Scientists Achieve Perfect Efficiency For Water-Splitting Half-Reaction (phys.org)

Dthief writes: Splitting water is a two-step process, and in a new study, researchers have performed one of these steps (reduction) with 100% efficiency. The results shatter the previous record of 60% for hydrogen production with visible light, and emphasize that future research should focus on the other step (oxidation) in order to realize practical overall water splitting. The main application of splitting water into its components of oxygen and hydrogen is that the hydrogen can then be used to deliver energy to fuel cells for powering vehicles and electronic devices. The process involves exposing the water to a mass of platinum-tipped nanorods, with visible light driving the reaction. The 100% efficiency refers to the photon-to-hydrogen conversion efficiency, and it means that virtually all of the photons that reach the photocatalyst generate an electron, and every two electrons produce one H2 molecule. At 100% yield, the half-reaction produces about 100 H2 molecules per second (or one every 10 milliseconds) on each nanorod, and a typical sample contains about 600 trillion nanorods.

Comments

Oh well.

[sims 2]

Too bad there aren't any uses for oxygen.

Re:Oh well.

[dbIII]

Nitrogen in a combustion chamber also leads to a lot of nasty pollutants that are difficult and expensive to remove

Not that hard just add water and pipe it away as very weak nitric acid which is pretty well how "scrubbers" work.
At a power station where I did some work the new manager decided he wanted nice white smoke coming out of the stack for PR reasons. So somebody played with the settings on the scrubber injecting a lot of water into the exhaust which came out as nice white steam. That night was very still, the water condensed out of the air and the utility had to pay for repainting thousands of cars in the city that had nitric acid damaging the paintwork.