The OPAL neutron reflector “leak”: Greens full of nonsense.

Australian Greens senator Scott Ludlam has again this week called for Australia’s 20 MW OPAL research reactor to be closed down, following reports that a minor problem with the neutron reflector in this “tank-in-pool” reactor has yet to be rectified.

The facility has been out of operation for 11 of the past 14 months, during which time Australia has had to rely on costly imports of medical and scientific radionuclides from foreign suppliers in South Africa and Canada.

(Thanks to ANSTO for these images. Click through for large high-resolution images.)

The OPAL reactor core sits in the centre of a heavy water neutron reflector, which itself sits within the reactor’s large pool of light water, as we see in the above diagram.

In the centre of the circular heavy water vessel is the nuclear fuel itself, an array of 16 fuel assemblies. The large and small holes that pass through the entire height of the reflector, into the reactor core, support the generation of products such as transmutation-doped silicon and medical and scientific radionuclides as well as supporting neutron irradiation experiments. Several different neutron beamlines are also installed into the reactor, set up for different neutron spectra, including a liquid deuterium moderated cold neutron source.

Here, the square reactor “core” is clearly visible in the centre of this photograph, illuminated strongly by its own Čerenkov radiation, with the round neutron reflector surrounding it, pierced by the aforementioned ports for the irradiation of samples, with the greater reactor pool, containing light water, surrounding that.

The purpose of the neutron reflector is to improve neutron economy in the reactor, and hence to increase the maximum neutron flux – neutron flux being a fundamentally important metric of the performance and usefulness of a research and isotope production reactor.

To maximise the neutron flux or neutron economy in the reactor, heavy water, being a good moderator, basically a material from which elastic scattering of neutrons readily occurs, is used to construct a neutron reflector, immediately surrounding the reactor.

You’ve got light water from the pool seeping into the heavy water neutron reflector that surrounds the reactor. So, the light water from the pool is “leaking” into the reactor components, in towards the reactor. The reflector vessel is kept at a lower pressure than the light water at ambient pressure in the reactor pool. Any leakage pathway at all will allow light water to seep into the reflector vessel, diluting the heavy water. This issue was first identified in December of 2006, following commissioning of the new reactor, and attempts have been made to address the problem during an extended shutdown, which have been somewhat, but not totally, successful.

The sole consequence of this is that it dilutes the expensive heavy water. Of course, some people, and some media reports, seem to persist in documenting such a “leak” as though it were luminous green radioactive goo tricking out into suburban Lucas Heights.

If the heavy water is diluted to any significant extent, the efficiency of the neutron reflector is diminished, and the neutron flux that is achieved under nominal operating conditions is diminished, making the reactor less efficient for neutron beam experiments, neutron irradiation or radionuclide production. There is absolutely nothing here of any health physics or safety significance, at all, period. This dilution of the heavy water in the reflector vessel has absolutely no significance with regards to safety of the facility.

The Greens have derided ANSTO’s comments on the nature of the fault as “spin” and link these technical concerns to some kind of supposed, imaginary potential for safety concerns in the future. Of course, Ludlam (nor the rest of the Greens) wouldn’t know what a neutron reflector was if it bit him in the arse, and he has a proven track record of carrying on fervently about issues of nuclear science and technology, whilst possessing an alarming lack of understanding of such science and technology; we’re used to it amongst some members of the public, but it’s completely unacceptable for a federal politician.

Once the heavy water in the vessel becomes diluted, the only way to un-dilute it is via the same methods of deuterium enrichment such as those originally used to make it – such as distillation, or the Girdler sulfide process. In the case of a high deuterium concentration, as in a tank of somewhat diluted heavy water, distillation is the best option. Apparently, ANSTO are planning to construct a small-scale heavy water re-distillation system for online re-enrichment of some of the heavy water passing through the reflector circulation loop. This will fully counteract the problem, and allow the use of the reactor with the fullest efficiency for research and isotope production.

Anyway, Senator Ludlam and the Greens are not just content with calling for the reactor to be shutdown until the heavy water dilution issue can be rectified or nullified, however – they are quite adamant in calling for the permanent shutdown of the reactor.

“We think the safest solution for this reactor is for it to be shut down and for the waste to be contained properly,” Greens senator Scott Ludlam said this week. Importing radionuclides from international suppliers such as in South Africa and Canada could continue, he said.

In addition to the production of medical radionuclides, the reactor is used to produce neutron-transmutation-doped silicon boules for microelectronics – a valuable commercial service marketed by ANSTO – as well as for the production of radiopharmaceuticals and scientific radiochemicals. The radionuclides, most of them employed in nuclear medicine, typically commonly produced with ANSTO’s reactor, are thus:

Samarium-153 – 1.93 days
Molybdenum-99 – 2.75 days
Indium-111 – 2.83 days
Iodine-131 – 8 days
Chromium-51 – 27.8 days
Iodine-125 – 59.4 days

Half-lives are as indicated. The short half-life of ¹⁵³Sm, the basis of the onocological radiopharmaceutical Quadramet, in particular means that importation of this radionuclide is difficult and impractical, and it is essentially unavailable in the absence of an operating isotope production reactor in Australia.

We’ve learned from painful experience that the supply of expensive imported radionuclides has been subject to delays or interruptions to supply during shutdowns of OPAL (and HIFAR) in the past. On the basis of ANSTO’s past experience, it can reasonably be assumed that still worse problems would arise if Australia were to be totally reliant upon imported radionuclides. The supply problems arise from a range of causes, such as weather delaying flights, aviation regulations relating to radioisotopes being carried with other goods, or opposition from freight pilots.

The International Atomic Energy Agency has identified the “growing problem of refusal by carriers, ports and handling facilities to transport radioactive material” as a significant problem for nuclear medicine and scientific research involving radionuclide importation across the world, and has initiated processes intended to identify ways in which it can be overcome. A number of international, such as British Airways, no longer accept carriage of radioactive material, and others have imposed tight restrictions. Unless a way can be found to reverse such trends, shipments of radionuclides across the world will become increasingly problematic.

The reactor and its associated neutron guides and instruments are used for neutron radiography, neutron scattering imaging, neutron reflectometry and other advanced neutron-beam based research and technological applications, neutron activation analysis, for example for forensic applications, as well as the analysis and testing of materials under neutron irradiation and research into the potential for Boron Neutron Capture Therapy as a potent weapon against cancer – which requires the patient to be bought to a nuclear reactor to produce the thermal neutron flux required.

Even if some radionuclides can be imported, clearly our research reactors in Australia are of significant importance and usefulness in such fields. If radionuclides are to be imported from foreign suppliers, they are still being produced in similar nuclear reactors – if a research reactor is such a dangerous thing, as is suggested by these groups, why should foreign nations be subjected to such a burden for the production of radiopharmaceuticals which are for the benefit of us? Why shouldn’t we take responsibility for our own reactor, if we have decided that we value the benefits of its products, and we’re not prepared to forgo them?

Heh

The Green Glass Sea

The Green Glass Sea sounds like a nice little story. It’s only a book pitched at teenagers/children, but it sounds like a cute book, telling a famous story in an interesting way. I’ll have to see if I can get my hands on a copy.

The Sarah Palin email “hacking”

It’s not a case of “hacking”, or “cracking”, or an “infamous group of hackers” – it’s little more than a case of “Sarah Palin is a computer-illiterate who did something really stupid“.

The blockquoted text below is taken from:
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/09/17/the-story-behind-the-palin-e-mail-hacking/

I missed the original incident, but monitored the discussion and repostings afterward to see what I could learn about what had happened and who was responsible.

There are several misconceptions and errors in most accounts of this story, including your post. Most significantly, the perpetrator(s) were not members of an “infamous group of hackers”. I don’t blame you for misunderstanding this, because in all the media coverage regarding the war with Scientology the media has completely failed to explain what Anonymous is.

Anonymous is not exactly a group. It is people using the umbrella of a web discussion board for cover to be as offensive, funny, strange, or whatever as they want.

Here’s the short version: there is a site called 4chan.org. It is an image posting site based on a popular Japanese site. The site contains multiple boards, each of which is dedicated to a particular subject. The most notorious of these boards is called /b/. /b/ is the board dedicated to random images. /b/tards, as its denizens are called, are interested only in their own amusement. Their sense of humor runs the gamut from sick to cruel to merely strange. Lolcats, as made famous by http://www.icanhascheezburger.com, originated on /b/. A lot of memes start there. There is a lot of racist humor — pictures of excited and happy black people in proximity to fried chicken abound. There is a lot of pornography. Sometimes it’s child pornography, although posting that is moderator grounds for banning — no, it’s not a pedophile ring; /b/tards post it because they think doing so is funny.

4chan does not log participants. Most people don’t use or have usernames, and post instead as “Anonymous.” And every so often, a number of /b/’s anonymous denizens decide to make somebody’s life hell. Sometimes it’s a random person who offends /b/’s sense of propriety. Sometimes it’s a forum dedicated to a serious topic. Sometimes it’s Scientology. And Tuesday, it was Sarah Palin. Or it would have been.

Sarah Palin’s email account was originally accessed by one person, not a group.
This person read her emails, then posted the username and password on /b/. This happened at about 4 in the morning on Tuesday.

There was no “hacking”, or “cracking” of Palin’s email, and no “hackers” or “crackers”. It was found out that Palin was using a free Yahoo web-based email account, which of course was never exactly secure at all.

Some enterprising person, upon learning this, went on the Yahoo site, and activiated the “lost password” page, and provided her “secret answers”… her ZIP code and the place she met her husband.

It’s plainly obvious that Yahoo Mail is not a high-security institution at all, and nobody with a true concern for the security and integrity of their correspondence would use it.

It’s even more plainly obvious that somebody in the public eye, like, you know, a State Governor and now candidate for Vice-President of the United States, could never use it and possibly have any informed, realistic expectation of security at all. It should be fully obvious to everyone that questions like “what is your mother’s maiden name?”, “what is your ZIP code?”, where were you born?, etc, are not the basis of any actual security at all, especially if you’re a public figure.

The idea was that the sea of Anonymous /b/tards would download the emails, upload porn, and cause all manner of mischief. Anonymous is not a group of hackers. Anonymous is more like gremlins. They are hyperactive adolescents in search of amusement and joy, which they often get by upsetting people and making messes. That’s what was happening here.

Anonymous did not “hack” the account. The “hacker” who opened Palin’s non-secure email and changed the password tried to throw Sarah Palin to Anonymous. Not all of Anonymous was having it. One person threw a crowbar in the works. Other /b/tards were displeased… mainly disappointed to miss a chance at the lulz. The moderators stepped in. The thread was deleted.

Later, other individuals created threads reposting screencaps of emails and the inbox, and put together a collection of these files. All mentions of these were purged by the moderators. So then some bright /b/tards decided to email what little stuff they had to the media.

That’s pretty much it.

This afternoon, in a thread that was later deleted, an individual claiming to be the original poster gave his account of what happened. I’ve attached screencaps. Here’s the text. The original poster used the name “rubico.” The linked email address for the poster was rubico10@yahoo.com.

This is what rubico said:

rubico 09/17/08(Wed)12:57:22 No.85782652
Hello, /b/ as many of you might already know, last night sarah palin’s yahoo was “hacked” and caps were posted on /b/, i am the lurker who did it, and i would like to tell the story.

In the past couple days news had come to light about palin using a yahoo mail account, it was in news stories and such, a thread was started full of newfags trying to do something that would not get this off the ground, for the next 2 hours the account was locked from password recovery presumably from all this bullshit spamming.

after the password recovery was reenabled, it took seriously 45 mins on wikipedia and google to find the info, Birthday? 15 seconds on wikipedia, zip code? well she had always been from wasilla, and it only has 2 zip codes (thanks online postal service!)

the second was somewhat harder, the question was “where did you meet your spouse?” did some research, and apparently she had eloped with mister palin after college, if youll look on some of the screenshits that I took and other fellow anon have so graciously put on photobucket you will see the google search for “palin eloped” or some such in one of the tabs.

I found out later though more research that they met at high school, so I did variations of that, high, high school, eventually hit on “Wasilla high” I promptly changed the password to popcorn and took a cold shower[/B]…

>> rubico 09/17/08(Wed)12:58:04 No.85782727

this is all verifiable if some anal /b/tard wants to think Im a troll, and there isn’t any hard proof to the contrary, but anyone who had followed the thread from the beginning to the 404 will know I probably am not, the picture I posted this topic with is the same one as the original thread.

I read though the emails… ALL OF THEM… before I posted, and what I concluded was anticlimactic, there was nothing there, nothing incriminating, nothing that would derail her campaign as I had hoped, all I saw was personal stuff, some clerical stuff from when she was governor…. And pictures of her family

I then started a topic on /b/, peeps asked for pics or gtfo and I obliged, then it started to get big

Earlier it was just some prank to me, I really wanted to get something incriminating which I was sure there would be, just like all of you anon out there that you think there was some missed opportunity of glory, well there WAS NOTHING, I read everything, every little blackberry confirmation… all the pictures, and there was nothing, and it finally set in, THIS internet was serious business, yes I was behind a proxy, only one, if this shit ever got to the FBI I was fucked, I panicked, i still wanted the stuff out there but I didn’t know how to rapidshit all that stuff, so I posted the pass on /b/, and then promptly deleted everything, and unplugged my internet and just sat there in a comatose state

Then the white knight fucker came along, and did it in for everyone, I trusted /b/ with that email password, I had gotten done what I could do well, then passed the torch , all to be let down by the douchebaggery, good job /b/, this is why we cant have nice things

The “white knight fucker” was the /b/tard who thought that going through Sarah Palin’s email wasn’t cool. He logged in, changed the password, and sent an email to a friend of Palin’s warning her and letting her know the new password. Unfortunately, he then posted a screenshot of this email to let the other /b/tards know their fun was over. He failed to blank the password, and they all tried to log in and change the password — which tripped the automated Yahoo! freeze. Since then, the account has been deleted.

“Rapidshit” refers to rapidshare.com — i.e., rubico wanted to download the emails, put them into one file, and put that file up on rapidshare for /b/tards and the world at large to download. But he panicked, or didn’t know how to download the emails, and so pawned that task off on Anonymous, which he didn’t realize wasn’t monolithic and in his favor.

As Paul Harvey would say, “And now you know…. the rest of the story.”

Engineers’ Dreams

Engineers’ Dreams – George Dyson’s fantastic short story spanning the past and future of information technology, delivered with just the right mixture of history, fact and futurism that seems to be a rather famous talent of the Dyson family.

It’s only a short story, nothing serious, but it’s a wonderful diversion.

Coal and nuclear safeguards

In the 2006/2007 financial year, Australia exported 244.9 million tonnes of black coal around the world – the nation’s largest export commodity. Hence, as much as 441 tonnes of uranium (at 1.8 ppm) and 1714 tonnes of thorium (at 7 ppm) could conceivably be added to accepted export figures. It’s only a couple of parts per million… but multiply a couple of parts per million by a couple of hundred million tonnes, and what do you have? Such a quantity of natural uranium contains 3.16 tonnes of uranium-235 – the equivalent of 49 simple Hiroshima-style nuclear weapons based on very highly enriched . Of course, this requires having the enrichment technology in place to enrich to the very high enrichment level required – but goes to show that control of uranium export is no barrier to potential nuclear proliferation concerns. If we assume that the 437.8 tonnes of could be entirely converted into plutonium, the result would be 439.7 tonnes of plutonium, if it was all . Hence, one year worth of Australia’s coal exports could be enough material, in principle, to produce

43,970 ( implosion type) nuclear fission weapons, if we assume 10 kilograms of is the making of a single nuclear weapon – an ample quantity.

There are no treaties, no safeguards, agreements or controls on any the use of this fissile and fertile material.

Given that foreign nations have access to the technology for uranium recovery from coal waste, and are using it, and given that exports of mined uranium are always accompanied by concerns and outcries over the potential for weapons use, and the need for agreements and safeguards with regards to preventing nuclear weapons proliferation, why don’t we have nuclear non-proliferation safeguards in place for Australia’s coal exports?

The very first light.

Somebody mentioned this to me at the Victorian Skeptics forum the other night.

The book of Genesis, as most of us know, says something to the effect of: “When God began to create heaven and earth, and the earth then was welter and waste and darkness over the deep and God’s breath hovering over the waters, God said, ‘Let there be light.’ and there was light”, and then later on there’s a bit about the creation of the “dry land and seas and plants and trees which grew fruit with seed; the sun, moon and stars in the firmament.”

Well, the seemingly obvious question was posed to me, how could there be light in the Cosmos, before the formation of the stars?

Perhaps that’s what we know as the cosmic microwave background radiation?

WYD pilgrims bring pestilence

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,24340140-421,00.html

PILGRIMS carrying exotic strains of flu spread more than religion and goodwill when they descended on Sydney for World Youth Day.

Unusual strains of flu are being blamed on the influx of 250,000 youths from more than 100 different countries in July.

Nurses report seeing high rates of virulent infections among hospital patients with “new and unusual strains of flu from exotic places”.

I guess we know who’s to blame for practically everyone, everywhere in Australia being almost constantly sick this winter.

Breakthrough car runs on water!! Or not.

Here’s another past post, reposted from my other blog.

“Petrol pricey? Japanese invent car that runs on water”

TOKYO (Reuters Life!) – Tired of petrol prices rising daily at the pump? A Japanese company has invented an electric-powered, and environmentally friendly, car that it says runs solely on water.

Genepax unveiled the car in the western city of Osaka on Thursday, saying that a liter (2.1 pints) of any kind of water — rain, river or sea — was all you needed to get the engine going for about an hour at a speed of 80 km (50 miles).

“The car will continue to run as long as you have a bottle of water to top up from time to time,” Genepax CEO Kiyoshi Hirasawa told local broadcaster TV Tokyo.

“It does not require you to build up an infrastructure to recharge your batteries, which is usually the case for most electric cars,” he added.

Once the water is poured into the tank at the back of the car, the a generator breaks it down and uses it to create electrical power, TV Tokyo said.

Whether the car makes it into showrooms remains to be seen. Genepax said it had just applied for a patent and is hoping to collaborate with Japanese auto manufacturers in the future.

Most big automakers, meanwhile, are working on fuel-cell cars that run on hydrogen and emit — not consume — water.

(Writing by Chika Osaka, editing by Miral Fahmy and Chang-Ran Kim)

You can’t run a car on water.

It’s bogus, baloney, BS. Anybody that tries to tell you otherwise is trying to scam you.

I suspect that I don’t at all have to convince most of the regular readers of this blog of this fact, but I just needed to state that, for the record, if you will.

You can use electrolysis to generate hydrogen from outside the car, and have a tank of hydrogen in your car, but that’s not a water-powered car, it’s an indirectly electrically powered car, using hydrogen as an energy storage medium. No such technology is especially novel, and it’s certainly far from impossible.

There’s also the option of using the sulfur-iodine cycle to disassociate water into hydrogen, using thermal energy – however, in practice, this disassociation is, overall, not dissimilar to the electrolysis of water, other than in that it employs thermal energy directly as opposed to electricity, and can be considerably more efficient than electrolysis, especially when thermal energy is used directly from a heat source – such as a nuclear reactor – as opposed to driving a heat engine to generate electricity from the nuclear reactor, followed by electrolysis.

(Aside: The SI cycle was invented at General Atomics in the 1970s, and the Japanese Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) has conducted successful experiments with the process with the intent of using high temperature Generation IV nuclear fission power reactors to produce hydrogen on a large scale.)

For that reason, I will focus on electrolysis for this post, but just remember that in terms of stationary generation of hydrogen, the SI process could be substituted anywhere where electrolysis is mentioned.

The fundamental claim of the water-powered car is that electrical energy from the car’s electrical system is used to generate hydrogen via electrolysis of water in situ, which is burned in the internal combustion engine, generating energy.

Alternatively, it might be claimed that water can spontaneously be disassociated into hydrogen, without any energy input.

It’s a ridiculous claim. It’s simply a matter of basic physics.

Let’s start with this.

Thus, the standard potential of a water electrolysis cell 1.23 V at standard pressure and temperature. The positive voltage indicates the Gibbs Free Energy for electrolysis of water is greater than zero. The reaction cannot occur without necessarily adding energy. It is just not thermodynamically favorable.

Electrolysis is not perfectly efficient, of course. It does not convert 100% of the electrical energy into the chemical energy of the resulting hydrogen. The process requires higher voltages what would be expected based on the cell’s total reversible reduction potentials. This excess potential accounts for what is known as electrochemical overpotential. The extra energy supplied, corresponding to these overpotentials, is eventually lost as heat. The reaction overpotential for the oxidation of water to oxygen at the anode is the dominant overpotential in the process, and an effective electrochemical catalyst to facilitate this reaction does not exist.

Platinum alloy electrodes are the default state of the art for this oxidation. The reverse reaction, the reduction of oxygen to water, is responsible for a significant contribution to electrochemical inefficiency in hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells.

Developing a cheap and effective electrochemical catalyst for this reaction would lead to increases to efficiency in both water electrolysis and in hydrogen-oxygen fuel cells – but efficiency can only be increased incrementally towards the ideal 100% – it cannot ever exceed 100% efficiency, of course.

Catalysts are pretty cool, and extremely useful, but they don’t violate the laws of thermodynamics.

The formation of hydrogen gas at the cathode can be electrocatalyzed with almost zero reaction overpotential by platinum, for comparison. Platinum is, of course, an expensive metal, but it is widely used in these applications.

The theoretical maximum efficiency of the electrolysis of water is between 80–94%, whilst in real world, practical contexts, the efficiency achieved is typically around 60%.

It should be obvious to everybody, then, that you cannot generate hydrogen in an electrolytic cell and convert it back to energy in a fuel cell which you then use to generate more hydrogen.

If this could happen with perfect efficiency in all steps then you would have a perpetual cycle from which no useful work can be extracted. Since it can not, does not and will not occur with perfect efficiency in all steps, then it’s basically nothing at all, besides nonsense.

In real-world terms, with an efficiency of around 60% for the electrolysis, and efficiency of 30% or less for energy conversion in the automobile engine, you’re considering an overall efficiency of well under 20% – it simply does not and cannot work.

We have yet another company basically claiming to have invented a perpetual motion machine.

It’s bogus. No, I don’t consider it “unscientific” to come right out and say that, with 100% certainty.
Thermodynamics-violating scams are at least as old, probably older, in fact, as the understanding of the laws of thermodynamics.

Should we wait and see if more data, results, demonstrations or peer review become available? No. I, for one, wouldn’t bother.

Look at Steorn. Remember them, making headlines a year or two ago? They were going to have peer review of the technology, and public demonstration, and all sorts of proof to convince the naysayers. Have we seen any of it delivered? Nope!

As gas prices rise, and energy becomes a central political topic, more and more people are suckered into taking a second glance at “free energy” peddlers.

There’s no need to be “open minded” about any possible wonderful hitherto unknown scientific discoveries here – it’s entirely just the same old snake oil.

By all means, let’s be open minded, but no so open minded that our brains drop out.

“The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations — then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation — well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.” – Arthur Eddington.

However, let’s just assume, for a moment, that you can do it.
Let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, that water can magically be disassociated into hydrogen with no energy input.

1 litre – or 1 kilogram – of water will yield 119.2 grams of hydrogen. Combustion of hydrogen yields 143 kJ per gram – therefore, the energy content of water in this form is just over 17 MJ per kilogram.

Gasoline has an energy content of about 47 MJ/kg – therefore, the “fuel economy” of the hypothetical car that can somehow do what we’re describing here is intrinsically limited to being about 2.8 times worse than a conventional petrol engine.

Bright readers will note that the story referenced above refers to a speed of 80 km (50 miles). Yeah, sure – I’m not sure who’s to blame here – the journalists or those people making the claim. I think they’re both as bad as one another.

Maybe we’ll operate on the assumption that they mean 80 kilometers per hour. That means they’re claiming the “fuel efficiency” as 1 litre of water per 80 kilometers. That’s 1.25 L/100 km, corresponding to the equivalent of 68 miles per gallon or 3.46 L/100 km in normal petrol consumption terms. Well, that doesn’t seem so bad at all – aside from the fact, remember, that it’s impossible.

There is, however just one way, in principle, that a water powered car can conceivably work, without violating any of the laws of nature.

This would have to involve liberation of hydrogen from water via electrolysis, followed by energy generation by means of nuclear fusion of the hydrogen.

Suppose your car’s tank is fueled with 1 litre of light water. Given that deuterium constitutes 0.015% of natural water on Earth, one litre of water contains only 16.7 milligrams of deuterium. But that deuterium packs quite a punch.

I’m not sure, quantitatively, how much of an effect the isotope kinetic effect of deuterium will have on the electrolysis of heavy water. Probably a measurable effect indeed, but for the purposes of argument we’ll ignore it. The energy input required for the production of one molecule of hydrogen via electrolysis is equal to E = 1.23 V * 2 * e / 60%; where 60% is the efficiency, as previously mentioned, or 4.1 electron volts per molecule of hydrogen.

That’s a significant amount of energy relative to the heat of combustion of hydrogen, which is 3 eV per molecule of hydrogen, however it is completely insignificant relative to the millions of electron volts yielded from nuclear fusion processes.

Of course, essentially all anthropogenic nuclear fusion technologies, in existence or under development, at present utilize the much easier ignited deuterium-tritium reaction. When we start with nuclear fusion in a mass of deuteron plasma, 50% of reactions will yield He-3 from the deuterium, and 50% of DD fusion reactions will yield tritium as the reaction product – but under these conditions, the tritium nucleus will fuse with deuterium straight away, releasing a whopping 17.6 MeV.

Tritium burns so well in a deuterium plasma that it is almost impossible to extract from the plasma. The D-He3 reaction is optimized at a much higher temperature, so the burnup at the optimum D-D fusion temperature may be low, so it seems reasonable to assume that all the tritium, but not the He-3, gets burned up and adds its energy to the net reaction.

Add all that up and you end up with about 6.25 MeV per deuteron.
Five billion joules from a litre of water.

If a typical car requires, say, 8L of petrol per 100 km, then that’s about 300 MJ of energy content per 100 km of driving.

What if you really could drive your car almost 1700 km on a litre of water? Perhaps some day you will.

It can’t be done, of course.

There is, at present, no working, mature technology available that can usefully generate energy via nuclear fusion (with the exception of a Teller-Ulam bomb, and that’s of debatable usefulness.), let alone a fusion reactor capable of fitting within and operating within a car.

But there is absolutely nothing, in terms of the natural laws, that precludes it. It’s not at all physically impossible – it’s an engineering problem. Water-powered cars – real water-powered cars are a fantastically interesting thing to dream about, but we won’t be driving them in the foreseeable future.

But, later in the month… we got some updated news on the magical water powered car. It turns out that those pesky laws of thermodynamics caught up with them after all.

http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20080616/153301/

Kiyoshi Hirasawa, president of Genepax Co Ltd, unveiled part of the reaction mechanism of the company’s new fuel cell system called “Water Energy System” in an interview with Nikkei Electronics.

The system, which is capable of generating power with water and air, was first presented June 12, 2008. As reported in our previous article, the system produces hydrogen through a chemical reaction between water and a metal (or a metal compound) on the fuel electrode side (See related article).

Genepax uses a metal or a metal compound that can cause an oxidation reaction with water at room temperature, the company said. Metals that react with water include lithium, sodium, magnesium, potassium and calcium. The main feature of the Water Energy System is that it can be operated for a longer period of time by controlling the reaction of the metal or the metal compound, the company said.

According to Genepax, the metal or the metal compound is supported by a porous body such as zeolite inside the fuel electrode of the membrane electrode assembly (MEA). The products of the hydrogen generation reaction dissolves in water, and the water containing them will be discharged with water inside the system. Upon the completion of the reaction, the generation of hydrogen and power stops.

There is nothing revolutionary here – nothing that violates the laws of physics. Rather than “running on water” the device if fuelled with chemical potential energy in the form of a reactive chemical – such as lithium metal – that will spontaneously reduce water to hydrogen gas on contact, consuming the lithium. Energy is “stored” in such a material, which requires considerable energy input to create, and does not occur in the free metallic form in nature.

This is essentially nothing more than a non-rechargeable chemical battery. When its chemical “fuel” is depleted, it doesn’t work, and the chemical material must be replenished.

Electric cars, quantitatively.

For argument’s sake, I’ll start with an assumption that the fuel economy of your average petrol-fuelled ICE passenger car is about 7 L per 100 km under conventional conditions.

7 L / 100 km corresponds to about 15.1 kg carbon dioxide emissions per 100 km.

(You can use the above expression in Google Calculator, and just substitute in any alternative figure for the fuel consumption for your particular car, if you like.)

(In the above calculation I’ve used the assumption that petrol is basically pure n-octane in chemistry terms, in terms of its density and carbon content.)

Obviously, better fuel economy means better CO2 emissions economy and vice versa.

(For readers in the US (or elsewhere) who would prefer the Imperial units, try this link instead. Fuel economy of 30 MPG will correspond to about 0.6 pounds of carbon dioxide per mile.

The Blade Runner Mk. II BEV, for example, (which you can buy in Australia now), requires a charge of 95 amp-hours at 240 V, and has a range of 120 km, corresponding to an electric power consumption of 190 Wh (Watt-hours) per km.

(Similarly, if we know the charger’s current draw, voltage, charge time, and the vehicle’s operating range for a single charge, then the electrical energy required to run the car for a given range is straightforwardly calculated for any EV.)

The tech specs for the Tesla Roadster claim that its electric power consumption is 110 Wh/km.

The specifications for the Mitsubishi i-MiEV correspond to about 154 Wh/km average.

In Australia, the average GHG emissions intensity for electricity generation is 1000 gCO2/kWh. (In Victoria, it’s obscene, about 1300-1400 gCO2/kWh.)

Therefore, the equivalent CO2 emission for the BladeRunner is 19 kg CO2 per 100 km, for the i-MiEV it’s about 15.4 kg / 100 km, and for the Tesla Roadster it’s about 11 kg CO2/100 km.

So, for electricity generation like Australia’s, the i-MiEV is about the same, in terms of its indirect greenhouse gas emissions intensity, as an average, reasonably fuel efficient, petrol-burning ICE car. The BladeRunner is significantly worse than an ordinary car, and the Tesla Roadster is significantly better – but I guess the Tesla represents what is essentially a top-of-the-line EV, with a price tag to match.

At the moment, in Australia, there is absolutely nothing to be gained at all, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions reduction, from electric vehicles. (Unless you get a Tesla). (In fact, choosing an EV over a new, relatively efficient petrol or LPG fuelled conventional ICE vehicle, which you could easily get for the same kind of budget, could very well represent a significantly worse choice, in terms of GHG emissions.) For that to change, what is required is a large reduction in the greenhouse gas intensity of electricity generation – replacing coal-fired generators with nuclear power or other clean electricity generation.

However, the greenhouse gas intensity of Australia’s electricity supply is very bad, by global standards. Ontario (in Canada) is an example of a place where extensive uptake of nuclear power, and extensive access to hydroelectricity, have almost completely displaced coal-fired generation, and provide electricity with extremely low greenhouse gas emissions intensity – about 200 gCO2/kWh, or 20% of the Australian average. In Sweden or France for example, you’ll see much the same.
In the US, for example, on the average, it is somewhere in between.

Thus, under these conditions, the BladeRunner has equivalent GHG emissions of about 3.8 kg CO2 per 100 km, 3.1 kg/100 km for the i-MiEV, and about 2.2 kg/100 km for the Tesla – all of which are far superior to any ICE vehicle.