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Name: gary

I want 1, wicked show…

Name: spark

He seems very confident, but if his actually talking about the rhodium based catalyst, let me just point out that it’s one of the rarest materials on Earth with a price tag around $100.000/kg. So much for large scale and so much for a message of hope.

Name: sean

re: spark’s comment

Well if he said it costs $100 to make a unit for household use, do you think he’s using Rhodium? Your last statement/sentence infers that you do. Maybe you’re not a very bright spark.

Name: Spark

Well Sean … nice to start off with an ad personam argument.
The only photocatalyst that I know of discovered by professor Nocera is the one using rhodium.
here’s the patent:
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/6863781/claims.html
here’s the paper:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/293/5535/1639

If you can show me a different photocatalyst that would be great, but for now stop with the name calling and better find some real arguments.

The annual production of rhodium is in the order of 2-3 tons (so the whole world produces a cubic meter of rhodium per year!). It’s hard to imagine how this could be scaled up. Of course you could create a billion of small devices like this with a really small amount of rhodium (and other rare metals), but that would most certainly influence the rate of the process.

MAYBE this works. I’m just dubious how he can get high efficiency, high rate of the process and make it cheap, all at the same time.

Name: Spark

I actually made an obvious error (as rhodium’s density is around 12 g/cm^-3) and the annual production is equivalent to just a quarter of a cubic meter. For all you Americans having problems with the metric system, that’s less than 9 cubic feet . ;)

Name: Miriel

Hi Spark,

Just wondering when you heard him speak of Rhodium? I went to one his talks just over a month ago and from what I heard they had previously used platinum (obviously not economical) but were now using cobalt and potassium with a molecular catalyst.

I am not that familiar with the resource base for cobalt and potassium phosphates but from what we were told, a small representative model of the system could be made at best with $20.

Name: shuen

When was this? He said 2050 and "in 42 Years". So it should have been in 2008.

Than he´s saying he will produce these things in a year. That would be 2009.

right now it is 2010 and i didn´t hear anything nor i can buy.

I would be one of the first who buy this kind of stuff (even if it is a little more expensive)….

Name: Donnie Jones

I think he is talking about a cobalt-phosphate as the catalyst, not rhodium.

A Self-Healing Oxygen-Evolving Catalyst
Abstract:
A cobalt−phosphate water-oxidizing catalyst forms from the oxidation of Co2+ to Co3+ in the presence of phosphate. We have employed radioactive 57Co and 32P isotopes to probe the dynamics of this catalyst during water-oxidation catalysis. We show that the catalyst is self-healing and that phosphate is the crucial factor responsible for repair.
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja900023k

Name: Spark

Thanks Donnie.
Finally getting some reasonable answers with actual data to back this up.
@shuen
Since the publication and patents are from 2009 it’s more likely he made a simple error and it should have been 41 years. I seriously doubt this talk is from 2008.
Also this kind of technology takes a lot of time to get from the lab to mass production. Not only you need to discover something that works in a control environment, but you have to figure out a way to mass produce it cheaply. Obviously it takes time and money to scale this up.

Waiting for my hydrogen powered car/home ;)

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