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Breakthrough solar cell captures CO2 and sunlight, produces burnable fuel

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Re: Breakthrough solar cell captures CO2 and sunlight, produces burnable fuel

#141

Post by posterboy »

nhebb wrote: post #95
Animats wrote: post #35

"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.

A high rate of comments without upvotes degrades a story's ranking, you seem to have done the right thing. I don't know exactly how much flaming there has to be before that kicks in, though.

Re: Breakthrough solar cell captures CO2 and sunlight, produces burnable fuel

#142

Post by DougWebb »

im4w1l wrote: post #135
eggy wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The thing with falling-of-roof deaths is that they are poisson distributed. If 25 people fell off roofs then maybe if we are unlucky 50 people will fall off roofs this year. But no amount of bad luck will ever make 10,000 fall off roofs the year after. 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 peopl…

Millions of people? Where do you get that number? We've had two devastating accidents with nuclear reactors, and one that came close to being devastating. All three were older designs that were more dangerous than the designs we could build today. The combined death toll is in the hundreds to thousands, at best. You don't get up to millions of deaths unless we start firing nuclear weapons at each other.

Re: Breakthrough solar cell captures CO2 and sunlight, produces burnable fuel

#144

Post by Aelinsaar »

onion2k wrote: post #140
Aelinsaar wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just a "Bullshit" option.

With the majority of articles about cutting edge science, very few HN readers would be qualified to state whether or not it's a breakthrough or bullshit. The option would protect HN from the bullshit, but it'd also hide the breakthroughs that people believed too good to be true. I think that'd be an overall drop in the quality of what we read here.

You're not wrong, but maybe on HN at least many of those people can be counted on not to vote out of reflex, unless they do really bring something to the table.

The other simple, sad fact is that the big breakthroughs that have some initial traction issues stick around. Often people point to the very early history of SR/GR, but it's worth pointing out how that turned out. When a shocking breakthrough is actually a shocking breakthrough, it ends up producing results that speak for themselves.

Until then, when it comes to extreme claims, so many more are just "bullshit" than "breakthrough". Our lives are finite, so it's not wise to ignore the role of triage in those lives.

Re: Breakthrough solar cell captures CO2 and sunlight, produces burnable fuel

#145

Post by Aelinsaar »

stephengillie wrote: post #133
Aelinsaar wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just a "Bullshit" option.

Don't care, Dislike, Disbelieve, Downvote, Doesn't belong on HN. It just feels like a spectrum. Maybe we could rate each thread on a scale of 1-30, ranking where we think it should be on the page?

Or maybe pick from a number of descriptors just like the ones you listed, and if one breaches a certain threshhold, it gets tagged with "Widely Disbelieved" or the like.

Re: Breakthrough solar cell captures CO2 and sunlight, produces burnable fuel

#147

Post by selimthegrim »

fernly wrote: post #119

Can anyone comment in a knowledgeable way about the chemicals involved? 1. tungsten diselenide 2. an ionic fluid called ethyl-methyl-imidazolium tetrafluoroborate Just offhand I see selenium in #1, and fluorine and boron going into #2. There's some expense there, and some handling and exposure dangers. If you have a lot of these cells around, are there public health dangers either in handling or in disposing/recyclin…

WS2 should be a relatively inert wafer/flake, the desirable property is the so-called van Hove singularity in the electronic density of states that makes it ideal for solar cells.

Re: Breakthrough solar cell captures CO2 and sunlight, produces burnable fuel

#148

Post by kelvin0 »

Another interesting concept from Daniel Nocera a few years ago (Sun Catalytix), seemed to be full of promise as this one.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkanellos/2014/08/26/mit-c...

It looks like these great promises never quite reach the level where they can get to market and create the impact they claim. Trust me, I really wish it were different, and I root for each and evey one of them to succeed. Maybe military and big corp. snatch the tech before they reach consumers (most likely).

Re: Breakthrough solar cell captures CO2 and sunlight, produces burnable fuel

#149

Post by delecti »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #127
mattashii wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Cold, water, sunlight, no crops, existing infrastructure for moving fuels. Alaska? There's even high CO2 there from wood stoves (Alaska is 4th per-capita). http://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/state/analysis/

Alaska is so enormous and sparsely populated that I doubt much that the residents do will have a significant impact on the ambient CO2 levels, compared to a state like Texas or California, which are about 80 and 250 times more population dense for their size.

I agree with all the rest of your factors, though high CO2 is likely not a mark in Alaska's favor. My main concerns with Alaska would be suitably large cleared land area to collect sunlight without damaging the environment, and not having panels get covered in snow in the winter.

Re: Breakthrough solar cell captures CO2 and sunlight, produces burnable fuel

#150

Post by gregschlom »

adwn wrote: post #121
taneq wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if it's completely inorganic, plants (or algae cultures, etc) are a necessary comparison for anything like this, but that never seems to come up. It's like announcing the invention of the motor car without comparing it to a horse.

> Even if it's completely inorganic, plants (or algae cultures, etc) are a necessary comparison for anything like this, but that never seems to come up. Probably that's because plants are typically only 2-3% efficient when it comes to their use of sunlight, and then it's still a long way (energetically and logistically) to usable fuel or electricity. Plants are really not a good comparison benchmark here.

Given that we are currently using plants such as corn to make biofuel (at an industrial level, not just in the lab), I think it's actually a very valid comparison.
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