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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."
Because they're converting it all into flammable lifting gas!
Whatever will we do?
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.
The latest nuclear fission technologies are a lot safer than most people believe.
I think you answered your own question there.
Blame Wall Street friend. Myself and many others have said that long term research is essential for the very survival of our race and its pretty obvious to anyone with eyes that wars for resources will replace wars for territory in the future. the problem is on wall street if you don't say "Damn everything but the quarterly earnings!" then your stock is gonna take a big old dump and bye bye buddy.
Personally i believe in a broad approach, i think we should be building at the very least small scale test reactors for thorium and for reprocessing our nuclear waste into usable fuel, we should be investing in battery tech and fuel cells and every other possibility that has any real chance for success because frankly the one that trips over a viable replacement for gasoline is gonna make Gates and Buffet look poor and whatever country they are in will probably have a new golden age but sadly the USA is just too short sighted thanks to the government sucking the dicks on wall street to do anything that the money men don't approve of.
I bet the next big breakthrough will probably come from China, they are investing heavily in science and like Japan in the 50s they are learning and improving daily thanks to all the work we have given them. Remember when made in japan meant shit? In a decade i wouldn't doubt if the same change happens in China. Looking at history one has to wonder if this is not inevitable, if once an empire gets to a certain size the wealth becomes too concentrated and apathy and trying to hang onto what those at the top have becomes more important than innovation and stagnation simply can't be avoided.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I wouldn't have made this post a few weeks ago, but reading other people's comments about hydrogen fuel made it painfully obvious that many people have a fundamental misunderstanding about how the hydrogen economy works: There is no free energy. You cannot convert water into hydrogen with little energy, then burn the hydrogen with oxygen to get lots of energy.
The amount of energy you put in to break water into hydrogen and oxygen has to be more than the energy you get out when you burn (or combine via a fuel cell) the hydrogen with oxygen. There is no getting around this; it is simple thermodynamics. This is why many people refer to hydrogen as a battery, not as a fuel. Free hydrogen is exceptionally rare to find, so when you manufacture atomic hydrogen gas you're storing energy in it like in a battery. When you burn the hydrogen, you're extracting that energy like from a battery.
With electrolysis, typically you're looking at about 50%-70% of the energy you put in ending up in the hydrogen gas. The rest is converted into waste heat. With a non-research grade fuel cell, you're looking at about 50%-70% efficiency there as well (the rest going to waste heat). So for the cycle overall, you're at 25%-50% efficiency. That is, only 25%-50% of the energy you put in to create the hydrogen ends up actually doing useful work, which is absolutely abysmal for a battery.
The cost of materials like platinum is also a bit misleading. The platinum is not consumed during the electrolysis process. While the high cost of platinum does affect the cost of the device used to generate hydrogen, it has no effect on the cost of the hydrogen gas itself. Almost the entirety of the cost of hydrogen gas is the energy used to create it by cracking water.
Most people could care less about the future.
Couldn't care less.
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.
Your way to do it probably had shitty efficiency. 1-2% of the electrical energy probably ended up used to produce hydrogen. With fancy catalysts and carefully controlled temperature, it's possible to improve that efficiency by a factor of 30 or so, with the best methods now getting efficiencies between 30 and 60%. The problem is that those schemes tend to either rely on very expensive catalysts (like platinum ), or they are chemical processes which produce CO2 as a by-product ( steam reforming, in which hydrocarbons are reacted with water to form hydrogen and CO2 ).
What the article seems to speak of is that they've found a catalyst that drastically improves the efficiency of electrolysis, without resorting to expensive materials.
Nuclear is bad. Nuclear is not safe and never will be. It is also going to be necessary for the next 50-100 years.
All strong sources of energy are inherently dangerous and expensive (in absolute terms). They differ enough from each other to make you choose your poison, that's it. For the amount of energy nuclear plants produce, they are relatively cheap and safe.
Coal has many operational issues, but failure is limited to the plant and extremely immediate surrounding area.
Coal plants are failing continuously (as a part of their design), and by doing so they affect much larger area than nuclear plants will ever do.
But you missed my point friend, in that if say Apple WERE to announce they were gonna fund such a thing to that amount of money wall street would take a massive dump on their stock and then they simply wouldn't have the funds.
The entire system IMHO has been taken over by leeches, you have corps that literally are doing NANOsecond trades, now how is that in ANY way helpful to innovation? The original intent of trading stock was like what kickstarter is now, you have an idea and need funding, others believe your idea will work and provide funding for a piece of the proceeds. I would argue that the lack of tech actually helped because one had to focus on the long term.
But now the entire system is completely short sighted because any other view is crucified by wall street, it is the reason why you have companies sitting on piles of money instead of investing it into more plants or better infrastructure, simply because anything that affects the bottom line in any way that isn't immediately positive is shat upon. in my own area neither DSL nor cable has moved a single foot in over a decade, even though the town has grown by over a third, why? Because they are both publicly traded companies and their stock goes down when they spend money on lines but goes up when they buy out some other company, so that is what they do instead.
Like I said looking at history i have to wonder if this is simply inevitable because in every empire you see the same progression, first growth and innovation followed by wealth concentration then finally stagnation and downfall. Just as once the sun never set on the British empire so too it appears our own day in the sun is setting, most likely to be replaced by China and India. lets just hope they find the answer before we are all out of time.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.