What Hydrogen Needs is its own Elon Musk? Maybe they found one...

Indeed. That's what I've read as well...T

 

(Proposed) fusion reactors generally use hydrogen isotopes such as deuterium and tritium. Deuterium has a natural abundance in sea water.

 

But a fusion reactor would still need elemental hydrogen (D2, T2) and not heavy water (D2O, T2O, etc.). So, energy involved in that. Plus tritium is essentially zero natural abundance, so it needs to be made in a nuke reactor.

Hmm. Wonder how much heavy hydrogen fuel it would take per annum to fuel a tokamak. Cool thread!

T

 

You can breed more tritium in the tokamak itself using lithium. You would use electrolysis to release deuterium gas from heavy water which is created by chemical exchange. The amount of energy required for electrolysis is orders of magnitude lower than the output energy of the tokamak.

 

Makes sense. Thanks. This seems interesting.

https://www.iter.org

T

 

.... and may I share the irony of having spent part of the earnings on my investment in PLUG on this gorgeous fossil-fuel-burning ICE vehicle? Sold some shares on Aug 31st, and had this delivered Sept 3rd... Now that's what I'd call a win-win... LOL!
Cheers,
- Art

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Beauty! What is it?
T

 

It's a 1977 Maserati Khamsin, 5-speed manual.. Thanks for asking.. Image Unavailable, Please Login

 

Hey Art. I sat in that one a week or two before you did. (It looks like you took care of the wheels).

 

Following this thread. No opinion yet. Pardon me if any of the below is naive.

As a way to obtain Hydrogen:
Over 25 years ago I worked on the design for an air separation plant. One of the products was hydrogen. I recall the process was to compress and cool the air so that each component dropped out to liquid as it reached its vaporization temperature. (All were far below zero degrees).

Regarding Hydrogen as a fuel for combustion:
Can't it just be burnt by combining with the Oxygen in air? By products would be water vapor and whatever impurities were in the air anyway.

Regarding electric cars:
As others have stated, currently the dirt is not eliminated but only moved from the car's propulsion system to some other central plant.
Here in NYC we get 40% of our power from Indian Point Nuclear Power Station. I've heard that the rad waste pools are slowly leaking into the Hudson River.
Almost all of the rest of our electricity comes from fossil fuels.

 

Hydrogen is clean on the burn. The issue is that it's generation, currently from natural gas, is not green. As you said, the point of pollution is changed from a moving to a point source. Theoretically, it should be easier to scrub the greenhouse gases from a fixed source, but I do not know if anyone is doing capture on a large scale.

Separation by cryogenic methods is energy intensive I would guess. Boiling point of hydrogen is -423 F per Wiki compared to -320 F for nitrogen and -297 F for oxygen, the two main components of air.

T

 

Yeah, I'm not surprised people passed on it - pretty much everything except the body, glass and exterior trim is a mess: The engine bay, suspension, electrical systems need a ton of work. Cheers, - Art

 

Electric cars give the possibility of alternate generation methods that don't require fossil fuels. For instance, lots of folks with electric cars have solar panels on their house that produce enough electricity to power the car.

 

ICE can easily run on bio-ethanol which is not exactly fossil fuel - that has not proved to be very popular though.

 

I think a lot of bio-ethanol is sourced from food crops like corn...T