Sandia hunts hydrogen fuel alternative (Hydrogen cars by 2010)

[cthrumatrix]

Sandia hunts hydrogen fuel alternative
Eric Lai

When Detroit auto giant General Motors Corp. went looking for a partner two years ago to help develop a promising hydrogen fuel alternative to gasoline, the decision quickly became a no-brainer.

"As they say, it's no secret that there's hydrogen in the hydrogen bomb," said Jill Hruby, director of physical and engineering sciences at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore.

The lab officially unveiled its $10 million, four-year joint-research effort with GM this week.

snip

http://www.bizjournals.com/eastbay/stories/2005/03/14/story7.html

The wheels are slowly turning looking for alternative resources for oil.

[doubleplusgood]

1. $10 million over 4 YEARS ?

A drop in the bucket. If only half as much had been spent on alternative energy over the past decades as the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the development of "clean, safe, cheap" nuclear energy, just think what we might have now.

[hatrack]

2. Gosh, they're really going all out, aren't they?

$10 million over four years. Ooh. :eyes:

[Charles19]

15. That's enough funds for what?.... like 4 people to work on it (n/t)

[StopThief]

18. 12 scientists and. . .

20 assistants.

[Blue_Tires]

6. i agree

[Massachusetts]

14. Ditto

[BornLeft]

7. Money spent

on 2 Iraq wars= 300-400 billion? Wonder what MIT would have come up with that amount of money researching alternative fuels?

[Gregorian]

3. Cart before the horse, again.

Basically, we must have a hydrogen production infrastructure. We need a way to make hydrogen that doesn't rely on OIL! idiots.

[amandabeech]

4. Or natural gas, which is the most common source of hydrogen

and the fossil fuel burned to provide heat for the process.

Of course, we could do electrolysis of water using coal generated electricity. Wouldn't that be special?

[Trillo]

19. What about Solar Hydrogen?

"Using special titanium oxide ceramics that harvest sunlight and split water to produce hydrogen fuel, the researchers say it will then be a simple engineering exercise to make an energy-harvesting device with no moving parts and emitting no greenhouse gases or pollutants."
>snip<

"Solar hydrogen, Professor Sorrell argues, is not incompatible with coal. It can be used to produce solar methanol, which produces less carbon dioxide than conventional methods. "As a mid-term energy carrier it has a lot to say for it," he says."
http://www.unsw.edu.au/news/pad/media/2004/aug/Solar_hydrogen.html

[bemildred]

5. If you don't stop burning carbon, you are just wasting time. nt

[DireStrike]

8. They said we would have them by 2004 or 2005 at the latest

We won't have them until oil is $200 a barrel.

[patcox2]

9. Hydrogen is not an energy source, its a storage medium.

Hydrogen solves nothing. Its not a "fuel" in the sense that it is a source of energy, it is only a fairly efficient means of storing energy which still has to be produced through coal or gas or oil or nuclear power plants.

Bush is huge on fuel cells, also powered by hydrogen, and I am convinced that the only reason is to encourage going back to nuclear in a big way.

On the other hand, I am not against that; nuclear waste disposal problems are something we can conquer, I think, easier and quicker than we could ever deal with global warming and the pollution caused by fossil fuels, China's coal is more of a threat to the earth than France's power plants.

[Gregorian]

11. And photovoltaics

Good post, if I may say so. Thanks. I feel like we're getting the message out.
Photovoltaics are at the 50 percent efficiency range. Now we need to start producing them.
Of course no amount of engineering will help the problems caused by six billion consumers. But at least we need to move in the right directions.

[currents]

16. So is gasoline and electricity

What's your point, do you want a car that runs directly on sunlight?

[Coastie for Truth]

10. $10 Million/4 Years Level of Effort

That is the level of effort of a couple of profs and post-docs. Nothin'

[Tesha]

12. The "hydrogen economy" is a smokescreen for Nuclear Energy, Inc.

There's one reasonable way to separate hydrogen right now: nuclear
energy from good-old fission reactions carried out in good-old
fission reactors.

The reason that BushCo is pushing "the Hydrogen Economy" is that they
want to put the defib paddles on the chest of the nearly-dead fission-
based nuclear energy industry. With commercial nuclear power dying
and the military being forced to phase out their graphite-moderated
(read "~Chernobyl-style") production reactors, it's just getting
too darned hard/too expensive to get the plutonium, highly-
enriched uranium, and tritium that they need to make the next
few generations of nuclear weapons, but by promising us a hydrogen
tiger in our tanks to replace gasoline, they're sure we'll all fall
in line and say "Yes, sir!"

And the saddest part is: they're correct.

Remind me again why Reagan substantially defunded our nuclear
*FUSION* programs back in the '80s?

Tesha

[reprobate]

13. there's hydrogen in the hydrogen bomb,"" Huh? Where's the hydrogen?

Oh, yeah. That's why hydrogen bombs are so light, right?

The real comment on the state of education here is that so many will believe this to be true.

[Tesha]

17. Actually, there is.

> "There's hydrogen in the hydrogen bomb,"
> " Huh? Where's the hydrogen?"

Lithium deuteride is the principle fuel of the fusion part of a
thermonuclear weapon. And, as you know deuterium is simply ²H,
an isotope of hydrogen.

Tesha