131–140 of 157 posts
Interesting that it's a combination of hydrogen and carbon monoxide that it produces. Wonder what the safety implications are.
Prior to the use of natural gas, such a mixture was used for lighting and cooking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_gas I guess it won't be much different than natural gas from a safety standpoint.
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There are plenty of areas of this planet where plants don't grow because the climate is too harsh (not enough water and/or extreme temperatures)
I understand your point, but this system also requires water, and therefore does compete at that point as well. Higher temperatures also have a negative effect at the efficiency of solar panels, but they are indeed a lot more resistant (typically lower temperature=better efficiency for solar panels).
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> as usual, the PR is excessive I think articles that over hype lab results make it to the top of HN because there is no downvote button and flagging them doesn't seem appropriate. I wish there was a "meh" option.
Or just a "Bullshit" option.
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To be fair, I never read anything about fusion being 'just around the corner'. The most optimistic estimates I know of talk about commercial viability in a 30-50 year timeframe.
The most optimistic estimates I know of talk about commercial viability in a 30-50 year timeframe. Yes, and they have been saying that for 50 years . . .
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To be fair, I never read anything about fusion being 'just around the corner'. We've finally gotten a little smarter about the hype. There were great expectations for fusion about 40 years ago. Here's a shady group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Energy_Foundation that used the hype to raise money: In 1977, Executive Director Morris Levitt asserted that nuclear fusion power plants could be built by 1990 if the U…
I was approached by nuclear fusion advocates during a 1981 Anit-Nuke demonstration in NYC. I have always been scientifically-minded, so it actually set me on a course of reading up on all things nuclear. A lot of the marchers were not generally educated on nuclear science. Aside from military uses of nuclear science, there are a lot of obstacles to developing anything nuclear, fission or fusion. I think we would be f…
Deaths from fusion and nuclear on the other hand are very unpredictable. It is easy to imagine that year after year, no people die. And then suddenly millions of people die. That means that equating actual danger with observed-deaths-so-far is just not possible.
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Flue gases with a high CO2 content are better than cheap; people will actually pay you to get rid of them. And we have a lot of them (this is kind of the problem in the first place). If you look at something like the exhaust from an oxyfuel turbine, you can get 70/30 N2/CO2 with relatively high purity. For this reason, I'm always skeptical of atmospheric capture projects. It's just got to be more efficient to capture…
Actually if the CO2 absorbent is efficient it is not much harder to capture CO2 from the atmosphere than from flue gas. The key really is the CO2 flux rate which wind provides. The real advantage of atmosphere capture is you can do the capture where the cost is lowest, not where the CO2 is emitted.
Indeed. This brings us to the issue of volumes. A useful carbon capture plant needs to capture at least 100 000 tons of CO2 per year (then we need "just" ~ 10 000 such plants). This means each of these minimal plants has to process an air volume of 250 billion cubic meters of air per year. At an air speed of 1 m/s (you can't flow too fast or there is no time for reaction), and assuming a wildly optimistic 50% capture from the filtered air, you need a reaction area of over 15 000 square meters.
Mind you, that's the area of the membrane which processes air. Add the auxiliary stuff around it, you can add at least another factor of 100 to the area, so each of your 10 000 plants have to be 1.5x the maximum planned size of the Tesla Gigafactory. And we're being optimistic.
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Flue gases with a high CO2 content are better than cheap; people will actually pay you to get rid of them. And we have a lot of them (this is kind of the problem in the first place). If you look at something like the exhaust from an oxyfuel turbine, you can get 70/30 N2/CO2 with relatively high purity. For this reason, I'm always skeptical of atmospheric capture projects. It's just got to be more efficient to capture…
Cool idea to go straight to the source. I wonder if the same type of technology would be applicable. Likely not based on rate of reaction.
"Nanotechnology" again. It's just surface chemistry, people. It's nice that they can do this in the lab, but as usual, the PR is excessive. "The ability to turn CO2 into fuel at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline would render fossil fuels obsolete." At least get to pilot plant stage before issuing statements like that. Especially since UC Berkeley announced a similar breakthrough last year.[1] Wikipedia points…
> as usual, the PR is excessive I think articles that over hype lab results make it to the top of HN because there is no downvote button and flagging them doesn't seem appropriate. I wish there was a "meh" option.
The number of solar cell 'breakthroughs' that you read about in a given year is >= 5 or so, but 3 years later nobody even remembers what they were about. Meanwhile, the real improvements are incremental and process cost related, and those improvements then get eaten up by tariffs.
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> as usual, the PR is excessive I think articles that over hype lab results make it to the top of HN because there is no downvote button and flagging them doesn't seem appropriate. I wish there was a "meh" option.
Is it excessive? It certainly doesn't seem to be BS. It's published in a reputable journal (which doesn't make it true). It discusses several of the questions raised by Animats directly (though I wouldn't say it answers them conclusively). I do agree that the university press release isn't going to critically evaluate the work of its own researchers. That's too bad, perhaps, but it hardly renders the original result…
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> as usual, the PR is excessive I think articles that over hype lab results make it to the top of HN because there is no downvote button and flagging them doesn't seem appropriate. I wish there was a "meh" option.
Or just a "Bullshit" option.
