New Catalyst Allows Cheaper Hydrogen Production 191
First time accepted submitter CanadianRealist writes "Electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen is very inefficient without the use of a catalyst. Unfortunately catalysts are currently made of crystals containing rare, expensive toxic metals such as ruthenium and iridium. Two chemists from the University of Calgary have invented a process to make a catalyst using relatively non-toxic metal compounds such as iron oxide, for 1/1000 the cost of currently used catalysts.
It is suggested this would make it more feasible to use electrolysis of water to create hydrogen as a method of storing energy from variable green power sources such as wind and solar."
Re:hydrogen equals poor storage of energy (Score:3, Informative)
Per kilogram it is more dense energy dense but not by volume. You still have to carry somewhere around 6 times the volume of hydrogen to equal the same volume amount of gasoline. Look at wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
Hype as usual (Score:5, Informative)
Basically the same catalysts have been reported previously [acs.org]. In this new paper, they don't bother to highlight the fact that their films are extremely thick, so of course they get great catalytic activity (though it's an oxide, so the series resistance might just be a problem...)
nuclear weaponry != chemistry (Score:3, Informative)
While we are at it, E=mc^2, all matter has the same energy density. Stop making useless comparisons. If you have a fusion reactor in your phone, my anti-matter+ air battery will beat it. What we care about is usefulness. Hydrogen fuel cells have good energy density for the mass yes, but for the volume the suck.
Re:It might be helpful. (Score:5, Informative)
People seem to think that electricity is efficient. In practice, very large amounts are lost during transport, and not only during production.
Less than 5% of the power in the US is lost in transmission. This is significant, but hydrogen has many special problems which will probably make your idea a non-starter for the foreseeable future.
Re:hydrogen equals poor storage of energy (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It might be helpful. (Score:5, Informative)
Hydrogen is a much smaller molecule than methane which means that it's harder to make pipes and tanks which don't leak. In addition it reacts with a lot of things methane dosn't react with. So there is less choice of materials to make those pipes and tanks out of.
Re:It might be helpful. (Score:4, Informative)
Less than 5% of the power in the US is lost in transmission. This is significant, but hydrogen has many special problems which will probably make your idea a non-starter for the foreseeable future.
Problems such as the fact that hydrogen electrolysis loses way more than 5% of the energy. It was around 50% last time I checked and most of the new research that gets mentioned on slashdot completely fails to mention efficiency at all leading me to believe they have not improved it.
Re:hydrogen equals poor storage of energy (Score:4, Informative)
The term "hydrogen bomb" has always been a misnomer. Also most modern weapons dispense with the fusion altogether - the secondary is simply another fission core imploded by the primary radiation rather than by conventional explosives. Fusion it seems has gone out of style and with today's accuracy is no longer needed aside from boosting which is rather trivial.
Weapons that do use fusion mainly employ fusion as a neutron generator to cause fission in a fissile tamper thus dramatically increasing yield (fission 1%-fusion 15%-fission 84% portion of yield respectively). The weapons that use fusion for primary weapon effect are either banned and out of production (so called neutron bombs which is basically just a bomb as mentioned above without the fissile tamper) or are three stage weapons so huge as to be impractical these days like the Tsar Bomba. Some bombs produce tritium by bombarding lithium deutride with neutrons from a fission "spark plug" in the secondary which is in turn fused producing neutrons for the above cycle... but this can hardly be called a "hydrogen bomb". "Lithium bomb" would be better.
Of course this is all open source regurgitation.