NNadir
NNadir's JournalNature: What a Joe Biden presidency would mean for five key science issues.
The following appears in the "News" section of the major scientific journal Nature:
What a Joe Biden presidency would mean for five key science issues (Amy Maxmen, Nidhi Subbaraman, Jeff Tollefson, Giuliana Viglione & Alexandra Witze, Nature News October 1, 2020.)
I believe the article is open sourced and anyone can read it.
Some Excerpts:
...But what does Biden, a six-term senator from Delaware who served as vice-president under former president Barack Obama, stand for science-wise? Nature interviewed current advisers to Biden, advisers who served during Obama’s presidency and policy analysts about actions the former vice-president might take in five key science areas if he’s elected. (The Biden campaign did not respond to questions from Nature.)
Pandemic response
If Biden wins the election on 3 November, he will inherit not only a country in the throes of a pandemic that’s destroyed lives and livelihoods — but also one in which public opinion is deeply divided over the true extent of the coronavirus outbreak and the measures taken to abate it. Despite public-health agencies counting more than 200,000 COVID-19 deaths in the country, some Trump supporters feel that the impact of the virus has been exaggerated in an effort to control the populace.
Why the United States is having a coronavirus data crisis
Biden would also inherit a haphazard pandemic response, researchers say. “The problem with our whole response is that we’ve been changing the response since day one,” says Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association in Washington DC...
... Coming in with a strong response plan and the ability to adapt to an evolving situation will be crucial for steadying both the outbreak and the US economy, he adds.
Biden’s pandemic plans — which his team has been preparing since March, say sources close to the campaign — promise to ramp up the country’s test-and-trace programmes; address racial and ethnic disparities in COVID-19 infection rates and outcomes; and rebuild pandemic-readiness programmes cut by the Trump administration.
Still, it will take time to bring the pandemic under control in the United States, says Kavita Patel, a physician who advises on health policy for Harris but is not currently advising the campaign. Biden’s staff members, she says, “need to hit the ground running” in order to turn the US response around...
...If elected, Biden has committed to supporting the World Health Organization (WHO), which Trump began to withdraw the United States from in July. As well as providing badly needed funds to the WHO to fight the coronavirus, polio and other diseases globally, reinstating the United States’ commitment to the organization would pave the way for joining its international COVAX facility, which aims to accelerate the search for and manufacture of coronavirus vaccines...
Climate change
...The coronavirus pandemic isn’t the only divisive issue that Biden would face if elected — he would also be confronting climate change. Trump has moved to pull the United States out of the 2015 Paris climate treaty, rolled back a suite of regulations intended to reduce greenhouse-gas regulations and called global warming a hoax.
In contrast, Biden is now campaigning on the most aggressive climate platform ever advanced by a US presidential nominee in the general election. Addressing the demands of an increasingly vocal liberal base, his US$2-trillion plan calls for massive investments in clean-energy research and development and low-carbon infrastructure, such as public transit and energy-efficient buildings. It also calls for the United States to generate 100% clean electricity by 2035 and to produce “net-zero emissions” by 2050. The question facing Biden and his team, if they win in November, is how to make it happen...
I will state, for the record, that I regard the rote political position of our party, my party - that so called "renewable energy" will save the world - to be dangerously wrong headed, since so called "renewable energy" has been failing miserably at addressing climate change for several decades: The situation is getting worse not better, but I do believe that science - which is a human activity and begins with theory, some of which are biased - does demand experimental proof, and the failure of the anti-nuclear "renewable energy will save us" experiment has unmistakable results, and one does see growing recognition of this.
But no matter, since Biden can think and Trump cannot, he will at least take the issue seriously and hopefully bring young fresh minds into the discussion.
...As well as tackling the pandemic and climate change, a President Biden would have the opportunity to develop other science priorities for his administration. This process typically includes tapping experts to coordinate science policy and establishing research focuses for the White House. (The actual job of doling out science funding is left to Congress.)
These advisers will be crucial because although Biden and Harris generally support science and its role in crafting public policy, neither has worked extensively on science issues. When he served in the Senate, Biden’s focus was more on foreign affairs and the judiciary, and Harris has a background in criminal justice, including her former position as California’s attorney general.
NASA soars and others plummet in Trump’s budget proposal
If Biden is elected, he should choose a science adviser as quickly as possible to start developing and implementing whatever research priorities do emerge, says Michael Lubell, a physicist and science-policy expert at the City College of New York. That position is currently held by meteorologist Kelvin Droegemeier — who did not start until nearly two years into Trump’s presidency...
...Biden’s most obvious research interest has been in cancer science, particularly following the death of his 46-year-old son Beau in 2015 to brain cancer. As vice-president, Biden headed a government ‘cancer moonshot’ initiative that kicked off in 2016, the last year of Obama’s presidency. It aimed to speed up the rate of progress against the disease by coordinating with companies and researchers to share data and results. The initiative later morphed into a non-profit group, which Biden suspended last year after deciding to run for president.
“Biden will want to make sure that any momentum from that effort that began in 2016 has not waned," says Jon Retzlaff, vice-president for science policy and government affairs at the American Association for Cancer Research. He also notes that Harris’s mother, Shyamala Gopalan, a major influence on the vice-presidential candidate, was a leading breast-cancer researcher who died of cancer...
Space exploration
Under Trump, NASA has pursued an ambitious strategy — named Artemis, after Apollo’s twin sister — to put US astronauts on the Moon four years from now. Space exploration is one of the few areas where the Trump administration has put in significant effort to develop science policy.How Biden, if elected, might alter the course set out by Trump is another unknown. As vice-president, Biden was not deeply involved in space-policy issues — unlike Pence, who has actively worked on Trump’s space initiatives.
President Donald Trump views the Artemis II space capsule
Trump views a space capsule that's part of NASA's Artemis programme, which aims to put astronauts on the Moon by 2024.Credit: Bill Ingalls/NASA/Planet Pix/ZUMA Wire
He did, however, express enthusiasm for space in May, when NASA sent two astronauts to the International Space Station on a privately built spacecraft for the first time. In response, Biden posted his congratulations on the website Medium — and noted that he was vice-president when this ‘commercial crew’ programme began in 2009.
NASA might not dramatically change its course under a President Biden, experts say. The Democrats’ official platform says the party is “committed to continuing space exploration and discovery”, including “NASA’s work to return Americans to the Moon and go beyond to Mars”...
Personally, I am a big supporter of robotic instruments in space, human space travel, not so much...but that's just me...
Scientists widely feel that Trump’s isolationist stance has eroded the position of the United States as a global leader in major scientific collaborations and dimmed its allure as a destination for foreign students and researchers. Biden’s foreign-policy and immigration plans could mend some frayed ties, but science-policy experts warn that the road to recovery will be longer than a single four-year presidential term.
Well before the 2016 election, Trump’s nationalist campaign rhetoric, with vivid promises to build a wall along the US–Mexico border, spooked foreign scientists. And weeks after his presidential inauguration, a ‘travel ban’ executive order targeted at seven Muslim-majority countries stranded international students at airports, sparked protests and sent shock waves through the US research community. “When you don't have certainty over what the future immigration laws of the host country are going to be, you're going to think twice before deciding to uproot yourself and move to another country to pursue your PhD,” says Ali Nouri, a molecular biologist and president of the Federation of American Scientists...
Amid this crackdown, US scientists are concerned about racial profiling against Chinese scientists, and some scientists in China are wary of travelling to the United States for conferences or partnering on projects with US scientists. US funding agencies have denied that the increased scrutiny has caused collaborations to suffer and insist that the US government’s interest is in select cases of unethical or illegal behavior.
Having an ignorant racist for a President is clearly extremely dangerous in science - as well as many other areas - because science is in fact international and we disconnect from the world at our peril.
Biden is sure to be a huge improvement, a vast improvement, in fact an improvement on an almost infinite scale, since essentially he'll be starting from zero or less than zero.
Anyway...
I felt that the Obama administration was, overall, the best administration for science in my adult life, particularly in the first term.
President Biden and Vice President Harris will have huge issues to address, many of them involving science and engineering issues, and if nothing else, we can be sure that without a President Biden and Vice President Harris, science will suffer greatly, as it is doing now, at the expense of hundreds of thousands (actually millions) of lives.
Un Cadeau des Dieux
My wife got laid off from her University job today.
We kind of knew the University was on its last legs; as many private universities are.
Small private liberal arts focused universities are dying rapidly. Her university is still alive, but going down fast in the days of Covid.
Years ago, for the one and only time, I got fired, and I ran into an acquaintance, and told her I'd just lost my job, and she said, "That's great! This is a tremendous opportunity!"
I was polite about it, and didn't say the "Fuck you Lady!" that was going through my head.
But she was right. I left a wing of the industry which was dying - API manufacturing - because of Indian and Chinese competition, and went into another side where I learned so much more than I ever knew. Getting fired was just great for me. My life would have sucked if it didn't happen.
We are NOT watching the debates tonight. It's not like it matters; we're all Biden all they way for all the time and have no interest in watching that old senile drooling, drug addict in the White House try to take down someone who knows something he will never know; what it is to be decent, intelligent, and worthy of ones life.
Tonight we'll be watching Blade Runner 2049, celebrating that we are still alive, and yes, drinking a bit.
Life is beautiful and then you die.
Tears in rain.
Palestinian refugee receives Spanish citizenship after discovering Jewish Sephardic roots
What she lacked, however, was a passport.
A 26-year-old lecturer in architecture at Birmingham City University, Iskandarani has been stateless for most of her life, possessing only a Lebanese travel document that defines her as a Palestinian refugee.
But after discovering that her Palestinian father had Jewish roots going back to Spain, Iskandarani was able to claim Spanish citizenship thanks to a 2015 law that promised to naturalize anyone whose Jewish ancestors fled the Spanish Inquisition.
In an interview with the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Iskandarani attributed her quest for citizenship as rooted in both an emotional search for an identity and as a practical remedy to the bureaucratic complications that resulted from her lack of national citizenship.
“This deep addiction for belonging made me look deeper into my family history,” Iskandarani wrote in a Sept. 12 Facebook post. “I wanted to find a solution to break the cycle of shame, the feeling of being less than all. I needed an identity a country to fall back too [sic]...”
Palestinian refugee receives Spanish citizenship after discovering Jewish Sephardic roots
Daily new Covid cases in New Jersey have jumped from September 12 to September 25,...
...from 297 cases per day, to 750 cases per day.
Not good...
My wife keeps talking about things like Christmas and next summer.
I'm not entirely sure I'm going to live that long. I'm clearly high risk, fat, old, borderline diabetic, with type A blood and male.
I think we get our ballots the first week in October. I'm filling out mine immediately and bringing it down to the County Board of Elections. I do hope to see that piece of shit dragged out of the White House if necessary, but failing that, I want to do my part to make it happen.
Screening Study of Different Amine-Based Solutions as Sorbents for Direct CO2 Capture from Air
The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: Screening Study of Different Amine-Based Solutions as Sorbents for Direct CO2 Capture from Air (Francesco Barzagli, Claudia Giorgi, Fabrizio Mani, and Maurizio Peruzzini ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2020 8 (37), 14013-14021).
Let me start this commentary by repeating myself: We will be damned for all time in history for leaving future generations the task of picking through our garbage dumps to survive. We will not be forgiven and we should not be forgiven.
Of course, we already have people picking through landfills to survive, but in my view, the most egregious dump of them all is precisely the one which almost no higher living thing can escape, our atmosphere.
Some years back, there was a moderately prominent energy website on the internet - it apparently operated from 2005 to 2013 -The Oil Drum which was built around the idea advanced by James Kunstler a journalist, once at Rolling Stone, in his book, The Long Emergency, that the world was experiencing "Peak Oil" and that we were all going to die when oil ran out.
(I could offer my standard joke that one cannot get a degree in journalism if one has passed a college level science course, but it appears that Kunstler does not have a degree in journalism; and certainly doesn't have one in a scientific discipline either.)
Personally, although I was certainly known to ridicule Kunstler despite that he was inexplicably popular among many of us on the left - the same people who opposed the two Iraq wars which were about claims of the essential nature of petroleum, also embraced Kunstler's fetishizing that pernicious substance - but I wish he'd been partly right, that oil was running out, if not about everyone dying without it. Regrettably it hasn't run out, even though the destruction we wrought to get at it is increasingly odious.
As of 2018, according to the 2019 Edition of the World Energy Outlook, dangerous petroleum was the largest single source of primary energy on this planet, producing 184.34 exajoules of energy out of 599.34 exajoules. It was the third fastest growing source of energy in the 21st century, after dangerous coal and dangerous natural gas; together they made up 81% of the world energy supply in 2018, as compared to 80% in the year 2000.
Things are getting worse, not better, but thank you Germany for pretending to care, even if pretending to care has been expressed by an embrace of stupidity. You're excused Germany, inasmuch as we live in the age of stupidity, and the stupidity of the German Energy Policy is simply an embrace of our times.
Eventually though, irrespective of the fate of Kunstler's mentality over the short term, the world will run out of oil, at least if we don't drown in its waste. I personally hope it is sooner rather than later.
This said, if we are ever to have any hope of reaching human development goals, which were first succinctly codified in Article 25, section 1 of the largely ignored 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an industrial society will require sources of carbon for essential chemicals and materials. Even though we live in the pyritic age of stupidity, we also live in the Golden Age of Chemistry, and an obvious source for carbon, the source in fact utilized by living things, is the otherwise dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide.
This paper is about the much discussed concept of "Direct Air Capture," often abbreviated in the scientific literature as "DAC," of carbon dioxide. This is an energetically expensive proposition, because in a purely thermodynamic sense, one must overcome the Entropy of Mixing, said entropy having contributed to the dubious embrace of dangerous fossil fuels by providing an efficiency kick. Sophisticated arguments have been advanced about why it might work; other sophisticated arguments have been advanced stating why it won't work. I come in on the side of saying it is feasible, not easy, but feasible, but only if no carbon dependent energy source (with the possible exception to a limited extent of bioenergy) is utilized to address overcoming the entropy that we, and all generations before us beginning in the 19th century, have dumped on future generations. From my perspective it is obviously feasible, since plants and algae do it all the time, albeit from the agency of providing a huge surface area via the self replicating function of life.
I personally think that a better industrial choice for capturing carbon dioxide from the air is indirect air capture, utilizing seawater, but that's another topic entirely.
Even I concede however that under limited circumstances, there are circumstances under which direct air capture might be viable, as a side product.
This involves my view of the wisest approach to what I'll call - since it involves a massive electrical circuit, the grid - capacitance, although I'm not a fan of the sometimes discussed idea of massive "super capacitors," designed to store electricity on a grand scale in the same way as it is stored, for example, in cell phones, or TV's in a short term fashion.
Capacitance is a refined word for energy storage. Energy storage is widely discussed as a scheme to make so called "renewable energy" a practical source of energy, by throwing good money after bad: So called "renewable energy" is an expensive failure, and attempts to store it to make its availability fit better into energy demand are misguided because they will certainly fail, just as so called "renewable energy" has failed to address climate change, particularly because what would be required would be the storage of electrical energy for a very long time in many circumstances. The mass requirements of doing so, and the toxicological and carbon associated with accumulating that mass, would surely be incredibly destructive and expensive.
Nevertheless, on an electrical grid, short term capacitance is a necessary feature. Here is the CAISO graphic for electricity demand in California during the recent extreme heat wave, accessed on September 6, 2020 at 3:05 pm Pacific Coast Daylight time:
Note that the distance between the forecasted peak power on that date, 45,168 MW, and the minimum at around 6:45 am on the same date, looks to be, from the graph, about 26,000 MW is roughly 20,000 MW. There are two ways to address this discrepancy, one being to build redundant power plants to cover these exigencies. This is extremely wasteful and therefore environmentally and economically unattractive, and it represents the reason that the highest electricity prices in the OECD are found in Germany and in Denmark. The other is capacitance, but this need not - in my opinion should not - involve the storage of electricity itself either in batteries or in massive super capacitors since this approach will clearly be environmentally odious. A better option would be to store the energy as heat, as in a phase change material, or as compressed air, or perhaps both.
For the purposes of this discussion, I will only discuss compressed air. Compressing air generates heat according to - on the simplest level - Charles Law, although vastly more sophisticated gas laws are obviously well known and widely used. It follows that gases cool when they expand adiabatically, that is, without heat being added. However, if one adds heat, in particular waste heat, one can under the right circumstances increase the exergy derived from the heat, where exergy is the usable energy extracted from the system.
If the air is compressed over a solution containing a carbon capture agent, similar to the amines discussed here, or - more to my personal liking - metal hydroxides, one can remove carbon dioxide from the air as a side product of the effort.
Another possibility is to use air as the working fluid in a Brayton cycle, during which the air is continuously cycled over carbon capture agents. This is certainly possible; all jet engines are Brayton cycle heat engines, and all use air as the working fluid.
If the air is superheated after compression, say to temperatures approaching 1000° or even higher, this will have the effect of combusting the greenhouse gas methane as well as carbon particulate matter, the latter a serious health risk, the former a potent greenhouse gas. If the heat transfer medium is highly radioactive it will have the effect of destroying the ozone depleting greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, residual CFC's, HFC's, sulfur hexaflouride, carbon tetrafluoride.
Although unlike the hyped up energy charlatan Amory Lovins, I am aware of Jevon's Paradox, I still think that high efficiency is desirable, particularly if we consider human development goals of justice and opportunity and health for all of humanity, not just those of us who live in wealthy countries. A very high temperature Brayton cycle, or a series of them, coupled to a Rankine cycle and perhaps even a Stirling cycle offers a number of opportunities, including the opportunity of providing sensible heat for chemical processing and, in fact, carbon dioxide recovery and reduction into useful products.
From the paper's introduction:
The "approximately 410 ppm" remark is bitterly amusing to anyone who pays attention to carbon dioxide concentrations in the air. I am certainly such a person, as I monitor these levels closely on a weekly basis. I note that it was only a few years ago that scientific papers were talking about "approximately 390 ppm."
Depending on this year's carbon dioxide minimum, which will probably occur this week, measured at Mauna Loa we may never see a level as low as 410 ppm again, so dramatic is our failure to address climate change. In the last 52 weeks, going back to the week beginning of the week of September 29, there have been six where the concentration at Mauna Loa was lower than 410 ppm. That week, represented the annual minimum. We have not, as of this year, seen a value as low as 410 ppm: The last data point, the week beginning September 20, 2020, reported a concentration of 411.27 ppm. If values fall this year to 410 ppm - I doubt they will - it will be the last time in the lifetime of anyone now living that it will do so. (This year's maximum was 417.43 ppm, measured in the week beginning May 24, 2020, during worldwide Covid shutdowns.)
So there's that.
Later the introduction continues:
With the aim of developing new liquid sorbents for the efficient capture of ultradiluted aerial CO2 with a lower regeneration energy compared to KOH and NaOH solutions, we decided to investigate the performance of several amine-based sorbents in DAC systems. Aqueous amines are well-known (and widely investigated) sorbents for the efficient CO2 capture from large-scale emission points (CO2 12–15% v/v), which can be regenerated at T = 100–120 °C, a temperature well below that required for the CaCO3 calcination.(21,22) Currently, many researchers are working to develop innovative amine-based absorbents able to combine the most efficient CO2 capture with the lowest heat of CO2 desorption,(23?26) an important parameter for assessing the regeneration energy (the opposite of the heat of CO2 absorption, usually lower than 90 kJ/mol CO2 for all of the most studied aqueous amines).(22,27)
For various reasons, I'm not quite sanguine about giving up on alkali metal hydroxides, although - despite it's limited availability - for various reasons I won't discuss presently, I favor cesium or at least rubidium hydroxides. I note that alkali hydroxides can be made into continuous systems by the expedient of drizzling in saturated solutions of group 2 hydroxides, those of calcium, strontium or barium. The authors are nonetheless focused on reducing the regeneration heat and energy required, as they state above, and study various amines.
The amines tested and their structures are shown in a table in the text:
Here is a photograph of their equipment, accompanied by a schematic:
The caption:
Carbon dioxide captured by amines, including the commercial carbon capture amine, monoethanolamine, is generally in the form of carbamates, structures in which a carbon dioxide is loosely bound to a amine nitrogen.
Some tables of results:
The formation of carbamates tracked by NMR:
The caption:
The authors explore the use of non-aqueous solvents. This table gives results.
In some cases the carbamates react with the alcoholic functions in the nonaqueous solvents having them to produce alkylcarbonates by the proposed mechanism:
The caption:
Excerpts from the conclusion:
...These findings highlighted the differences of DAC processes compared to conventional CCS processes and, consequently, the best CCS absorbents cannot be the best choice for the DAC process. The obtained results also showed that aqueous amines are more efficient than the same amines in organic diluents. MEA and DGA in EG/PrOH display slightly lower abs% compared to the aqueous solution by virtue of the high percentage of carbamate formed...
This is a fine paper; I like it, although I'm not sure I agree with the idea of amine carbon capture reagents, in particular because in the case of a commercial example MEA, monoethylamine, the stability of the amine proves to be a long term problem. Another is the recognition that the air is hardly clean, and besides the formation of sulfates, there is a considerable amount of nitrogen oxides in the air. A recently discovered problem in the pharmaceutical and, albeit to a lesser extent, the food industries is the formation of highly carcinogenic and genotoxic nitrosoamines. At the scale of air capture - we're talking billions of tons here - this may be problematic for these amines, even if they are designed to be used in closed systems.
I wish you a pleasant and safe Sunday.
Los Angeles, 2019.
I watched the "Final Cut" of Blade Runner today, which begins with the title, "Los Angeles, 2019."
Flying cars, lots of rain...um...um...
Los Angeles looks a little different than expected in 1982, I think.
There are no replicants in Los Angeles, from what I can tell, but I may be missing something.
I especially liked the part where they get kind of "sciency," when Tyrell tells Batty why he can't live. It was less silly than some things you see in science fiction.
It was though, I think, a pretty good movie, if you like that sort of science fiction sort of thing. I'm not, in general, a science fiction fan, but I liked this one.
A Rare-Earth Samarium Oxide Catalyst for Electrocatalytic Nitrogen Reduction to Ammonia
The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: A Rare-Earth Samarium Oxide Catalyst for Electrocatalytic Nitrogen Reduction to Ammonia (Yonghua Cheng, Haifeng Nan, Qingqing Li, Yaojing Luo, and Ke Chu
ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2020 8 (37), 13908-13914).
I often reflect on Stuart Kaufmann's remark, which has stuck in my mind for nearly two decades, in his fabulous book The Origins of Order that life can be considered, "An Eddy in Thermodynamics." I once spent part of an afternoon with Freeman Dyson - one of the best afternoons of my life - and he approved of that description as well.
The nitrogen-nitrogen triple bond is one of the strongest, and thus one of the most thermodynamically stable, bonds there is, 9.79 ev/bond. This means that it is very, very, very difficult to break. Worse, the activation energy of breaking it is also enormous, 3.5 ev/bond. Yet, for life to exist, breaking this bond is essential because of the impossible to understate role of nitrogen in biochemistry, where it plays a huge role in proteomics and nucleic acids, as well as in amino sugars, the role of which is very critical in immunology, the science at the forefront of the world's current crisis.
Before the development of the Haber-Bosch process, which is brilliantly discussed by one of my favorite thinkers, Vaclav Smil, in his wonderful "down to Earth" popular science book, Enriching the Earth, almost all of the fixed nitrogen on Earth was formed via the agency of a molybdenum/iron metalloenzyme, nitrogenase.
Here is the structure of the metal center of nitrogenase:
The caption:
Kim and Rees Science Vol. 257, Issue 5077, pp. 1677-1682 (1992)
I once had the privilege of attending one of Emily Carter's lectures in connection with the publication of this paper:
Prediction of a low-temperature N2 dissociation catalyst exploiting near-IR–to–visible light nanoplasmonics (Martirez and Carter, Science Advances (2017) Vol. 3, no. 12, eaao4710).
I asked her kind of rhetorically, "What is it about molybdenum, anyway?" and she laughed and made a sort of noncommittal remark about orbitals, a subject about which she knows more than I have ever known or ever will know.
I am, by the way, convinced that the best way to replace the dependence of the world on dangerous natural gas - and in some places even coal - for the production of ammonia, which is said to consume about 2% of the world energy supply, does not involve photochemical bond activation, or, for that matter, the electrochemistry under discussion in this paper on Samarium. I think the Haber-Bosch Process is acceptable if the heat energy required comes from process intensification of the thermal downgrade of thermochemical hydrogen production using nuclear energy as the primary energy source.
As I often remark, electricity is a thermodynamically degraded form of energy, and it is only acceptable to use it for chemical processes in the case where it is waste electricity.
Dealing with the environmental - in particular atmospheric - consequences of the Haber-Bosch process, on which the world's food supply depends, is another issue entirely.
From the introduction:
Lanthanide rare-earth compounds have gained a noticeable popularity in various applications of batteries, sensors, catalysis, and supercapacitors,(24) owing to their unique electron configurations, high surface chemical activity, and robust structure. Recent studies have identified CeO2,(25?27) DyF,(28) and La2O3(29) as promising rare-earth NRR catalysts. As a typical lanthanide oxide, Sm2O3 has recently attracted considerable interest in photocatalysis and electrocatalysis. For instance, Sm2O3 could act as an effective catalyst for the oxidative coupling of methane with high activity, selectivity, and durability.(30) Wang et al. prove that Sm2O3 can catalyze oxygen reduction actively and selectively and with high stability.(31)
Here, we first demonstrate Sm2O3 to be an effective and stable NRR electrocatalyst. Theoretical computations uncover that Sm2O3 can facilitate the NRR and hinder the HER. On the basis of the theoretical results, we synthesized Sm2O3 nanoparticles (NPs) which delivered an appealing NRR performance as well as robust stability.
The authors here did similar computational work to that reported by Carter, but went a step further into the experimental realm:
Some pictures from the text:
The caption:
The caption:
The caption:
The caption:
From the succinct conclusion of the paper:
Again, I basically am less than supportive, despite the fine science demonstrated in this paper, to electrochemical reduction of ammonia, except in the case where there is waste electricity.
However, it is environmentally and economically wise to avoid waste electricity, and the idea of storing it in batteries is about as environmentally odious as one can get in my opinion.
Continuous processes are always desirable, as opposed to batch or interrupted processes, in an environmental and economic senses - because these senses depend on thermodynamics.
This fact - facts matter - is why so called "renewable energy" will continue to fail to address environmental issues while simultaneously failing to address the ethical issues associated with human development goals.
I trust you will have a pleasant and safe weekend.
At the Purchaser's Option...
Everything I got is done and pawned.
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