Inexpensive Nanosheet Catalyst Splits Hydrogen From Water

An anonymous reader writes "Traditional methods of producing pure hydrogen are either extremely expensive or release lots of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have developed an electrocatalyst that addresses one of these problems by generating hydrogen gas from water cleanly and with drastically more affordable materials. Goodbye platinum; hello nickel and ammonia."

Comments

Re:Will it work?

[PaulBu]

This article is an excellent example of the types of future-energy storage that we'll need to rely on.

FTFY

I also hoped that that would be some fancy catalyst to convert sunlight + water into O2 and H2 -- sadly, it's just improvement in electrolysis catalist.

This is total BS (from the article):
The electrolysis of water, or splitting water (H2O) into oxygen (O2) and hydrogen (H2), requires external electricity and an efficient catalyst to break chemical bonds while shifting around protons and electrons.

Hell no!!! I remember as a kid, after overgrowing joys of running around electric toy trains, I repurposed pretty heavy-duty DC current supply (couple of Amps up to 24 volts, I think) to doing much neater experiments, and water electrolysis using just a pair of steel nails was the simplest one. If a 8-10 year old in Soviet Russia could do it withouot fancy Pt-based catalyst, I would expect BNL geeks to know how to do it as well -- but no, I would not expect green-washed hyped-up "science" journalists in this country to have a slightest clue! :(

Paul B.

Re:Will it work?

[pixelpusher220]

Nuclear is bad. Nuclear is not safe and never will be. It is also going to be necessary for the next 50-100 years.

Nuclear plants simply can not fail which is why they make them so massively redundant, expensive and exhor. And yet if humans are involved in the design, planning, construction or operation of something, there will be failures.

Newer nuclear plants are indeed 'safer' than previous ones. So is my 2000s honda safer than my 1980s honda. People still die in cars. Nuclear plants will still fail. None has yet failed in a truly catastrophic manner thankfully, but no other source of power has such potential destruction if it does fail catastrophically.

Coal has many operational issues, but failure is limited to the plant and extremely immediate surrounding area. Likewise mining and coal slag ponds are limited to their destructive area. Hydro-dams can be planned around for failure and you can walk in the next day to do clean up.

We need to be investing heavily in renewable techs and energy storage so that it can be grid scale ready down the road, yet we're still giving 40 billion a year to the oil companies who make nearly that much profit each year.