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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Is it hard to add a source of hydrogen? In the images they have here it looks like there is a vat of water and it explicitly says it produces H2O and CO2 gas waste (though calls the CO2 harmless). That would imply there is a source of hydrogen here. (Not an expert, just legitimately curious so I can better spot snake oil)

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https://youtu.be/Zmtc22uPLd4

I’m not a chemist/someone else can offer a more detailed explanation (just love the excuse to post that song), but with most of these kinds of things the energy and advanced equipment required to go in a theoretically plausible direction for a minuscule amount of yield is usually absurd. Including turning iron into gold. (I think it might theoretically be possible to do that at this point as well, but if it is possible I’m sure it’d be astronomically energy intensive and wasteful to manipulate matter to that degree)

The way to turn iron to gold is ancient: smelt the iron, make a weapon with it, and use that to steal the gold from someone else.

teleochemistry

Turning iron to gold is not possible as a chemical reaction. They are elements. You need a nuclear reaction.

Ahh! So it is possible, just need a nuclear reaction!

It's quite simple: Gather a sufficient amount of iron (4 million times earth's mass will probably do). Bring it all in one place, it will naturally compact. Wait for the resulting supernova - you do want to keep your distance for this step. Lastly collect gold and other heavy elements.

Yeah. It's even better since you are starting with iron, don't have to wait billions of years for everything to burn first.

Exactly right. And to think there are still simpletons who dig in the ground for gold like neolithic primitives. Of course the doubters don't want us to know about this simple trick for turning iron into gold.

I have a vague memory of someone or some article saying there’s a way to get from lead to gold if you really wanted to with some combination of available nuclear tech, but it’d be completely absurd/ludicrously expensive (I think the context was somebody humoring what would be needed for atomic level assembly/star trek replicator stuff). I assume the same would apply to iron.

Yeah, but even worse. You need to add a lot of nucleons to iron just to get to (impure, radioactive) lead, and then from there to gold.

Iron (26) -> Lead (82) -> Gold (79)

How does that work?

Ha, woops. I was just assuming Gold had higher atomic number. But I don't know, maybe a convenient positron emission decay path.

You smash a proton into it and knock a light atom nucleus off. Works every time about 2% of the time.

For the stuff that doesn't end up as gold you can just keep hitting it with neutrons until it's heavy enough to try again.

At that point, why not just use hydrogen as a fuel? Or better yet, just use batteries.

I can't fuel my car with hydrogen.

And there we have it, the solution we've needed all along - dirigibles.

You could, the technology exists. The reason hydrogen fuel cells never caught on is because the production of hydrogen doesn't make economic and environmental sense. Which gets back to the root of problem with the OP claims.

Hydrogen leaks through metals because it can diffuse through the lattice, and attaching it to carbon stops it from doing that.

Hydrogen is extraordinarily annoying to store and transport. Oil is kind of annoying, but not “heavy cans of pressurized gas that leaks through metal walls anyway and is explosive in a wide range of air concentrations” annoying. Nobody has figured out a workable way to deal with this, though they might at some point.

It’s also not an accident electric cars are so heavy—gasoline or diesel fuel are fantastically energy-dense compared to almost anything else you might want to use, even accounting for the intricate engine you need to haul around to take advantage of them. Not to say that you shouldn’t try and use something else, just that it’s a very real problem.

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