The most interesting I ever ran across was people doing artificial photosynthesis to produce H2 and combustable oil, e.g. Nate Lewis' group at Cal Tech. Same problem: contemporary economics.
I'm glad people are still working on these problems.
[1]https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00286-0
Also, that scheme is a thermochemical scheme for sunlight to hydrogen. Producing H2 gas by electrolysis driven by PV would be more efficient.
It's a common nuclear talking point that solar is impractical because of efficiency. This is a bogus argument, since comparing efficiency of schemes that use different inputs is comparing apples and oranges. Sunlight is cheap and abundant and can be wasted without intolerable pain.
What, you're allowing nuclear to scale up, but not storage? Very high double standards you all have in Nuclearstan.
How much does it produce?
No breeder program has ever closed the fuel cycle, and the "closed" cycle doesn't even aspire to get rid of the fertile isotopes which will just be more high level waste.
What reprocessing does do though is let out all the Kr, Cs, Tc, T and so on that was safely contained in your spent fuel bundle. Much of which is just vented or dumped in the ocean.
I think the eventual answer will be in genetically engineered microbes or plants, if only because it is easier to scale up vats with microbes and nature already has figured out synthesis paths for ages.
https://www.science.org/content/article/cost-plunges-capturi...
If someone asked me for a current cost calculation for a large-scale facility producing methane or methanol, off the top of my head I imagine it's still 5-10X as expensive as mined fossil fuels are. Economies of scale might bring that down to parity fairly soon, however.
There is one, got traction since millions of years..it's called trees:
https://www.britannica.com/science/methanol
>>wood alcohol, or wood spirit
Interestingly I had to reword my comment (plant->facility and evergreen-> continuous) to avoid looking like I was trying to pun. Natural metaphors are a deep part of our thinking about the world.
Yeah see that's the wrong thinking of us humans. The best systems are those established by nature. Remove and bind CO2...yes trees and algae and shellfish have some million years of training in that.
Lets see this at scale..you need so many solar-panels that you already wasted mw's of energy, just to waste that energy for a process nature is already much better.
It just to make stocks and money...not to safe the climate, well maybe it's meant to make vodka in space-stations, then i am ok with it.