Nanowire Forests Use Sunlight To Split Water

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from IEEE Spectrum's Nanoclast blog: "One of the fundamental problems with fuel cells has been the cost of producing hydrogen. While hydrogen is, of course, the most abundant element, it attaches itself to other elements like nitrogen or fluorine, and perhaps most ubiquitously to oxygen to create the water molecule. ... Now researchers at University of California, San Diego have developed a quite different approach to mimicking photosynthesis for splitting water molecules by using a 3D branched nanowire array that looks like a forest of trees. ... The nanowire forest [uses] the process of photoelectrochemical water-splitting to produce hydrogen gas. The method used by the researchers, which was published in the journal Nanoscale (abstract), found that the forest structure of the nanowires, which has a massive amount of surface area, not only captured more light than flat planar designs, but also produced more hydrogen gas."

Comments

Re:Efficiency?

[hairyfeet]

Besides wouldn't the smarter thing to do to be capturing all the carbon we belch out anyway and using it to make biofuels thus actually cutting down on the amount of greenhouse gasses? hell that might even stop the outsource hemorrhaging we've been having in this country where all the factories go to Asia where nobody gives a fuck about greenhouse gasses.

While coming up with new ways to produce power is good ultimately we need to be working on ways of bring the current damage DOWN without simply moving pollution to the left as we have been doing. Lets face it folks our 40 plus years of environmental regulations has done fuck all except kill our economy because thanks to globalism the corps can simply go poison the third world while still having access to first world markets. look at how over 10% of China's farmland is now toxic from heavy metals and other pollution. I'd say the best bet I've seen so far is biodiesel farms set up next to factories. This way we can keep the factories going while turning what would have been pollution into something we can actually use.