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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: Joe NYC who wrote (145539)4/19/2002 3:39:29 PM
From: combjelly  Read Replies (1) of 1574735
 
"If my assumption that the source is oil"

Currently it is only an extender. Longer term, there are lots of potential sources for hydrogen. In the '70s, TI had developed a system where they made little single crystal balls of silicon that were doped and etched to form a solar cell. You then put down a bed of these, covered them with water and set them out in the sun. They would crack the water into hydrogen and oxygen. You'd then scavage the oxygen and get the hydrogen. According to NASA, there is a lot of free hydrogen in the Earth's crust. In some places it can be as much as 1000 liters per cubic meter of rock. Now extracting that hydrogen is problematic right now, although there are some wells that produce hydrogen in the US. Or you could use a nuclear reactor to thermally crack water. This would be a good way to make sodium borohydride. I saw one setup where there was this solar cell panel that was intended for use at a filling station. And so on. Except for the hydrogen in the crust, all of these methods use hydrogen as a storage medium for the energy.

"I wonder if there is any merit to the Sci-Fi concepts such as of assembling gigantic mirrors in space"

There have been several studies that indicate it could be done, but you have to have a moon base to be really practical. You would probably want to convert the sunlight into microwaves and beam those. The conversion efficiency is really high with a simple diode.
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