I posted here years ago under another name. I always admired how a pro-nukie could survive here. I know it has been challenging for you.

Your takes on hydrogen have been, as always, bang on.

...but the reality is setting in:

Without nuclear energy there is no path to addressing climate change and so called "renewable energy" is not actually "renewable" nor is it sustainable.

...that renders nonsense into truth.

Were the opposite true we would never see retractions, including those involving fraud that have made their way not only through peer review, but even to acclaim.

We forget that science is a human enterprise, subject to all the foibles of humanity, including the embrace of fallacies, including but not limited to the bandwagon fallacy.

It is a cultural phenomenon, disturbing to me and I'm sure many others, to believe that if one states the word "hydrogen" one is talking about clean energy. It is, indeed, officially endorsed around the world, including in this country. This is immediately falsifiable on inspection since hydrogen is overwhelmingly produced using fossil fuels, is not primary energy, and the 2nd law of thermodynamics has never been disproved, and, I'm sure, never will be.

industries . They have a long established practice of setting up so-called "research institutes" whose inmates do nothing but pump out papers like this one using similar claims which propagandize against established science the anti-climate change agenda. Another route to the same end is to endow research chairs at selected universities which are then staffed with compliant scientists. Big Tobacco used and still has similar arrangements to give cover to their false claims.

And I emphatically agree that it is very similar to tobacco advertising, only worse, because the cost is not just some people's lungs, but the entire planetary atmosphere.

The survey article I linked actually referred to another paper, this one, in the issue: A Molecular Dynamics Simulation Study on the Diffusion Coefficients of the •OH, •H, and •HO2 Free Radicals Related in the Hydrogen Production Process in Supercritical Water Weijing Ding, Hui Jin, and Osamu Takahashi Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2023 62 (42), 16968-16976

It begins with "clean coal" rhetoric:

Then there's this, um, interesting text after the conclusion of the paper:



Now China is still overwhelmingly dependent on coal which is its largest energy resource; its government is largely independent of popular will; and it is building coal plants at a rapid rate. Thus the claim that "The Authors declare no competing interests" is highly dubious if not an outright lie.

It is easy to see that this article, while the science is somewhat interesting in terms of modeling - it is not an experimental paper but a modeling paper, is about greenwashing coal. It does not report where the carbon dioxide is going, and in fact, it is immediately clear that as coal is better than 90% carbon, the process cannot be "low carbon."

Practically all hydrogen papers written are of this nature, a shell game. There are, in my opinion, although I am in no position to prove it, at least two sales people who post a great deal about hydrogen at DU who are here at the behest of fossil fuel interests. Interestingly one of them often posts stupid videos about hydrogen use in China. They're all appalling dishonest junk.

Of course, in my blogging career over the last 20 years, to be fair, I have often been met with similar accusations that I am being paid by the nuclear industry, since I am a strong supporter of that industry. However, if I were, and I am not, this does not refute the truth of what I say, in particular about used nuclear fuels, which is that they have a spectacular record of not killing anyone, whereas this is hardly true of coal. Coal more or less kills people every time its used. That's a fact.

I believe my journal here speaks for who and what I am, not that it matters who and what I am.

The fossil fuel sales people and salesbots here often juxtapose their claims about hydrogen connected with completely fraudulent pictures of so called "renewable energy" industrial plants in China. For the record, I regard so called "renewable energy" as another scheme, similar to hydrogen, an effort to entrench and expand the use of fossil fuels. (The WEO data released by the IEA each year, along with soothsaying about so called "renewable energy's" growth demonstrates that this is the real result of the trillions of dollars foolishly thrown at it.)



If the soothsaying in this table actually proves to be true, the planet is screwed, and along with it, all future generations.

We are currently using more fossil fuels than we have ever done before, and finally the IEA, in the most recent issue of the World Energy Outlook has finally admitted, even with the absurd soothsaying about solar and wind energy, that all of its scenarios leave the use of fossil fuels in place at unacceptable levels.

I do believe that supercritical water generated by nuclear heat may play a role - if allowed to do so - in the reformation of solid wastes and perhaps some agricultural by products. This has the potential to ameliorate some environmental insult. But it cannot play a major role in carbon removal. Photosynthesis is relatively slow at carbon capture compared to the scale at which fossil fuels emit it, and the obscene land use issues associated with so called "renewable energy" will only make this worse, not better. The supercritical water oxidation of plastics will release carbon dioxide that originated from fossil fuels.

All this said, this paper is cute, but not at all essential for understanding supercritical water, although some of the references may be interesting.