In reply to Jones Beene's message of Tue, 3 May 2011 18:16:11 -0700: Hi, [snip] >Maybe the worry is not a future nickel shortage ... so much as good old H2O. >Since you are into the SciFi scene - you know the plot of a future problem >that pops up on occasion - lack of water. This came up as a major element in >the last Bond effort - Quantum of Solace. I guess this was the first movie >where the villain was ecologist, another twist. A bit of trivia: produced by >EON Productions. Presumably not that EON.
There is a huge amount of Hydrogen in water. We are not likely to use it in a hurry, even if we "only" get a few keV / atom. > >Anyway- if hydrogen is the major consumable in the future Ni-H device, then >water supplies could be an issue - since cheap energy can support very large >populations and every citizen will want the heated sidewalk and other >frivolous indulgences. Heck maybe the demand for H2 will mean that too much >oxygen will be released, and that will be a secondary problem. How ironic if >in the year 2525, the problem is not CO2, but O2. Everything is rusting >twice as fast. This is another matter. There is about 1000 times more Oxygen bound as water in the oceans than there is in the atmosphere, so even using 1/1000 of the ocean water for Hydrogen is going to double atmospheric Oxygen, unless we find some other way of binding it into a useful molecule (CO2?) ;^) (Actually starch/cellulose or a variant thereon as a form of plastic may be a better idea. If you are a bit creative you can store quite a bit of oxygen in plastic, e.g. polyester.) However we should be able to stand a 10% increase, from 20% to 22% of the air, which implies enough energy from Hydrogen (at only 3000 eV / atom) to last us for over 7 million years at the current rate of use. If we can't come up with a better alternative in that time, then I don't think we deserve to call ourselves an intelligent species. > >Can we tie Ni-H reactors smoothly to rising sea levels - and use the extra >O2 to terraform Mars?... Mars already has plenty of Oxygen, bound as minerals in the soil. It would be far cheaper and less energy intensive to create it locally than to ship it from Earth. However there is another solution to the problem: extract the Hydrogen from water elsewhere (e.g. Europa/Gannymede), and only bring the Hydrogen to Earth to be used as fuel (carrying coal to Newcastle ;). Because Hydrogen is far lighter than Oxygen, this approach is much more efficient, particularly if a fusion reaction is used to provide the power for the transportation. And who cares if one of Jupiter's moons ends up with "too much" Oxygen? (I suspect that anyone who might be reading this in a few hundred years time would find it "quaint". :) > OTOH if we manage to exploit ZPE or dark energy, >can that somehow reduce the amount of it available for our sun to maintain >its fusion output. Solar fusion itself may be tied to a constant level of >dark energy. If "dark energy" is being consumed by the Sun, then it is already being replaced on an ongoing basis, or we would probably notice, since the Sun converts 4.5 million tons of mass into energy every second (E=mc^2), producing about 600 million tons of Helium / sec. [snip] Regards, Robin van Spaandonk http://rvanspaa.freehostia.com/Project.html
