[AR] Re: Fw: Hydrogen / oxygen news
- From: Norman Yarvin <yarvin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2013 16:23:49 -0500
On Tue, Nov 05, 2013 at 02:16:52PM -0500, Ed Kelleher wrote:
>This 1973 study used heat from nuclear reactors to desalinate and
>also produce H2 gas on an impressive scale.
>They agreed electrolysis was too expensive.
>The PDF is really crappy though.
>They mention metal hydrides as form of storing H2 also.
>
>Combined nuclear and hydrogen energy economy : a long term solution
>to the world's energy problem
>http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/lib-www/la-pubs/00269006.html
Uh, that paper says that "As yet, none of these cycles [for
thermochemical extraction of hydrogen] have been proven
experimentally, even on the bench scale."
>Some others ...
>
>Thermochemical production of hydrogen from water, a critical review
>http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/lib-www/la-pubs/00258556.html
That's from 1978, five years later, at which time "The only plant (100
liters of hydrogen per hour) in operation is one at Ispra, Italy...",
and the predicted cost and efficiency for large-scale operations were
about on par with electrolysis.
(At least they'd given up, by that point, on the cycle that required
large amounts of mercury as a reagent, and moved to nicer chemicals
such as sulfuric acid.)
In any case, I'm with Henry Spencer on this: you're going to want a
liquid fuel as the end result. Trying to maintain millions of
installations of an exotic technology, one in each car, is just not
going to be competitive with maintaining just a few large-scale
installations of an exotic technology in centralized
liquid-fuel-production facilities.
And if you want a liquid fuel as the end result, the optimal chemistry
likely won't have molecular hydrogen as an intermediate product
(though it might).
--
Norman Yarvin http://yarchive.net/blog
Other related posts:
