Most modern kitchen ovens are "self cleaning" but if you are old enough, you may remember ovens that did not have this feature, and which required lots of scrubbing, often with caustic - hopefully if you know someone who used to do this they wore gloves, as I recall my mother doing when I was a child. It was a very messy business, oven cleaning, and I would imagine that a good many people were actually injured doing it.
Aren't we lucky, with all our swell new technology.
The way self cleaning ovens work is that they are coated with ceria, which is CeO2, the oxide of a lanthanide metal.
The lanthanide metals are of increasing economic importance owing to the bourgeois wind power/hybrid car/electric car fantasy that has become so popular as we push ourselves toward oblivion, with 2011 promising to be a record year for dangerous fossil fuel waste dumping in Earth's atmosphere, despite all that wonderful stuff we hear about the wind power/hybrid car/electric car fantasy.
(There isn't, by the way, enough neodymium - another lanthanide - on the planet to make this fantasy any more real than a ride at Disneyland, but don't worry, be happy.)
Happily for those might have otherwise felt the need to hire someone to clean their ovens, cerium is one of the more common lanthanides, and we are in no danger of a shortage of self cleaning ovens, although it is possible we will face a shortage of dangerous natural gas and electricity to run the ovens.
Anyhow. The paper from the primary scientific literature I will discuss tonight in this brief throwaway diary - which I leave for myself as a kind of "sticky note," and not because it will otherwise mean a hill of beans - is in the relatively new journal, a Wiley publication, ChemSusChem, which is dedicated to sustainable chemistry.
Here's the abstract and a link to the article if you have access to a subscribing library:
Ceria as a Thermochemical Reaction Medium for Selectively Generating Syn Gas or Methane from Water or Carbon Dioxide.
By the way, this scheme does not for the record violate the second law of thermodynamics. It requires significant heat, which the author's claim - playing to popular delusion "could" come from solar thermal energy reactors.
It won't. Nothing will happen except ever increasing dangerous fossil fuel waste dumping. It's over. We're cooked.
As for the journal itself, there is no such thing as "sustainable" by the way, since humanity will get what it deserves, owing to its rapid embrace - the link is just one example out of many - fear, ignorance and superstition.
(Um...um...um...no, Virginia, 35S is, um, not a fission product. One of the fun things that anti-nukes like to do is to point up their ignorance right in the text, although this doesn't prevent other ignorant people from believing them. Sometimes reading this stuff is like watching a TV show with Pat Robertson explaining the origins of the universe.)
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