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Self-Sustaining Solar Reactor Creates Clean Hydrogen
An anonymous reader writes "A mechanical engineer working out of the University of Delaware has come up with a way to produce hydrogen without any undesirable emissions such as carbon dioxide. The solar reactor is capable of using sunlight to increase the heat inside its cylindrical structure above 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Zinc oxide powder is then gravity fed through 15 hoppers into the ceramic interior where it converts to a zinc vapor. At that point the vapor is reacted with water separately, which in turn produces hydrogen. If the prototype gets through 6 weeks of testing at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology located in Zurich, we could see it scaled up to industrial size, producing emission-free hydrogen."
But it's pointless to speculate about its utility without knowing how much hydrogen a given unit can produce, how much that unit costs, and how much maintenance it will need.
And the four giant robot arms the operator wears don't fill me with confidence.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
But if you burn hydrogen, it creates dihydrogen monoxide, a known greenhouse gas!
This is terrible!
It'll cost pennies!
Never say never. Ah!! I did it again!
You mean if we get rid of them like the Canadians plan to do? Won't that inflate the price of our thoughts by 500%? Egads! Intellectual property will be too expensive for everyone.
.. with zink oxide...making zink vapor...that zink vapor....supply of Zink Oxide again.
Are you German, perhaps?
No, the obvious, cheap, easy way to store hydrogen is to mix it with oxygen. It makes a really stable compound which we could truck around, or send places in pipes.
Are you out of your mind? Shipping dihydrogenmonoxide in trucks on regular roads. Do you have any idea how many people die each year because of dihydrogenmonoxide overexposure? Dihydrogenmonoxide was the main reason for the Fukushima disaster. It can already be detected in drinking water supplies of all mayor US cities. This stuff is dangerous!