It's time for a quickie NNadir "Garbage Diary," a 15 minute special:
I'm sorting through some old papers I didn't get around to reading last year and I came across a swell "solar will save our car CULTure" paper about solar molten salts.
You know about solar thermal plants using molten salts, don't you?
In 1976 Amory Lovins predicted that lots and lots and lots and lots of people - many people would have solar powered molten salt tanks in their back yards "soon." Amory went on to get rich and famous for this kind of stuff and got better at making money off it - predicting hydrogen HYPErcars would be in showrooms by 2005 - this in 2001.
Um, he doesn't make money I think by selling hydrogen HYPErcars here in 2009 but he does get a ton of money greenwashing Walmart and Shell Oil.
Whatever. I am always interested in the chemistry molten salts, which must be why I picked up this 2008 paper in the journal Solar Energy this summer which is nominally about the use of solar energy for "The conversion of the high-temperature solar heat to hydrogen...
... (which) has the advantage of producing long-term storable and transportable clean energy carriers from solar energy."
"Clean" energy carriers.
Yeah right...
When you look at two of the biggest loudmouths about how solar and wind energy are going to save us, Amory Lovins and Gerhard Schroeder, you find that they are highly paid by dangerous gas companies to hype hydrogen.
In fact another such loudmouth - a wind power advocate - is none other than T. Boone Pickens, dangerous natural gas mogul.
Some time ago I came here to ridicule a paper about compressed air gas storage of wind energy by Paul Denholm in Environ. Sci. Tech where it turned out that the compressed air wind was simply designed to give an extra kick to um, dangerous natural gas.
Dangerous natural gas is widely advertised as a "clean fuel" although, if you must know, it is one of the most potent greenhouse gases known and when burned it produces dangerous fossil fuel waste - chiefly carbon dioxide - for which there is no permanent repository designed, planned, sited or under construction any where on this planet.
Dangerous natural gas waste is expected to be around for millions of years, and every year millions of people are killed by it.
In the same breath as they are sorting sweeping dangerous natural gas's enormous and intractable problems under the rugs, the "renewables will save us" crowd is trying to pretend that you can keep your stupid car with stuff like solar energy.
Yeah right.
When I criticize the waste profile of solar PV - which is nearly identical to the waste profile of other electronic waste - sometimes I hear about how wonderful solar thermal is, Lovins old "molten salt tank in every back yard" stuff.
Yeah right.
The paper I'm going to reference is:
Solar Energy Volume 82, Issue 12, December 2008, Pages 1145-1153
Abstract.
The paper is by Gakon et al and is called "High-temperature carbonate/MgO composite materials as thermal storage media for double-walled solar reformer tubes."
Some excerpts:
Modern solar concentrating systems of central-tower and dish-type can provide high-temperature solar thermal energy exceeding 800 C at levels up to a few tens of megawatts and a few hundreds of kilowatts, respectively (Johnston et al., 2003; Kalogirou, 2004; Mills, 2004), if the system is built in sun-belt regions. The conversion of the high-temperature solar heat to hydrogen has the advantage of producing long-term storable and transportable clean energy carriers from solar energy.
Wow that sounds great, doesn't it?
Yeah right.
Natural gas reforming is currently the most common
process for hydrogen production...The former two reactions of steam and CO2 reforming are highly endothermic and high-temperature processes, which make them a candidate for solar thermochemical hydrogen production. These endothermic reactions can upgrade the calorific value of methane feed, ideally by 22–28% using solar thermal energy if the process heat is provided by solar high-temperature heat. The solar processed syngas can be readily converted to hydrogen via the water–gas shift reaction.
Huh?
The solar energy contributed to the hydrogen production is ideally 17%, based on the low heating value (LHV) of H2. From this point of view, the hydrogen production via solar reforming is a current important R&D task in the research field of ‘‘solar chemistry"
Say what?
"Solar will save us" advocates just love that "percent talk" when they talk about how we don't need nuclear energy because solar is so great.
So what's the bottom line here: Lipstick on the dangerous natural gas pig.
You see the vast majority, 83% precisely, comes from an unacceptable dangerous fossil fuel, for which there is no known form of waste disposal of any kind.
I have, by the way, completed and need only one rewrite on my diary series on the Indian Fast Breeder Sodium Cooled nuclear reactor, part 5, but have not worked out the poll which may be about the wonderful biofuel that will save us, um, well, hemp.