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Inexpensive Nanosheet Catalyst Splits Hydrogen From Water

Posted by Soulskill on from the i'll-order-a-dozen dept.

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."

3 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Will it work? by Githaron · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I want to know why we have not gone nuclear across the nation. The latest nuclear fission technologies are a lot safer than most people believe. Renewable energy is a nice thought but it is not going to do it in the short term. Perhaps in the future when it is more advanced but not right now.

  2. Re:Will it work? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Solyndra did not fail because of any technological fault or even internal corruption.

    They failed because China shattered the price on solar panels, with their own subsidized production, which meant Solyndra couldn't effectively compete.

    People are seeing the wrong lesson from what happened. It's like the flooding in the upper Mississippi. People got all worked up over the dams and reservoirs not working, but they never noticed that the reservoirs were kept full because of their use in fishing. Which made people money. Or like the California power crisis. Everybody swore up and down that the problem was California hadn't built power plants or some such, but they didn't notice that it was Enron's deliberate shut-downs of functional plants in order to create an artificial crisis. So they could make money.

    Perception and reality are often quite different.

  3. Re:That's not where most of the cost comes from by loshwomp · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Almost the entirety of the cost of hydrogen gas is the energy used to create it by cracking water.

    Don't forget that you have to compress the H2 before you can use it, too, and that takes a huge amount of (usually electrical) energy. Enough energy that you could put it into a battery electric car instead and drive a significant fraction of the distance the fuel cell would take you without the stupid fuel cell.