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Name: gary

I want 1, wicked show…

Name: spark

He seems very confident, but if his actually talking about the rhodium based catalyst, let me just point out that it’s one of the rarest materials on Earth with a price tag around $100.000/kg. So much for large scale and so much for a message of hope.

Name: sean

re: spark’s comment

Well if he said it costs $100 to make a unit for household use, do you think he’s using Rhodium? Your last statement/sentence infers that you do. Maybe you’re not a very bright spark.

Name: Spark

Well Sean … nice to start off with an ad personam argument.
The only photocatalyst that I know of discovered by professor Nocera is the one using rhodium.
here’s the patent:
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6863781/claims.html
here’s the paper:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/293/5535/1639

If you can show me a different photocatalyst that would be great, but for now stop with the name calling and better find some real arguments.

The annual production of rhodium is in the order of 2-3 tons (so the whole world produces a cubic meter of rhodium per year!). It’s hard to imagine how this could be scaled up. Of course you could create a billion of small devices like this with a really small amount of rhodium (and other rare metals), but that would most certainly influence the rate of the process.

MAYBE this works. I’m just dubious how he can get high efficiency, high rate of the process and make it cheap, all at the same time.

Name: Spark

I actually made an obvious error (as rhodium’s density is around 12 g/cm^-3) and the annual production is equivalent to just a quarter of a cubic meter. For all you Americans having problems with the metric system, that’s less than 9 cubic feet . ;)

Name: Miriel

Hi Spark,

Just wondering when you heard him speak of Rhodium? I went to one his talks just over a month ago and from what I heard they had previously used platinum (obviously not economical) but were now using cobalt and potassium with a molecular catalyst.

I am not that familiar with the resource base for cobalt and potassium phosphates but from what we were told, a small representative model of the system could be made at best with $20.

Name: shuen

When was this? He said 2050 and "in 42 Years". So it should have been in 2008.

Than he´s saying he will produce these things in a year. That would be 2009.

right now it is 2010 and i didn´t hear anything nor i can buy.

I would be one of the first who buy this kind of stuff (even if it is a little more expensive)….

Name: Donnie Jones

I think he is talking about a cobalt-phosphate as the catalyst, not rhodium.

A Self-Healing Oxygen-Evolving Catalyst
Abstract:
A cobalt−phosphate water-oxidizing catalyst forms from the oxidation of Co2+ to Co3+ in the presence of phosphate. We have employed radioactive 57Co and 32P isotopes to probe the dynamics of this catalyst during water-oxidation catalysis. We show that the catalyst is self-healing and that phosphate is the crucial factor responsible for repair.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja900023k

Name: Spark

Thanks Donnie.
Finally getting some reasonable answers with actual data to back this up.
@shuen
Since the publication and patents are from 2009 it’s more likely he made a simple error and it should have been 41 years. I seriously doubt this talk is from 2008.
Also this kind of technology takes a lot of time to get from the lab to mass production. Not only you need to discover something that works in a control environment, but you have to figure out a way to mass produce it cheaply. Obviously it takes time and money to scale this up.

Waiting for my hydrogen powered car/home ;)

Name: Yarrow

I think he’s talking about something real, but his way of presenting it to the public I believe is very misleading. Water is not an energy source as he accidentally states in his lecture. The whole swimming pool thing is wacked. He’s talking about splitting the water in the pool into H2 and O2 once every second. He’s skipping the surface area and solar technology needed to do that! The water is just a medium for energy transfer & storage. The amount of water needed for this process is small, which is good, but I think he’s got people thinking they can get all the energy they need from a couple quarts of water for free. This is not true – they can use just a couple quarts of water to facilitate the transfer of collected solar energy into hydrogen. What’s missing from his talk is any detail on how to get the "cheap solar" he describes. Everyone knows that cheap solar would solve the problem. But we are still waiting for that to happen. Solar cells have dropped in price dramatically in the past 30 years and if that continues we’ll be doing good eventually. But a $40,000 PV system for a house doesn’t even sell well in this country, let alone in undeveloped countries where it would take 3 lifetimes to make that much money. So it may come down simply to cheap solar panels – if we spend as much money on that research as we do on our military we might get somewhere.

His best idea is educating poor females in developing countries – he’s onto something there because this is a well-established method of reducing birth rates.

Name: BB

1 MIT pool/second = 1 Lake Erie every 4 years. I think the Environmentalists would have something to say.

Name: Doug

For BB: The process does not consume water – the same water is recycled over and over as long as you bother to recapture what comes out of the fuel cell as hydrogen is used to generate electricity. Teh analogy with a swimming pool was just to show what the intantaneous usage could be, world-wide. Tiny tiny amount.

Name: BB

Yes, this is true the process does not consume water, but it is how the process would be utilized that is the environmental problem. What he proposes to do is to destroy the power grid and then convert water into hydrogen and oxygen at the water source, such as a lake. He would then distribute these gases all over the world, because their is no more power grid. The gases could also be sent to places were their never was a power grid. Once delivered the gases would then be used to generate electricity and the water created could have other uses. The end result is that hugh amounts of fresh water are redistributed all over the globe and I believe that environmentalists would have a problem with this.

Name: Douglas Gray

Why doesn’t one of you e-mail him and ask him these questions, rather than have an endless debate?

Name: Kirk

I’m going to try and see him talk in the DC area soon (March 2011). Sounds like some very pointed questions would be useful about the material being used the envrionmental impact. I personally the technology being worked on to convert naturally produced methane emissions into energy sources (e.g., from animal manure). Dean Kamen (inventor of Segway) has a box his team has made that is designed to be portable and ready for shipping all over the world with focus on poor agricultural areas with lots of dung and little electricity. Killing two birds with one stone seems smarter than solving one problem by causing another

Name: Secruoser

Can someone explain to me the threat difference in the radioactive cobalt used here, and the uranium used in nuclear fission? Won’t Nocera’s model generate nuclear waste too?

Name: NRGee

So you all think Dan is fibbing? Wow

Name: Tinker

Consider the indestructibility of matter. Solar powered electrolisys would fracture the water, Hydrogen would fuel combustion with athmospheric oxigen with water steam as exhaust.
It’s the PEM Fuel Cell reversed.
High School Science revisited and improved upon.

Name: Tinker

No need to destroy the grid, your surplus energy feeds back to it rewinding your meter to your advantage. Once you are self sufficient, you can always secede from the grid without major political consequenses. In a perfect world, the grid would sucumb to technological Darwinism.

Name: Socean

Humanity will learn how to redirect sufficient amounts of solar energy into our material world through a variety of means, this being one of the most essential.

We will have a super abundance of readily available energy, primarily from a plethora local generating devices operating at very small scales that are cheap to own and even cheaper to operate.

The redistribution of energy sources is literally and figuratively the redistribution of power and wealth.

Everyone having all the power they want is one thing that will help reduce tensions driven by need.

We should all get behind developing these technologies because they bring us all greater degrees of freedom.

In the meantime, help women educate themselves.

Name: Rudall

Portions of this lecture bordery on quackery.

It’s fine to say, "let’s electrolyze one MIT pool a second."

But you ought to tell the young students in the room that
this task would take twice as much electricity as all the world’s powerplants currently provide.

That omission is more than an oversight!

Name: Rich

I would like to know the surface area of cheap photovoltaics needed to power a household with this method. The photovoltaic costs and efficiencies are the limiting factor here.

Name: DrypeDoof

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