all pass.
And "foreign oil" is not the big issue here. The issue is how much CO2 we pump into the atmosphere every day, which the burning of every hydrocarbon (synthetic or not) contributes to. This technology gives us a carbon-free energy delivery device that doesn't require costly pressurized tanks, filling stations, etc. Hell, you could buy a bag of these pellets at safeway. The delivery bag could then double as the waste bag for the alumina sludge. We could offset the extra costs of this method by not having to have special stores (gas stations) dedicated to delivering us this stuff. This is great tech that could have a lot of potential.
Tolerance does not tolerate intolerance, or hypocrisy.
So when do we run out of aluminum? Or is there some reverse process to reuse the metal?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
mmmmm even this produces large amounts of CO2 as carbon electrodes are used which burn off during the process. Besides the large quantities of power being wasted in the process (entropy kicks hydrogen power in the nuts again)
I only drink on 2 occasions when I'm thirsty and when I'm not!
Seems that here in Australia where Oil, Aluminium and most other things are far more common than water, that something which destroys water would be somewhat pointless.
PS: Yes... hyperbole alert for those nit pickers.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
This whole process seems unnecessarily complex to me. React aluminum with water to get hydrogen to run in a IC engine or fuel cell? If you're going to run the hydrogen in a fuel cell, what does this process do that makes it better than an aluminum-air battery? That seems to be a simpler and more direct use of the energy you get from oxidizing aluminum. I would think it would be more energy efficient.
There already is a place to dump it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain/ But it's never going to open as long as people continue to believe Nuclear energy is some kind of demonic source of power.
This is basically a "better" battery because the energy density is fairly high. You don't need much more volume than a gas tank. The mass is higher, but that is probably OK because you still want traction even if you replace the engine with a fuel cell. However, recharging the battery does not look to be all that efficient. I wonder if you could get a current rather than heat if you ran this on a diode?s -selling-solar.html
--
Get solar power at a grid competitive price: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Direct electrolysis would be simpler if you had a power source that you could carry around in a car to do it. Or, if you has a hydrogen storage method that worked well in a car. This is kind of the point here. The volume needed to go 300 miles is the same as for gas.s -selling-solar.html
--
Think of the Sun as Mr. Electron: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Just to add some information, the reference to how much waste a 1000MW nuclear plant produces is wrong. With reprocessing, most of the 33t of "waste" is reusable.
e ssing
:) the sarcophagus of the reactor! With this surprisingly great news, maybe the only way to save the Amazon is to dump nuclear waste all over it - sad but true.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power#Reproc
So assuming just 90% is reused, that results in about 3.3t of actual waste. 3.3t at that densities is less than 0.5 cubic meter. That's one barrel of waste for 1000MW or 1GW power plant per year. And without reprocessing there is enough Uranium and Thorium for few hundred years. With reprocessing, there is enough for a thousand years or more. But then I'm sure we'll be able to come up with Shingle Solar Panels on every roof and fusion so no problem.
PS. For the radiation worried crowd - the Chernobyl disaster actually *saved* the environment around that town. The no-go zone is now one of the best animal and bird sanctuaries in Ukraine and surrounding regions. Endangered birds are now gaining in numbers even having their nests *inside* (well, on the building, not where the core is
This is rather the point - the aluminium is there precisely because it 'contains' a large amount of chemical energy per kg. The system works by liberating that energy.
Whether (some natural energy source -> electricity -> aluminium -> converted to H2 in car -> internal combustion engine -> kinetic energy) is better than lots of other methods for turning natural energy sources into kinetic energy of your car is quite another matter.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Oh, and I guess that H2 production would be an exothermic reaction - with a large amount of energy wasted in the process, and potential for fire if the 'fuel' gets too wet. The best use I can think of for this is "spit on it" hand warmers, or a cigarette lighter that 'runs on water'. It seems to be about as useful as using glow-sticks for street lighting. But if you really want to make it unpopular call the reduction of the Aluminum oxide back to a metal "fuel reprocessing"...
There are perfectly good hydrogen storage methods. They aren't cheap, but neither is aluminum.
300 pounds of aluminum, plus large amounts of water? Quite a bit heavier than a tank of gasoline. Not to mention the complexity involved in refueling.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The hydrogen storage methods are still a little lacking so this looks competitive there. I don't know if refueling would be complex or easy. I just changed ink in my printer and it seemed a little bit of a hassle though less so than fueling my car. But, I didn't need a block and tackle to do either. It is an interesting idea, but I think it won't go far. It might spur some new thinking though.
Not only is Aluminium "solid electricity" requiring 3 electrons per atom, and it's the 5th lightest metal, it is a horrible pollutor. The carbon rods used as anodes burn spectacularly producing vast amounts of C02, and the cryolite that the Aluminium Oxide is melted in releases flourine(!) gas. You can forget Aluminium totally as a way to get to your 'green' car.
I really don't see your point.
Changing the ink in your printer doesn't involve removing 300 pounds of aluminum oxide, and replacing it with (fresh) aluminum alloy, as well as water.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Refining aluminum from the raw ore is definitely energy intensive.
But simply recycling alumina (which is oxygen reacted with already refined aluminum) is far cheaper. The Physorg article alludes to the use of "fused salt electrolysis", which is roughly 90 percent efficient.
That's just the first law of thermodynamics. Too bad the second law of thermodynamics will keep you from actually using most of that energy, since it'll be lost as heat in many, many places of the whole process.
Aluminium is extracted via electrolysis and takes masses of electricity to produce. Hope you're adding this energy into your "zero sum".
No sig today...
"Hydrogen economy" is what happens when/if we figure out how to do energy-positive fusion. Once we have that up and running, the only thing we need hydrogen for is to feed our fusion power plants
That said, I'd like to point out the link the AC posted which had the farcical notion of pulling uranium out of seawater. The energy required to do that, and then refine it into fuel, is ludicrous. Also, the scale it would have to be performed at would seriously fuck up areas of the ocean, which is already wildly overstressed and fucked up. Not a smart idea. The actual fact is: Uranium is a limited resource that is complex, dangerous, and energy intensive to develop. It is not optimal, and it is a limited resource. Thorium is more common, but it takes a very different kind of reactor to be useful (such as an IFR) and those are still very experimental and not likely to come on line.
re: Fusion aka ITER, Fusion was just 20 years away 50 years ago. I would hope that ITER succeeds, but the track record for Fusion research in general is poor, so I'm not holding my breath.
Your point re: politics moving aside with energy starvation is well taken, and one that I trend to agree with, but when you combine massive overpopulation beyond carrying capacity in some godforsaken central asian hellhole, and give them a nuke, the potential for ugly blowback approaches 1.
I agree that the sustainable options (wind/solar) are not optimal, and this leads me to conclude that industrial civilisation itself is in for a massive re-adjustment.
I would humbly suggest a re-definition of industrialism is in order - one characterised by greater localisation of fundamental resources (food, clothing, shelter) and greater self-reliance on the provision of such. An abandonment of some of the signifiers of "wealth" such as air travel, and a greater focus on media/cultural exchange, greater emphasis on community building, depaving the suburbs, reinventing our cities, depopulating the human experiment to a level of natural carrying capacity, and not relying on an energy faerie to pull us out of the hole we're in.
Just as you said :
political reality in the end cannot override energy needs
So too, wishful thinking cannot replace actual energy resources. We can WANT fusion all we want, but that doesn't make it real or actual. It would be nice, but I think there are a variety of compelling reasons why it's not a true solution. Right now, today, the world needs to come up with 13 terawatts. By 2025, the demand is projected to be around 20 terawatts. I don't see anywhere NEAR enough nukes coming on line i nte next 20 years, fusion or otherwise. Hence: for your own safety and welfare, I would recommend "making other plans".
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Ash is often sold as filler. Filler for roads in my area. Often filler for concrete.
Some of it is pulverised and reburnt.
Selling ash is a huge business.
Ash does not end up in landfills.
I hate coal.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
I prefer this one. By some margin.
A while ago I came across something called a Cornish Hydrogen Generator:
http://www.keelynet.com/energy/cornish.htm
Which is a similar type of system, except one of these was tested by BMW. All it uses is an aluminum wire and cylinder for electrolysis in a water bath. The only by product is alumina.
This suffers the same basic issue as the gallium solution:
Recycling the alumina.
This prevents it being carbon neutral at present, but it may be very carbon efficient. Also, by thinking about a global economy based around providing aluminum and recycling the alumina it may be possible to reduce the carbon to almost, if not, zero. The efficiencies of the system suffer, but if using solar or wind energy to be the base power source, the overall efficiency does not matter with renewable/free power sources. The hard (and this may be very very hard) part is making the whole system competitive economically.
Interesting, but do you know how much energy is required to process aluminum?
There is no hydrogen economy and hydrogen in *not* a "green" fuel.
You do realize that reactors generate a lot of radioactive waste besides just used-up fuel? You can't just throw, say, radioactive water (or equipment, pipes, etc.) into a breeder reactor. The fuel waste is easy to deal with, the rest of the waste is a big problem.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
So their process uses as much power as they put in and they are basically hoping for free electricity to make it commercially viable.
And even once they do make those assumptions, it's still not commercially viable:
I can do better than 350 miles for $60 right now, with gasoline.
Do a search for mirrors of LAYO.COM and you'll find that a gentleman built a test device that used aluminum and H2O, performing the same oxidation and releasing hydrogen. He even submitted the device to BMW for testing, to which their only complaint/question was how to filter the aluminum oxide powder.
There is one possible method of creating hydrogen and electricity at the same time. It's called the Supercritical Water Reactor, a type of nuclear reactor that operates at much higher temperatures. The "supercritical" part refers to operating past the critical point of water, not to any nuclear properties. This allows for higher thermal efficiency, and a high enough temperature to directly produce hydrogen gas at the same time. However, the technology is still a long ways off, as there are currently no known materials that can withstand the extreme conditions for prolonged periods (>900 F @ >3600 psi)
I just drop a few pellets of sodium into my car's gas tank (it is half-filled with distilled water of course) and the reaction generates HYDROGEN to run my fuel-cell engine! It's simple!
Bonus! At the end of the day, I siphon out the NAOH (it's Drano® ) and use it it to clean my kitchen and bathroom drains.
Just a small caveat: Make sure your hands are DRY before you drop in those sodium chunks. And don't let that that Drano burn your lips when you siphon it out!
Experimental results + a FREE pony! at tonyking.tk
Note: Pinoqachole is not supplied with the sodium. But we are currently working on using Potassium, and perhaps even Cesium.
The ponies will cost extra, however.
.
- aqk
F U
...and it was forty years ago!!!
I wanted to make helium balloons, so I hit the library and did a little research. I found nothing about how to make helium, but hydrogen was another matter entirely. There were two methods, physical and chemical.
The physical method was injecting a DC current into a box of salt water, which tore the H2 from the O, giving you hydrogen from one electrode and oxygen from the other. Of course, unless the two gasses were separated from each other somehow, as soon as they were released they would react and explode.
This gave me two problems: One, it was too dangerous and two, it would be too much work to construct.
The other was zinc and acid and the book said it released hydrogen only. So I filled a coke bottle with roofing nails (back then roofing nails were steel coated with zinc and coke bottles were thick heavy glass) and then vinegar, and put a balloon over it and let it sit overnight.
The next morning the balloon was almost full. I took it off and tied it, let it go... and it fell to the floor. Something was wrong. Was it really hydrogen? One way to tell was to see if it would burn. Having heard of the Hindenberg I was a little scared to just light the balloon, so I capped the bottle with another balloon and let it fill for half an hour or so, so only a little has was in it. Then I got two coat hangers, taped the balloon to one and a match to the other, lit the match on the stove and held it at arm's length and lit the balloon (yes I was stupid). I got a big yellow fireball out of that little bit of gas. So, if it was hydrogen (the book said it was), why wouldn't it float?
So I took the full balloon to school and put it in my locker. When I got to science class, the first thing I did was to question my teacher.
"Well," he said, "maybe the hydrogen isn't pure."
"Can I test it some how? I brought a balloon full of it, it's in my locker..."
"WHAT??? OH MY GOD!"
He made me get the balloon and take it outside and break it, then I was marched to the principal's office where they nearly expelled me, untill I pointed out that the lesson I learned that day had nothing to do with physics or chemistry, but that in school you are severely punished for wanting to learn. I was let off with a warning.
Of course, the other kids soon found out that "mcgrew almost got expelled for bringing a Hydrogen Bomb to school!"
I was probably the first 8th grade nerd in history to be looked up to by the hoodlum elements and feared by the preppy types. Not until computers came along was any other nerd thought "cool".
-mcgrew
No,No! It's TRUE!
I run my car on sodium and water! See my Hydrogen Ponies comments elsewhere in this thread.
.
- aqk
F U
Put this in your hydrogen pipe and smoke it:
There is more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than there is in a gallon of hydrogen (at STP of course)
.
- aqk
F U
"The Purdue scientists who discovered the effect" - ??? What's next, you are going to claim that Edison have invented the light bulb? I remember reading about this, some 20 years back in a Soviet tech publication. Russki researchers came up with an alloy of Al and Indium (check Mendeleev's Periodic Table, in case you never studied chemistry) to achieve the same effect. I'd hope that they did not filed patents ; )
You can use solar furnaces to decompose Zinc Oxide into Zinc. You can then use Zinc instead of aluminium to create your hydrogen. The reason people are excited about methods like this is that hydrogen is hard to transport. If you can ship around big blocks of zinc, then add water to get your hydrogen.
Paul Scherrer Institute
You can even just use zinc in a zinc-air fuel cell
Zinc-Air Battery
Or you can use Sodium Borohydride
Sodium Borohydride
This discovery has more applications has more applications as a sabotage weapon than for hydrogen powered cars. Nowadays Aluminium is used at a lot of places especially in airplanes precisely because it is lightweight and wont get oxidised to Alumina other than a thin surface layer. If we could develop a way to add the Gallium suspension to a paint anyone wanting to sabotage a plane could just paint it with Gallium paint and in a few months the wings will fall off. If the saboteurs are really lucky it will fall off in battle. Or think of a nation like Iraq fighting an US invasion. They have no air force to speak off but if they can use anti aircraft shells to saturate their airspace with Gallium vapour the Us planes coming in to bomb them would soon be losing wings on a regular basis
**Life is too short to be serious**
Additionally, aluminum smelting almost certainly does not using "electricity" produced from a power plant; instead the smelting furnace is almost certainly heated with natural gas. It's a "fuel to heat" process, as opposed to a "fuel to heat to steam to electricity to heat" process, and therefore likely to be more efficient.
I ran across this URL several years ago and bookmarked it thinking I could use it someday. I'm actually surprised the link still works! If the device really does do what it says it is a shame that nobody has pushed it further.....
http://members.tripod.com/~anon99/water_engine/
Irradiated water gets recycled in a closed loop inside a nuclear plant. The open-loop coolant that gets exhausted out a cooling tower is not radioactive, for obvious reasons.
The actual real waste of a modern nuclear plant is mathematically insignificant compared to ALL OTHER OPTIONS.
This is all well and good in places where the temperature does not go below the freezing point of water.
First in hydrogen bombs. But even in a tokamak breakeven conditions have been achieved. JT-60 did it in 1998, i.e. more energy got out than had been put in. ITER aims to go one step further: make a burning plasma. A burning plasma is one that given bootstrap heat perpetually self-heats itself on its own. After ITER they aim to fix the remaining problem: make the fusion plant cheap, and easy to maintain. The conditions inside a D-T fusion tokamak are hardly forgiving to the materials the reactor is made of.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium - it takes about 55 MegaJoules of electricity to convert Al2O3 into one kilogram of Aluminium. That amount is not "incredible" - it is about the same as energy stored in one kilogram of gasoline.
Self-reliance is not good, because it is the opposite mode of mass production of (whatever) at centralized locations that is most efficient.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
Look at all the things around you that are made out of plastic or demand fossil fuels in their production. Sure - you can take the gas out of the gas tank, but peak oil means peak asphalt. That said, I don't think Walmart et al will close up shop overnight- shipping things by Giant Boat is extremely efficient, and that isn't going to change anytime soon. But it's the goods being shipped that will tend to vanish. The keyboard I'm typing on is made of plastic: petroleum. Every calorie you stuff in your face requires 10 calories of petroleum to get to you (in the form of fertiliser, fuel for farm gear, energy to make the farm gear, shipping it from farm to grainary/storage, shipping it to processor/store, the energy to build the grainary and storage and processors, and then finally you getting into your car to go get and the energy required to build the car itself.
All of that is energy expended or embodied, and right now, that energy is Petroleum. Centralised systems are extremely efficient, but only when subsidised by energy, in this case, petroleum, and to the tune of many many terawatts of power.
You can say "centralisation GOOD! Self reliance BAD!!!" all you want, but the fact is, the kind of massive centralisation of distribution we have, coupled wit the massive decentralisation we see of the population atomised into the suburbs, adds up to a very frail system that is hyper dependent on petroleum. Hence: "self reliance BAD!!!" comes under the "tough shit kid - get over it" department.
Truly - do yourself a favour: grow your own. Start with herbs - they're easy and fun and they make cooking such a pleasure. Then get into simple vegetables. you'll see - it's easier than you think - more complex than you might imagine - but NOT rocket science.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
we need to get a really long pipe to go to a nearby star and suck the hydrogen from there! Bam! STAR POWER!
Balderdash!
Well obviously. One is a gas, and one is a liquid.
But I'm against decentralization of population. I'm not saying we should all live in arcologies, but clearly suburbs are a flawed model. Cities with dense residential cores, such as the one I live in (Vancouver, BC) show that high density urban life can have very high quality (Vancouver is 3rd in the world in Mercer's quality of life rankings). I certainly cannot see conservation as anything but restriction on progress. Perfect example: light bulbs. Only incandescent bulbs have a smooth spectrum which can be filtered easily to match daylight exactly. The rest are non-blackbody emitters, and all of them, be they CFLs, other fluorescents, high intensity discharge, or LEDs, have spiky narrowband spectra with horrible color rendering ability, and no filters are sufficiently wavelength-specific to be effective in correcting these lights. Yet due to conservation issues, Australia, California, and Canada are all getting ready to ban light bulbs that do not meet efficiency standards which would eliminate incandescents from the market. Conservation and efficiency should never, ever, be at the expense of anything else! I say any compromise is unacceptable.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
That's why I mentioned the block and tackle. Presumably you can load this stuff in a block, but it might be clumsy. Don't know what people might come up with.
Actually the fuel waste is difficult to deal with because no one can come close to it during reprocessing. You have to have virtually all the work mechanized. And everything has to be in stainless steel because all substances are very corrosive. Repairs to equipment have to be remote (ie. broken pipe or similar) which causes problem.
The decommissioned plants are relatively easy to deal with because it is just irradiated *light* materials like steel and concrete. These substances are only radioactive for short period of time (100 years or so) and since a reactor is active for at least 50 years, the decommissioning time is very acceptable IMHO. One could build new reactors on site so the decommissioned reactor buildings do not incur much additional costs (ie. security, etc).
The modern alternative to nuclear is to burn coal (no other energy source abundant enough and cheap enough). That releases huge amounts of mercury and other toxins including Uranium into the air. Virtually all of the ocean contamination in mercury (ie. can't eat too much tuna - hopefully this will save tune from extinction, but you never know) is generated from the coal plants. True, you could add precipitators to remove most of this stuff from the smoke, but then you end up with the CO2 problem. So you have to sequester that. The end cost is even more than a nuclear plant and in a nuclear plant at least one deals with the entire fuel cycle and not dump the waste into the air (remember, radiation contamination will affect humans A LOT MORE than animals as animals don't really care about short term (1 or 2 generations until they adapt) birth defects).
Hey, what is the worst that can happen? We could have nature reserves where people dare not enter! (hence I cannot believe why the environmental crowd is not 1000% behind nuclear technology) Also, France has something like 90% of their power from nuclear plants. It also has one of the best (if not the best) air quality of any industrialized country.
You've got me wrong, I'm not totally against nuclear power. What I take issue with is people who claim that breeder technology can eliminate all of the waste problems. It just isn't true, since plants do generate a lot of waste that can't be reprocessed.
We have a -huge- mess at Hanford that still can't be effectively dealt with. I think that speaks against your claim that decommissioned plants are "easy to deal with".
Also, I remember WPPS, it was a financial disaster.
We can talk about how nuclear is nice -in theory-, but both Hanford and WPPS are the -real- results of our attempts at nuclear.
Pardon me if I dismiss some of the happy horseshit talk about nuclear, but it hasn't worked out so well so far, and I think the nuclear optimists are as unrealistic as the solar/wind optimists.
The biggest issues with nuclear power aren't technical, they are political and economic.
A house divided against itself cannot stand.
For reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site
Yes, it is a mess. It is a mess because it was designed not for power production or even safe processing. You can see similar examples of these messes in former Soviet Union. One incident by the enriching plant was that they dumped pure uranium on a pile. The pile got so big that the middle went critical. It actually *melted* inside and no one noticed for a while. Then the Uranium leaked into a lake and they noticed the leak when the lake started to get surrounded by radioactive flies. They traced it back to the centrally-melted Uranium stash.
Current Uranium handling techniques are not comparable to what happened in the "cowboy" days. Hanford would never happen in US, Canada or Europe. I'm not so certain about other countries though, like Iran or Pakistan or India or even China.
Anyway, nuclear power will not harm humanity. I think we will kill ourselves faster over water than through any civilian nuclear accident.
It is great invention! On my web pages, I have my and Tesla's thoughts about aluminum, how can it be used, and improvement of production: http://free-ri.htnet.hr/Branko/index.html