10.01.12
Military science
People who don’t know anything about science, including journalists, often labor under the assumption that the US military is whiz-bang at it.
Not so. Most of the great achievements in American science do not, and did not, come from the US military. The Manhattan Project, for example, while conducted by the military in World War II, was the product of the finest minds in high-energy physics, chemistry and other related fields.
Today, a doofus editor at an NBC News blog called “Futuretech,” allowed someone to go forward with a story on how the US Navy wants to make jet fuel from sea water.
It takes one small torpedo to send this story to the bottom.
The only way to make fuel from water is by electrolysis, which yields burnable hydrogen gas. And the reason our fuel problems are not over is because splitting it is not trivial, energy wise.
Which is a very good thing for the planet since good ol’ H20 is the solvent in which the chemistry of all life on Earth occurs. (I kinda like that sentence.)
But leave it to stupid journalists to mess this up with incomprehension for an equally benighted audience.
The U.S. Navy may need to look no further than the water around its ships to produce jet fuel, according to a program underway at its research laboratory …
The technology involves extracting carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas from seawater and then using catalysts to convert them into a class of jet fuel called J-5 that meets Navy safety specifications.
The journalist, John Roach, never really gets around to explaining the bit about cracking water, instead relying on some double-talk from the Navy boffins pushing their quack schemes:
This can all be done for between $3 to $6 per gallon, according to a feasibility study published in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy.
“This cost includes capital costs, operation and maintenance, and electrical generation cost for synthesizing the fuel,??? Heather Willauer, the study’s lead author at the Naval Research Laboratory, told NBC News in an email …
The team elaborates in the paper that the “though the energy balance is unfavorable, electricity cannot and never will be able to fuel jet turbines.???
The electricity to produce the fuel would come from either ocean thermal energy conversion (OTEC) technology or onboard nuclear power technologies.
Took a giant step toward solving the world’s energy problems in one e-mail, a press release, some vague jargon (OTEC) and an article in an obscure journal, did ya?
There might be an Ig Nobel Prize in it.
From Barry Commoner’s obit at the Times, today:
Along with eminent figures of the postwar years like the chemist Linus Pauling and the anthropologist Margaret Mead, he was concerned that the integrity of American science had been compromised — first by the government’s emphasis on supporting physics at the expense of other fields during the development of nuclear weapons, and second by the growing privatization of research, in which pure science took a back seat to projects that held short-range promise of marketable technologies.
Basic science helps one understand why the Navy’s fuel from seawater project is a waste of time. And is intelligence-insulting.
Mike Ozanne said,
October 5, 2012 at 5:01 am
I can understand the desire, make a carrier air group entirely self sustaining ( as long as ordnance expenditure is low anyways) but since the USN abandoned nuclear powered escorts the battle group is tied to RAS anyway! That’s before we worry about how many reactor cores and tonnes of catalyst needed to keep an air group refueled. Doesn’t do any good to make your own gas if you have to double the RAS drops to keep the catalyst consumption fed… And of course that big laconian “If” concerning whether it actually works at all…:-)
George Smith said,
October 5, 2012 at 9:57 am
Somehow, I think turning a carrier into a giant cracking plant, or adding another ship the size of a carrier to be the floating cracking plant in battle group probably hasn’t entered the equation. There’s a magical thinking quality to all these schemes which have included, biofuels from algae, coal-to-liquids, as practiced by the old Third Reich (that turned out well), etc.
Plus they want ship-to-ship and ship-to-air battle lasers. Another thing that’s going to stubbornly refuse to work like the cartoons and animations in the pitches.
Mike Ozanne said,
October 5, 2012 at 2:35 pm
“There’s a magical thinking quality to all these schemes which have included, biofuels from algae, coal-to-liquids, as practiced by the old Third Reich (that turned out well), etc.”
When I were a lad, I had to pick up some University level stats courses to keep the firms SPC rating up. The place made me do a tech foundation course that included power generation and Agriculture. All those SFschemes from my kidhood, about underground hydroponics factories feeding the world. Shot down by calculating the energy required to provide the light density that allows plants to grow…. The fuel from coal thing was practical to some extent, but by the time they got it working RAF and USAF were over their ass 24/7, making them burn it faster than they could pump it and blowing the stuff sky high as we found it. The South-Africans used the same process during the sanctions regime to guarantee their key reserve of military fuel. The airborne laser thing is fine just as soon as they can design a telescopic tube that can attach the laser to the target while its moving, so they can pump out a vacuum between muzzle and impact point….
George Smith said,
October 6, 2012 at 8:26 am
Yep, the Reich and coal to liquids! A couple years ago I wrote something for the Register on clean coal, some companies of which were incorporating coal-to-oill chemistry into their refining pitches. One of them was in the country where I grew up. It’s gathered a lot of momentum and then was slowly killed.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/28/us_clean_coal/print.html