New Sunlight Reactor Produces Fuel 269
eldavojohn writes "A new reactor developed by CalTech shows promise for producing renewable fuel from sunlight. The reactor hinges on a metal oxide named Ceria that has very interesting properties at very high temperatures. It exhales oxygen at very high temperatures and inhales oxygen at very low temperatures. From the article, 'Specifically, the inhaled oxygen is stripped off of carbon dioxide (CO2) and/or water (H2O) gas molecules that are pumped into the reactor, producing carbon monoxide (CO) and/or hydrogen gas (H2). H2 can be used to fuel hydrogen fuel cells; CO, combined with H2, can be used to create synthetic gas, or "syngas," which is the precursor to liquid hydrocarbon fuels. Adding other catalysts to the gas mixture, meanwhile, produces methane. And once the ceria is oxygenated to full capacity, it can be heated back up again, and the cycle can begin anew.' The only other piece of the puzzle is a large sunlight concentrator to raise the temperature to the necessary 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The team is working on modifying and refining the reactor to require a lower temperature to achieve the two-step thermochemical cycle. Another issue is the heat loss which the team claims could be reduced to improve efficiency to 15% or higher. Since CO2 is an input, the possibility exists for coal and power plants to collect CO2 emissions to be used in this process which would effectively allow us to "use the carbon twice." Another idea listed is that a "zero CO2 emissions" is developed along these lines: 'H2O and CO2 would be converted to methane, would fuel electricity-producing power plants that generate more CO2 and H2O, to keep the process going.' The team's work was published last month in Science."
Equal parts excitement and antipathy (Score:4, Insightful)
Another idea listed is that a "zero CO2 emissions" is developed along these lines: 'H2O and CO2 would be converted to methane, would fuel electricity-producing power plants that generate more CO2 and H2O, to keep the process going.'
So basically, it would be a solar-powered station that could run around the clock using methane as a storage medium. I know that for as awesome as this sounds, it is equally unlikely to ever come to fruition to the extent that it is explained here.
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The article said it had a 15% conversion rate.
You are better off using compressed air and turn a turbine.
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From the article;
'Currently, the system harnesses less than 1% of the solar energy it receives" and 'William Chueh suggests that efficiencies of 15% or higher are possible'.
So 15% has not been reached yet
Re:Equal parts excitement and antipathy (Score:5, Funny)
gasp, or wait until they build better reactors, or gasp, wait until they scale to MW size reactors, or gasp, use it in places where turbines make no sense, or gasp, use it in addition to turbines.
oh my god, he's being asphyxiated from the device's CO2 emissions! someone help!
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Or we could stick tubes up Cow's asses to harvest methane.
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Did anyone note the 15% efficiency?
Not exactly rocking that boat, not clear that it is cheaper to implement than photocells, useless at home. Interesting, and maybe addresses a way to turn the sunlight into tankers of liquid fuel, but ....
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Would also enable regenerative atmospheric reprocessing on board a closed-system vehicle, like a submarine or a deep-space spaceship.
Both would require something ELSE as the main power source, such as a fission or fusion reactor-- Thy CO2 reprocessing that this technology offers would be just to keep the air breathable.
(In the case of a deep space flight, the CO produced could be rapidly fed to algae to liberate the remaining oxygen, and to produce nutritious algae flakes for your breakfast in the morning.
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A 3000o furnace in a submarine?
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This solves the Batteries issue. You can burn Methane in your car and this can supply that Methane without all the CO2 and drilling.
Loads of Potential (Score:5, Insightful)
The summary covers a lot of it, but this is pretty fascinating (if it reaches production): something that can be added to the exhaust of a fossil fuel power generation station that reduces the carbon footprint and provides fuel to use in either that or other processes in addition to supplying oxygen for other processes. All it really takes is concentrated sunlight for an energy source.
I'd be interested to see in a few years what other uses are figured out for it.
We live in interesting times...
Mars (Score:3)
Could be useful for producing fuel and possibly oxygen at the same time on Mars. While the sunlight intensity is about 43% vs earth, atmospheric diffusion is less so the solar energy arriving at the surface is about 59% of earth. The effect of much lower gas pressure is beyond my powers of deduction. One thing the article glosses over is whether the process produces free oxygen during the heating phase, which would be very useful on Mars.
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Re:Loads of Potential (Score:5, Informative)
And that's what's probably the better long-term goal here: Convert atmospheric CO2 into some gasoline-like fuel, and use that as fuel in more mobile or space-constrained applications, where it generates CO2. You are back to a closed loop again, and humanity can be sustainable on our current resources. (With the external energy input of the Sun.)
Of course, you'd be limited by the amount of energy you can harvest from sunlight, but that's really a problem no matter what you do, in the longer term...
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harnessing just .01% of the sunlight that falls on just the Earth's surface can provide the current power requirements of humanity. Never mind all the solar power that is just flying past the Earth with nothing interacting with it. It is a massive, effectively unlimited power source that can sustain several billion times what we use today.
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Which doesn't do us any good if we can't affordably and in large quantities convert photonic energy to electrical and chemical energy.
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Look up solar furnace in the all knowing wikipedia.
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Sure it does. You just need to concentrate it with reflectors.
Unless you know about some wave-canceling problem with reflector arrays that no one else is aware of... in which case, please share, it'd be an enlightening read.
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But your solar plant "freeing up" fossil fuels is not removing CO2, those freed up fossil fuels are still adding CO2 to the atmosphere. This system removes CO2 during production which is released again during burning, so overall, it's carbon neutral. But as Philomage has already replied, there is no reason this can't be in addition to solar plants.
The point is that cars still largely run on gas, and a carbon neutral way of producing gasoline is a better short term solution that solar power and electric car
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Because my car can burn Methane if I spent ~$1000 to convert it. It would be cheaper to buy an electric car than convert mine to electric. Plus we already have all the infrastructure to deal with Methane.
Headline! (Score:5, Funny)
4th Time This Month
Alternate idea (Score:5, Funny)
I've discovered a system that allows sunlight, groundwater, airborne CO2, and a few other elements to be converted into substances which can easily be used for heating fuel, building materials, and even in some cases food. It's really amazing, and costs relatively little to set up and even less to maintain. It's also aesthetically pleasing, so you get very little complaint from the NIMBY crowd. In fact, this system is so simple that you'll often find it in the front and back yards of ordinary single-family homes, apartment buildings, and office complexes.
Not that this idea isn't potentially nifty, of course.
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The NIMBY crowd will possibly get annoyed with you when try and harvest said resource and when you use it as fuel.
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Harvesting perhaps, but using I don't see as too much of an issue as long as you pelletize it first.
Pellet stoves and pellet heaters produce very little smell or smoke, and burn the fuel much more efficiently than say-- a fireplace.
(Can also utilize grass clippings and garden waste, once pressed into pellets.)
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He could be acutely aware of that, and still have a valid question.
Since gardening doesn't prevent patenting what's described in TFA, he's perfectly correct.
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*laugh* If only "something which already does this" was the discrimination to grant a patent or not ... if you can patent "something we've been doing for hundreds of years, but with a computer", I fear this would be no deterrent.
All about cost efficiency (Score:2)
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Maybe it's less efficient, but so what? The source is free, so even if it is less effiecnt, if the total energy can be maintained, then it's a wash.
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Maybe it's less efficient, but so what? The source is free, so even if it is less effiecnt, if the total energy can be maintained, then it's a wash.
Welcome to EROEI energy returned on energy invested. Lets say you can build a plant that makes 10 million barrels of crude oil equivalent over its lifetime. If it takes less than 2 million barrels of crude to dig the materials out of the ground, pay the folks whom maintain the plant, and finally pack it in the landfill when its done, you made a profit of 8 million barrels.
On the other hand, if it takes 20 million barrels of crude to refine the materials, build the plant, maintain the plant, decommission t
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Welcome to reality, price of oil is going up, and batteries have not come far enough. This means burning those barrels now to build the plant and selling them later via your plant could make you real money. Even if that is not true, my car can cheaply be made to burn Methane, it cannot cheaply become an electric car.
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If the EROEI is negative, there's no point at all. You'd be better off leaving those barrels in the ground, and use them later.
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Effectively what they're doing is turning sunlight into chemical energy. The process sounds complex at first glance, so can it be more efficient than other methods of capturing solar energy? From a technical POV the percentage of sunlight captured is interesting. But from a business POV the costs are interesting, and I think overall more important: real estate footprint, amortized capital costs, and operational costs. Where do these fall relative to other methods?
Well, best comparison model is probably farming, where your typical crop runs about 1 or 2 percent efficiency from sunlight to glucose but these guys can almost make methane at 15% efficiency. Also fertilizer and insecticide costs are zero and theoretically you can produce whenever the sun is up regardless of outdoor temperature.
So I'm thinking it would be a bit more capital intensive and much less risky than industrial farming.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency [wikipedia.org]
How expensive is this thing Cerium? (Score:4, Interesting)
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According to http://www.chemicool.com/elements/cerium.html [chemicool.com]
Cost, pure: $162 per 100g
Cost, bulk: $1.20 per 100g
Source: Cerium is the most abundant of the lanthanides. It is not found free in nature but is found in a number of minerals, mainly allanite, bastnasite and monazite. Commercially, cerium is prepared by electrolysis of the chloride or by reduction of the fused fluoride with calcium.
The increased cost of the pure element Ce comes from refining it via electrolysis from it's naturally occuring state in various rare minerals. The article does not seem to mention the energy costs of refining the Cerium. So, although with this element, no electrolysis is needed to separate C from O2, electolysis is needed to obtain the element itself. Nothing is free (except Linux maybe).
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If need be the electrolysis can be done with solar or nuclear power. The real question is how much of it does this need and how often must it be replaced.
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Re:How expensive is this thing Cerium? (Score:5, Informative)
That strange and exotic metal Cerium, is it at least cheaper than gold? How rare is this? Admittedly it sucks to have our oil stuck under their sand, but trading it for our Cerium stuck in their jungle is not a better solution either.
It's strange and exotic, at say, McDonalds or Pick n Save food store. On the other hand, Home Depot probably sells cans of it and its widely industrially available in bulk and used for all kinds of things.
Its extremely cheap compared to gold. Heck its pretty cheap compared to nickel, tin, and only about twice as costly as copper. Its about ten time as expensive as bulk raw aluminum per pound.
Its a relatively common semi-industrial metal used in all manner of catalysts and especially grinding processes. Cerium Oxide grinding paste sells for about $10 per pound. You can pay more retail in small cans if you'd like, or perhaps you could contract down to 50 cents per ounce if you bought a unit-train of railroad cars worth of it.
Ask your local (working, not retail) jeweler, whom probably has some quart cans of different size grits for polishing stuff.
Unlike the polishing / grinding industry, the catalyst industry would probably recycle heavily. So I'm thinking it would remain relatively cheap even if usage increased.
Re:How expensive is this thing Cerium? (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerium [wikipedia.org]
http://www.radiochemistry.org/periodictable/elements/58.html [radiochemistry.org]
India, Brazil, USA, Sweden.
It's the most abundant of rare earth metals, and is low to moderate toxicity.
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It was first found in Switzerland an
Old News (Score:4, Informative)
This has already been discussed two years ago here http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/08/01/06/1620228/Scientists-Recycle-CO2-with-Sunlight-to-Make-Fuel [slashdot.org].
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And the efficiency is still extremely poor.
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And the efficiency is still extremely poor.
Who cares what the efficiency is? What matters is the cost:efficiency ratio. As long as it's cheap enough (I have no idea if it is) you can build as many as it takes to make up for the low efficiency. (Note that cost includes land to build them, however much that is).
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Sure, but a poor efficiency is going to make it harder to get a good EROEI ratio.
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If it's not good enough, we should have more research, not less.
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The point is that people have been researching this for over two years and no increase in efficiency. They are coming up with the same problems as two years ago and have not made any advancements. This looks to me like Cal Tech repeated the research done by Sandia National Laboratories and is calling it new. They appear to be at the same stage Sandai was two years ago.
Patent trick (Score:3, Interesting)
From GHG to pollutant to GHG and pollutant (Score:2)
So, we end up with ground level ozone and CO2. Yay.
Nuclear (Score:2, Insightful)
or better yet, rather than wait for some pie in the sky orbital solar array... how about use a nuclear reactor so we can make this a viable option NOW and get the infrastructure in place. Once these devices are in common use, it would be economically prudent to convert them to solar power as soon as the tech was available. Making hydrocarbon fuels from nuclear power would
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Building nuclear reactors and dealing with the waste ain't like dustin' crops, boy!
This + thorium reactor + cryogenic CO2 separation (Score:2)
Using a cryogenic separator, pull CO2 out of air (now considered a waste product or at best sold as dry ice) and use it as feedstock, and power the ceria reactor with solar during the day and thorium at night... Then reformulate (again, using thorium power) into common hydrocarbon motor fuels or other hydrocarbon-based product (fertilizers, plastics, etc) precursors.
Unless, of course, you build a gigantic Solar plant that can provide power for all phases of the process, but given that we have the thorium f
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Please shut your trap, you are making too much sense.....
Re:CalTech? (Score:5, Informative)
So it was *mostly* CalTech guys, using Swiss equipment for testing and further development.
Oil = yesterday (Score:2)
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Oil goes *lots* of places, really quickly, thru an incredibly large network of pipelines all over the world. And in Really Really Really Big Ships that carry it half way around the world at 20 knots.
It's that ease of transportability along with the fact that pumping continues day and night (almost) regardless of the weather which means that people will want to use Oil for a long time.
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I think the goal is more to get something good out of removing CO2, instead of a very slow and gradual change of benefiting the atmosphere.
Mind you, if the goal was to just remove CO2, they do have plans to build new skyscrapers with trees up high.
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True, but you can release the energy later, at a different location, or in more concentrated bursts. All of which could make the energy more useful.
Re:Simply Amazing ~ Free Energy (Score:4, Informative)
I believe we've been thinking of it for decades ... but, apparently, it's hard to actually do on a large scale and affordably. At least, that's kinda the impression I've gotten over the years.
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We've been using coal [wikipedia.org] for thousands of years for various purposes.
It may have become more prevalent, but fossil fuels have been in use for a long time.
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Putting stuff into space resolves the reliability issue, but only multiplies the
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I find it truly amazing that we can utilize this gigantic ball of burning energy that shows up every single day to help power things on Earth. Why haven't we thought of taking advantage of this abundant, renewable and FREE resource before????
Absolutely. We should send ships to that gigantic ball of burning energy to bring some back to Earth for our needs. Someone call Cillian Murphy!
Renewable Energy (Score:2)
Sorry, but every time I see solar (or geothermal or wind or tidal) as described as "renewable", I get pissed off.
How exactly do you think we would "renew" the sun when it runs out of energy? Use a big laser to push photons back in?
--Joe
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Renewable on Earth's timescale. Long before the sun runs out of fusable material, it will probably turn into a red giant and devour all the inner planets, Earth included.
And if we manage to go colonize other planets, they'll probably have stars too, which we can also use "solar" technology to extract useful work. The method is renewable until the universe ends, as long as you're within reasonable distance of a star. Your argument is purely semantic, and you should probably stop getting pissed off about it.
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I find it truly amazing that we can utilize this gigantic ball of burning energy that shows up every single day to help power things on Earth. Why haven't we thought of taking advantage of this abundant, renewable and FREE resource before????
MTBF, on an annualized basis, is almost exactly 12 hours. On a month to month basis, especially in polar areas, it approaches zero roughly once per year.
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Which is why we use this to make Methane that we can use during those periods.
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Why haven't we thought of taking advantage of this abundant, renewable and FREE resource before????
Because it involves a risky and highly experimental procedure called 'going outside'. Our best scientific minds admit they have no adequate theoretical model of the conditions in that realm of existence, but intensive computational simulation techniques suggest that it may contain 'girls'.
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Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Funny)
You would think with someone who can manage to type out the chemical chain you would know the sun doesn't shine at night. SO you need to STORE the energy.
But no, you go on poo-pooing the idea without bothering to think in any logical or rational manner. We certainly don't have enough people like that already~
Have you considered working for Glen Beck?
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This is the downside of the interwebz and google. Dumb people don't know they're dumb anymore. They can google for some out-of-context fact or figure and assume they know it all.
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Technically... the Sun is still shining at night, just not on you. I think it has to do with the Earth rotating and stuff... :-)
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This does not make any sense. A simple chemical reaction of methane burning is
CH4 + 2*O2 -> CO2 + 2*H2O + 890 kJ/mol energy freed during the process.. So in order to convert CO2 and water back to methane and oxygen you need to spend the same 890 kJ/mol energy. Okay, you get the energy from the sun, but why not to use the sun to generate the energy directly without doing the CO2 conversion back and forth?
Because we're "experts" at storing, stockpiling, and using methane gas, but attempts to store sunlight for later use, perhaps by bouncing it between two parallel mirrors or something, is way beyond our (current) technology.
Also ask a petrochemical engineer about the way cool things you can make given a large supply of methane. Pretty much any organic chemistry compound (with pretty obvious exceptions, like you're going to need some metal atoms from somewhere if you want to make organometallics, amines are
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Indeed, this part made no sense to me. Why would you put energy into producing a methane only to burn it for electricity?
The whole point of going to methane/syngas/ethanol is because you can store it and transport it, and use it for applications that require more concentrated energy than solar or batteries will give you. You're going to have unnecessary losses
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There are certain applications where hydrocarbon energy storage makes sense. High power electric motors and batteries are still very expensive compared to an internal combustion engine of the same output. Batteries simply don't have the power density to run airliners. It's easier to ship fuel to generators at remote outposts than charged batteries.
If you were simply dumping this energy back onto the grid, you are correct. You would just use a normal solar plant directly. The 40% efficiency conversion y
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Because my car can burn methane, sunshine does not seem to have the same propelling effect.
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I wouldn't say horribly inefficient. Most polycrystalline silicon cells get 12-15%, which isn't too bad. Some research groups have made PV cells that get 40-60%. The problem is that they don't do direct fuel conversion - you have to then use the electricity to do electrolysis or drive other chemical processes, which are inevitably going to be lossy. So you get 12-15%, run it through two or three processes that are 10-50% efficient, and suddenly you have 1% or less solar-to-fuel efficiency. Which, yeah, tota
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What can the environmental community possibly find wrong with this?
Probably will end up as something like "producing the required 10 pounds of cerium causes environmental damage equivalent to burning 10 kilobarrels of crude oil, yet only produces energy equivalent to 1 kilobarrel equivalent of burned crude oil before the catalyst disintegrates or whatever" So you'd be 9 kilobarrels ahead if you'd just burn the crude oil.
Very much like how making corn alcohol is a great way to manufacture the equivalent of one barrel of crude oil, assuming you're willing to burn the equiva
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You're wrong. Corn ethanol is slightly positive, just darn near not and it loses out cost wise without subsidies.
Re:Re-re-re-repost! (Score:5, Funny)
This reactor produces one of the most important components of a Hydrogen Bomb, and thus should be banned! And everybody knows that reactors are evil, and will cause the China Syndrome (whatever that is), which will kill us all. Reactors are well known to explode in a nuclear conflagration, as well as poisoning everyone within a 1000 mile radius before they do!
Of course environmentalists are going to hate this.
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I am an environmentalist, in that I think only people who are so stupid as to be bordering on sub human could possibly think that what we do to our environment doesn't effect us. I feel, and this is a moral point, that people who disregard the ill effects of their actions on the lives of othe
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i'd be interested in seeing those stats (as another Melbournite).
btw, check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor [wikipedia.org]
i'm not saying go down the pressurized water reactor path (with it's associated "waste" problems), but i think that nuclear power presents far more possibilities than those that have been investigated, like the ability to get rid of all that nuclear waste by burning it for power (including the lighter fission products).
also, being of anglo-celtic descent, i am well aware of
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Well, if we could get it to operate net-positive with a solar photovoltaic system to extract CO2 from the air, they'll probably cheer.
Granted, I like this idea. I've considered a wood-and-charcoal and solid-to-liquid fuel economy on sustainable forresting; but fossil-to-CO2 with buffers isn't so bad either. The problem is, of course, we don't create a huge dense CO2 cloud with this; drawing enough CO2 from t
A more immediate likely problem (Score:5, Interesting)
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Which is why burning Hydrocarbons is much better for the ozone layer than burning pure hydrogen...
Plus if we have a hydrogen economy for the next 100 million years we could conceivably lose enough hydrogen to space that the sea levels lower significantly and the O2 concentration in the atmosphere gets so high that stuff just starts burning a lot easier.
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Not really, ozone is constantly replenished by our friendly nearby star. And once H2 reacts with ozone it's just a harmless water vapor.
The problem with CFCs - they essentially catalyze O3 decomposition, while not being affected themselves.
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According to this [mindfully.org] Hydrogen in the atmosphere would put holes in the Ozone layer, just like CFCs.
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Comparing hydrogen to CFCs is a bit of a stretch. First CFCs were used as a propellant that was INTENDED to be released in the atmosphere.
Second the reaction of hydrogen with ozone results in water - one H2 molecule will affect 2 O3 molecules H2 + O3 = H2O + O2.
The chemistry of CFCs is much more detrmimental, in that each Cl ion will affect thousands of O3 molecules as it converts into ClO which then reacts with another ozone molecule resulting in O2 and Cl. This frees up the Chlorine ion to continue the
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Now factor in the simple fact that all leaked hydrogen will naturally rise through the atmosphere to the ozone layer, and that ozone is naturally "hypergolic" with hydrogen --the two chemicals instantly react
Not quite, although you clearly know enough chemistry to have confused yourself, or accepted someone else's confusion.
Molecular hydrogen is far shorter lived in the atmosphere than inert CFCs. That's why CFCs were such a problem - they hang around in the troposphere long enough to mix up into the stratosphere. Molecular hydrogen is for the most part scrubbed out by the hydroxyl radical (OH) in the troposphere (via H2 + OH --> H2O + H and bacterial decomposition by soil).
So, any effect of hydrogen leaks o
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I was fully aware of the catalysis problem posed by chlorine in the ozone layer.
But none of the detracting replies, except perhaps the last, paid attention to the fact that in a hydrogen economy, leakage of hydrogen will be as constant a thing as production of ozone by solar ultraviolet. The only question is, which rate will be greater? If a huge worldwide hydrogen economy leaks the gas faster than ozone can be formed, then t
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Yeah, we should probably just stop trying. After all, we'd stop being disappointed that way.
"You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is 'never try'."
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You can [wikipedia.org] generate heat and electricity from hay. A cogen plant can burn almost anything, in fact.
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I think you're ripe for the other version of the joke: Yes, I can, in fact, build a car that runs off bags of mowed grass and other biofuels. And not only that, its exhaust can be recycled for energy. What's more, it can handle rough terrain, and even -- get this -- self-replicate!
It's called a horse.
(And currently, ethanol is a [crappy] way of having plants store sunlight energy in form cars can use, after a little processing.)
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Since when do plants store energy in a way that's efficiently useful to us?
My house is heated by energy stored in 30-40 year old plants (growing on my land).
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don't fall for the propaganda! (Score:2)
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You know, it's people like you that keep us from the Star Trek future of tolerance, peace and plenty that Osama bin Laden is trying to lead us into.
Gee, I always thought it was the laws of physics. Learn something everyday here on Slashdot, I guess.