OT: Hydrogen fuel cell for cars..

Who said that the separation should be done in the nuclear reactor itself ? It is just about the temperature, not neutron flow in a reactor.

When writing my original reply, I wrote a funny comment about Fukushima hydrogen explosion (i.e. one time hydrogen generation), but decided to delete that chapter, since the blame was not japs but the yanks who sold the unstable power plant to a geographically unsafe area.

I sink the better car shoot nod use hi drogen. The better car shoot use a spring. I once had a toy car with a spring in it. It is ferry clean and does not pollinate the envy ronment.

Jou can save energy bye reversing the teeth gear and rewind the spring when breaking.

Simpli city to charge by electic drill rotate.

Me scent this to Elonia Musq and jou hear soon enough yes.

The weight of the spring needed for practical use would be bigger than the car, or one would be stopping every 300 feet to rewind the spring.

Your little car weighed an ounce of tin. The spring motor assembly inside it weighed as much as the 'car' it pushed.

That will not work scaled up.

Unless they create a super spring material that is ten times lighter than spring steel.

My book says 1200 C. You would need to sustain high pressures as well, unless the reaction has a LOT of volume or a tiny output requirement. Then there's the loss of energy when you cool down the product, and the corrosive nature of hot, high-pressure oxygen, to deal with. Separating the H2 and O2 at high temperatures goes against entropy, so there's a lot of little safety requirements related to storing explosive gas mixtures cooling at 1000 C...

Electrolysis sounds efficient, safe, easy.

Yes, but it takes the fun out of it!

Jamie

I especially like the way that you two are all about criticizing what others attempt to do while never offering one iota of what we can do to deal with the obvious problems our current ways of living create. Or am I wrong about this and the two of you have given your ideas on how to solve our energy problems?

Fossil fuels are the *only* thing at the moment. Popular Mechanics said I would be driving a very 50's looking nuclear car by now... what did I do wrong that I don't have one?

BTW, *all* of the energy you get from burning H2 comes from the electricity you use to make it... NONE from the water. What do you think the H2 and O2 combine to produce??? They just reform the water they started as.

Sadly, shifting 1000 C heat out of the core of the reactor isn't trivial, and you certainly can't shift it far enough that the explosive potential of an industrial scale thermal dissociation plant wouldn't be enough to disrupt the reactor core.

The hydrogen came from the reaction of water with the zirconium cladding of fuel elements - it's slow below 900 C but gets quite fast when the metal is warmer than that. There's nothing funny about the explosive potential of hydrogen - it forms explosive mixtures with air over a very wide range of concentrations.

You just explained why this can't possibly be true. If someone bought the patent and "shelved" it, that doesn't make it a secret. The entire point of granting patent is to make them public. So once the patent expires (which would have happened decades ago) the invention is public domain and we would all be filling the water tanks in our cars.

The grown-up version of this is flywheel storage. It's been used for trains and urban buses.

Yeah, that part has always been pretty good. I bet most of the 10% is in the batteries.

And it *won't*...

What is it in energy that brings out all the crazies?

Exactly, anyone can do "easy"...

Yeah, OK, so how about this: beeswax contains "hydrocarbons having odd-numbered straight carbon chains from C_21 to C_33". So, we have proof-of-concept for solar-powered hydrocarbon fuel synthesis with zero carbon footprint, made using fields of weeds in conjunction with colonies of apis. It doesn't feature drone delivery, however, the transport is handled by females (workers).

Your task: engineer that synthesis for higher productivity with less resources.

Do you have funding? What exactly is your need for odd-numbered straight carbon chains from C_21 to C_33? Is there much of a market?

Plants are about 0.1% efficient in extracting energy from sunlight and storing it in sugars. If you start with a photovoltaic cell you are a long way ahead of the game, and you don't have to mess with carbohydrate chemistry or bee-keeping either either.

I stand corrected concerning conversion from electrical energy to motion energy.

Last part is perfect and correct analysis; the problem is that the hype (to sell the dodad) was rather extreme and ignored the chemistry you so eloquently described.

That is a rather impressive list. Implies reasonable hope.