i guess alchemy is the new field to study in college

We will dance our way to energy independence!

People of Hiva unimpressed.

/sequel airs this year

Neat, but I'm not sure how I would feel about destroying water on an industrial scale

HindiDiscoMonster: Free Radical: We will dance our way to energy independence!

[sharetv.org image 334x250]

*shakes tiny fist*

*shakes other tiny fist*

Felgraf: This is why I hate gold speculators.

Gold is really, REALLY useful for scientific purposes. It has a very nice surface plasmon resonance (an effect that sounds scary, but is fairly easy to explain) at the nanoscale, and, while silver similarly has a good SPR, silver oxidizes really friggen fast, and gold doesn't. Gold is REALLY REALLY handy with nanotech research. It's really easy to make it into a variety of shapes, too!

And we insist on using it for trinkets. It's akin to using helium to fill carnival balloons.

Tillmaster: Felgraf: This is why I hate gold speculators.

Gold is really, REALLY useful for scientific purposes. It has a very nice surface plasmon resonance (an effect that sounds scary, but is fairly easy to explain) at the nanoscale, and, while silver similarly has a good SPR, silver oxidizes really friggen fast, and gold doesn't. Gold is REALLY REALLY handy with nanotech research. It's really easy to make it into a variety of shapes, too!

And we insist on using it for trinkets. It's akin to using helium to fill carnival balloons.

At least gold is infinitely recyclable.  Once helium escapes the balloon, it's gone.

eurotrader: Did Moskovits sit around and think what is the best way to produce cheap energy? He came up with no only gold but platinum too just surprised he did not go with a lab grown diamond layer.

A lot of the pioneering nanoparticle work was done with gold and silver because they're easy to study due to the plasmon resonance Felgraf mentioned.  You can tell a lot about  what you've made by putting a solution of Au or Ag nanoparticles in a UV/Vis spectrometer (a very common, simple to use instrument) and looking at the squiggles.  Other elements require different imaging techniques like electron microscopy, which is more expensive and kind of a PITA to get access to.  My M.Sc. thesis is basically a series of UV/Vis spectra of Ag nanoparticles with slightly different squiggles.

Mytch: Neat, but I'm not sure how I would feel about destroying water on an industrial scale

Once the fuel is "burned" in the fuel cell, you get the water back.

Felgraf: Bondith: A lot of the pioneering nanoparticle work was done with gold and silver because they're easy to study due to the plasmon resonance Felgraf mentioned. You can tell a lot about what you've made by putting a solution of Au or Ag nanoparticles in a UV/Vis spectrometer (a very common, simple to use instrument) and looking at the squiggles. Other elements require different imaging techniques like electron microscopy, which is more expensive and kind of a PITA to get access to. My M.Sc. thesis is basically a series of UV/Vis spectra of Ag nanoparticles with slightly different squiggles.

I'm (trying) to relpicate the results of a paper that winds up crafting some *very impressive* Surfance Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy substrates. you wind up growing these little gold sea-urchins on them, and you can, (in *theory*), get substrates that can give you a visible raman signal with solutions in picomolar concentrations.

I assume by "visible" you mean "detectable"?  Sounds cool, though.  Growing nanoparticles is still half witchcraft, through, unfortunately.

Also I hate benzyl mercaptan.

You and everyone else who's even been in the same room as it.

/organoselenides are worse

eurotrader: Did Moskovits sit around and think what is the best way to produce cheap energy? He came up with no only gold but platinum too just surprised he did not go with a lab grown diamond layer.

It's a plasmonic effect, so the thickness of the gold layer is probably about 1 micrometer or less, and the surface coverage is probably no more than 20%.  (There is space between the rods.)  Covering a square meter of whatever with that much gold (~0.2 cc) would cost you about $200 at today's historically-high prices.

That's not a bad price given gold's chemical inertness.  If the device worked, the gold portion would probably last longer than its owner.

Let's say it converted 20% of incoming solar radiation into splitting water into hydrogen, and you had that one square meter.  At middle US latitudes, accounting for night, clouds, etc., the NREL maps say you'd use about 900 W-hr (3.24 MJ) of energy, which is enough to split ~11 moles of molecular hydrogen daily, or ~22 grams, or ~270 liters at room temperature.

NREL prices hydrogen at about $4/kg, so each day, you'd be generating about $0.09/day with your $200 of gold, which is a 6-year payback.  That's a nice investment, especially if the device essentially never breaks.  Existing PV panels come with 30 year warranties, for example.

Of course, there are huge caveats:
1) You need to earn your money back on the whole device, not just the gold.
2) They aren't anywhere near 20% yet.
3) The cobalt/etc. will not be as durable as its inert metal (gold/platinum) partners.

On the plus side, hydrogen is portable, so there's no reason you couldn't site these things in Arizona or whatever to up your production rate 20-30%.  And there's no reason for gold prices to stay this high based on an endless web of speculators.

Worth continued research.

Felgraf: Bondith: A lot of the pioneering nanoparticle work was done with gold and silver because they're easy to study due to the plasmon resonance Felgraf mentioned. You can tell a lot about what you've made by putting a solution of Au or Ag nanoparticles in a UV/Vis spectrometer (a very common, simple to use instrument) and looking at the squiggles. Other elements require different imaging techniques like electron microscopy, which is more expensive and kind of a PITA to get access to. My M.Sc. thesis is basically a series of UV/Vis spectra of Ag nanoparticles with slightly different squiggles.

I'm (trying) to relpicate the results of a paper that winds up crafting some *very impressive* Surfance Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy substrates. you wind up growing these little gold sea-urchins on them, and you can, (in *theory*), get substrates that can give you a visible raman signal with solutions in picomolar concentrations.

Also I hate benzyl mercaptan.


When I was in college I ate a lot of that stuff.

fnu: [www.se51.net image 850x637]

People of Hiva unimpressed.

/sequel airs this year

Is that Mysterious Cities of Gold? Are they remaking it or continuing where it left off?

chimp_ninja: On the plus side, hydrogen is portable, so there's no reason you couldn't site these things in Arizona or whatever to up your production rate 20-30%. And there's no reason for gold prices to stay this high based on an endless web of speculators.

Uh, water?

You could, however, site these things near Broome, Western Australia, on the coast and have plenty of sunshine, electrolyte-rich water and political stability.  You'd just need to build hydrogen-ready pipelines across the desert to bring it to major cities to convert it to electricity in situ (which is actually more efficient than transmitting it by wire over long distances).

There's a book called Smelling Land that describes this.  It's written by a Canadian and describes the North American situation.  He decries the lack of foresight in building today's oil and gas pipelines to be readily converted to accept hydrogen.  The science behind hydrogen as an energy source is coming along, but after that there will need to be a massive investment in infrastructure to make it happen.

Felgraf: Also I hate benzyl mercaptan.

Really, any simple mercaptan is worth hating.  Branch out a bit.

Mytch: Neat, but I'm not sure how I would feel about destroying water on an industrial scale

1) You get it back when you burn the hydrogen.
2) Above, we're talking about ~200 grams of water per day per square meter.  If we covered the state of Texas with these things and, I don't know, buried the hydrogen in a giant pit, we'd consume 139M metric tons of water per day.  That's ~0.13 km^3/day, so we'd drain Lake Erie in 11 years.  Of course, we'd have 626 billion kW-hr of energy available for each day we stored energy, roughly ten times the total energy presently used in the US every day.

tl;dr: You couldn't make enough hydrogen to put a dent in one lake.  And if you did, you use the hydrogen and get the water back.

Arrived for the MCOG reference
Departing very satisified

/it is a sequel
//animation looks clean on the previews
///damn I'm old

Bondith: Uh, water?

You're vastly overestimating how much water is needed.

One large tanker truck (~44,000 kg) of water would supply 220,000 square meters for a day, which would be producing about $20K worth of hydrogen every day.  You could afford that truck.

The US uses enough water for crop irrigation alone to empty about 11.6 million of those trucks every day, and we grow plenty of things in the Central Valley that way.

chimp_ninja: Bondith: Uh, water?

You're vastly overestimating how much water is needed.

One large tanker truck (~44,000 kg) of water would supply 220,000 square meters for a day, which would be producing about $20K worth of hydrogen every day.  You could afford that truck.

The US uses enough water for crop irrigation alone to empty about 11.6 million of those trucks every day, and we grow plenty of things in the Central Valley that way.

Fair enough.  I defer to your numbers.

Isn't there all that useless gold sitting in the federal reserve and Fort Nox? We can prob get a lot more use out of it by making these rather than letting it sit as a whole bunch of bars in a room for all eternity.

bulok:

Is that Mysterious Cities of Gold? Are they remaking it or continuing where it left off?

Continuing. First two eps aired in Belgium in French and are fantastic, they're on Vimeo.  Picks up right where the first series ended.

Tillmaster: Felgraf: This is why I hate gold speculators.

Gold is really, REALLY useful for scientific purposes. It has a very nice surface plasmon resonance (an effect that sounds scary, but is fairly easy to explain) at the nanoscale, and, while silver similarly has a good SPR, silver oxidizes really friggen fast, and gold doesn't. Gold is REALLY REALLY handy with nanotech research. It's really easy to make it into a variety of shapes, too!

And we insist on using it for trinkets. It's akin to using helium to fill carnival balloons.

Gold is funny like that.  In ancient times, gold was the perfect "precious" metal for trinkets because, being soft and heavy, it was pretty much useless for anything but being pretty.  But with the advance of science we found that gold is actually quite useful.

"I came"

I work in alternative energy, and I will never understand the effort going into PV. You can spend millions of dollars developing Indium-Gallium-Arsenic doped semiconductor triple junction solar cells, and they will never, ever be as energy efficient as taking a tub of water, painting it black, pointing a couple of $30 mirrors at it, and setting a steam turbine above it. Solar thermal routinely achieves greater than 80% energy efficiency. It's insane to ever use any other form of solar energy.

Tommy Moo: I work in alternative energy, and I will never understand the effort going into PV. You can spend millions of dollars developing Indium-Gallium-Arsenic doped semiconductor triple junction solar cells, and they will never, ever be as energy efficient as taking a tub of water, painting it black, pointing a couple of $30 mirrors at it, and setting a steam turbine above it. Solar thermal routinely achieves greater than 80% energy efficiency. It's insane to ever use any other form of solar energy.

Single Point of Failure -- that's my concern.  Efficiencies don't have to be near as high if your power source is distributed over thousands of home and business rooftops.  And if we're going to go solar, might as well make it hard for a single failure to knock out the Eastern Seaboard.

elchupacabra: Tommy Moo: I work in alternative energy, and I will never understand the effort going into PV. You can spend millions of dollars developing Indium-Gallium-Arsenic doped semiconductor triple junction solar cells, and they will never, ever be as energy efficient as taking a tub of water, painting it black, pointing a couple of $30 mirrors at it, and setting a steam turbine above it. Solar thermal routinely achieves greater than 80% energy efficiency. It's insane to ever use any other form of solar energy.

Single Point of Failure -- that's my concern.  Efficiencies don't have to be near as high if your power source is distributed over thousands of home and business rooftops.  And if we're going to go solar, might as well make it hard for a single failure to knock out the Eastern Seaboard.

Right, but couldn't we then have ten or twenty small solar thermal plants per municipal region? I guess PV is a little simpler to implement on a per-building basis, rather than putting a turbine on every roof, but there has to be a middle point somewhere in between.

I think the reason PV is so attractive to many is it's perceived (by the end user) simplicity.   Just point it at the sun and you get usable energy in a form that's ready to use, be it for for batteries via a charge controller or mains voltage via an inverter.  It's also fairly maintenance free with no consumables (ignoring batteries if used) and great for unattended operation.

None of those points above really matter to commercial scale generation - there, efficiency is (or should be) very important and PV actually sucks pretty badly at that while thermal collection fairs better.

Now, for home or neighborhood generation, some company would have to come up with a well-packaged, easy to use and maintain, and *safe* thermal collector/genset

Tommy Moo: I work in alternative energy, and I will never understand the effort going into PV. You can spend millions of dollars developing Indium-Gallium-Arsenic doped semiconductor triple junction solar cells, and they will never, ever be as energy efficient as taking a tub of water, painting it black, pointing a couple of $30 mirrors at it, and setting a steam turbine above it. Solar thermal routinely achieves greater than 80% energy efficiency. It's insane to ever use any other form of solar energy.

The inefficiency is built in elsewhere.  Heat is a lower "grade" of energy than electricity; electricity can be converted into work at near 100 percent efficiency, while heat is limited by the carnot cycle.  So unless you are using the heat directly (to keep things warm) then you lose when you convert it to electricity or work.  And since we need far more energy for work than for heat, solar thermal is limited.  In the last year or two, PV became cheaper than solar thermal for creating electricity, and so a number of planned solar thermal plants switched to PV.

Hollie Maea: The inefficiency is built in elsewhere. Heat is a lower "grade" of energy than electricity; electricity can be converted into work at near 100 percent efficiency, while heat is limited by the carnot cycle. So unless you are using the heat directly (to keep things warm) then you lose when you convert it to electricity or work. And since we need far more energy for work than for heat, solar thermal is limited. In the last year or two, PV became cheaper than solar thermal for creating electricity, and so a number of planned solar thermal plants switched to PV.

Yep, it's cheaper for me, in a northerly latitude, to power a heat-pump water heater with PV than to install a solar thermal system with electric backup.

Bondith: Tillmaster: Felgraf: This is why I hate gold speculators.

Gold is really, REALLY useful for scientific purposes. It has a very nice surface plasmon resonance (an effect that sounds scary, but is fairly easy to explain) at the nanoscale, and, while silver similarly has a good SPR, silver oxidizes really friggen fast, and gold doesn't. Gold is REALLY REALLY handy with nanotech research. It's really easy to make it into a variety of shapes, too!

And we insist on using it for trinkets. It's akin to using helium to fill carnival balloons.

At least gold is infinitely recyclable.  Once helium escapes the balloon, it's gone.

eurotrader: Did Moskovits sit around and think what is the best way to produce cheap energy? He came up with no only gold but platinum too just surprised he did not go with a lab grown diamond layer.

A lot of the pioneering nanoparticle work was done with gold and silver because they're easy to study due to the plasmon resonance Felgraf mentioned.  You can tell a lot about  what you've made by putting a solution of Au or Ag nanoparticles in a UV/Vis spectrometer (a very common, simple to use instrument) and looking at the squiggles.  Other elements require different imaging techniques like electron microscopy, which is more expensive and kind of a PITA to get access to.  My M.Sc. thesis is basically a series of UV/Vis spectra of Ag nanoparticles with slightly different squiggles.

Mytch: Neat, but I'm not sure how I would feel about destroying water on an industrial scale

Once the fuel is "burned" in the fuel cell, you get the water back.

I see smarter/better educated Farkers have already said what I wanted to say

Finally, a use for that unwanted gold jewelry.

Crotchrocket Slim: I see smarter/better educated Farkers have already said what I wanted to say

If it's any consolation, I was Farking when I should have been doing something productive.

Bondith: Crotchrocket Slim: I see smarter/better educated Farkers have already said what I wanted to say

If it's any consolation, I was Farking when I should have been doing something productive.

I think we can all say that.

/Farking from a PV factory.

Tyrone Slothrop: HindiDiscoMonster: Free Radical: We will dance our way to energy independence!

[sharetv.org image 334x250]

*shakes tiny fist*

*shakes other tiny fist*

*shakes grove thang*

fnu: bulok:

Is that Mysterious Cities of Gold? Are they remaking it or continuing where it left off?

Continuing. First two eps aired in Belgium in French and are fantastic, they're on Vimeo.  Picks up right where the first series ended.

I thought that solar powered ship (in the image above) was the only one, and the last time I saw it on screen I think it wasn't exactly seaworthy?

/Haven't seen the original series since I was 12, remember loving it though.