The latest circle is up at Disillusioned Words. Get your latest skeptical goodness there.

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The latest on the war against "Toxins" from discovery news.

Good news:

...the levels in people in the United States are lower than they were two years ago," said Donald Patterson, formerly of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and now president of a company called EnviroSolutions Consulting

Bad News:

...we can still measure them," added Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park

Then they go on to list all the bad actors they were able to measure.

The chemicals in question include dioxins, PCBs, DDT, and a variety of other pesticides, insecticides, and fungicides, many of which are banned. All belong to a group of chemicals known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs).

They measured levels of 68 of these bad actors (and most of these are, in fact, in high enough doses, certainly bad actors) in 1800 people. Good work. Not once in the entire article did they mention either of two relevant things:

1. What were the concentrations?
2. What were the negative health effects that arose from these concentrations?

Why would they leave out that information? Here is why: Its because we can measure concentrations that are far, far lower than is relevant with respect to health. We measure toxicity levels for many, many chemicals, including all the of the ones mentioned above (and you can find the answer in MSDS sheets - material safety data sheets). If there was something shockingly high with respect to the concentration of one of these bad actors, you know that is what the article would have been written about. Instead we get this:

It's not yet clear what the new study means for human health.

The sorts of studies are very useful. They are used to find and catalog hot spots and to baseline for future comparison. I'm glad they do them (I hope this is not on the list of topics that republicans hate and want removed). But to write an article about "toxins" just feeds into the hysteria and de-tox cults.

I stopped reading New scientist because they insist on printing crap like that. This is appearing to be no better.

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I'm not writing about this anymore. I will simply refer people to this post. This fake controversy is over. Instead I will refer people to these two posts from now on.

Read why we immunize. Read it all. Read all the links. See all the pictures.

Read why vaccines are good and why all the arguments against them are weak. Read it all. Read all the links.

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Shit

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory Was a satellite that was going to let us create a dynamic detailed map of carbon emissions and carbon sinks. We do have some ability to do this now, but nothing like what this would have helped us to do. Now we will be looking to Japan Gosat satellite to perform this function. Too bad.

Update: Bad Astronomy has more and will have update. Clearly its better to read about it there..... But I still beat him to the punch!

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I don’t know many religious people. Of those, I know fewer who are willing to challenge their religious point of view. Of those, none are close enough to me to be able to carry on a friendly discussion on the matter. So what happens?

I have conversations about religion in my head while I walk the dog, drive, wait at the train station. Do you do this? Man, I hope I’m not the only one. Its kind of funny, because atheist tech doesn’t always ‘win’. Sometimes I come up with something that I don’t know how to defend to explain.

I’m not writing this post to give ammo to one side or another, I just write what I am thinking about at the time. So here is my conversation as I had it (I had a stenographer present at all times).

 

Atheist TS: You can’t know that there is a god, because there is no evidence, nothing that can’t be explained, and as time goes on, the things we can’t explain at some point, through the scientific method, eventually gets explained. the Gaps continue to shrink.

Religious TS: There isn’t a God-O-Meter that you can wave around to find god. He lives outside of our universe.

ATS: How convenient, if he lives outside of our universe, that's the same thing as not being there.

RTS: No, it isn’t. He may live outside of the universe, but he certainly has strong influence on our universe and humans as a whole.

ATS: If he had physical influence on our universe then we would be able to measure him.

RTS: Yeah I hear that assumption a lot. Let me give you an example. Do you think I am real?

ATS (sniggers a little, since this is in his head): no, but for the purposes of this conversation, I’ll bite. Yes you are real.

RTS: OK, lemme use someone else. Do you think Alex Rodriguez, the baseball player is real?

ATS: Yes.

RTS: So presumably he has a father right?

ATS: Yes

RTS: So we definitely know this person I am talking about is real, but he is also someone that most people do not know.

ATS: OK (with a look of “where the hell are you going with this?”)

RTS: OK, lets say A-Rods father, Daddy-Rod, goes to Mumbai and kills someone without being caught on video. Do you think that is possible, leaving aside his morals?

ATS: Yes.

RTS: Then Daddy-Rod does to Rhode Island and drops 1000 dollars in a mailbox in a suburb of Providence. Is that Possible?

ATS: I guess

RTS: Then he does 100 other acts of kindness, creation, destruction, and pain, all over the world in a completely random fashion. All while not being detected. Do you think that is possible?

ATS: Well I guess.

RTS: Is it possible that this string of actions looks random to you and everyone else, but in actuality there is a method to his madness?

ATS: I guess.

RTS: Is Daddy-Rod no longer real? Hasn’t he performed significant acts that affect people in a significant way? But still, presuming that all the acts appear to be random, he would not be detected. Further, it may appear completely random to you, but he may have his own formula about who gets good things and who gets bad, and you would never know it.

OK, I’ve let this drama go on long enough. Yeah, I knew where RTS was going in a second when I really had this conversation. Some of the folks I have brought this to, have asked “If you can’t detect Daddy-Rod, how is that different than him not being there?”. But clearly he is there. Clearly for many people there is a difference because he is there. Further, if we knew his reasoning, we would be in a better position to avoid pain and be granted something good.

The best I can think of is that, we have been trying to find concrete evidence of Daddy-Rod for millennia, surely he would have slipped up by now. Been caught on camera, or done something that would not have been able to be done without his presence. But presuming omnipotence, that may not apply to a god.

I’m not going all Raving Atheist. There are many reasons to ignore the god hypothesis. And tons of unconvincing arguments for God. But I was just thinking about this. If someone brought this to me, I am not sure of how I would respond. So, I am bringing it to you.

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Its sad that I even have to write a post like this. But I guess all blogs are prone to trolls, even mine.

For the most part of the last three years, I have been pretty free of dorks who just write useless blather. I have been pretty free of spam too. It was nice. But those days are over I guess.

I'll probably find a better comment system than the one blogger provides, but until I do and can specifically ban a trolls IP, I have to put on moderation, which is more work for me, and annoying for you. Let's all repeat after me, "Thank you, stupid trolls"

OK, for the future however, I'd like to get some foundation here for commenting. This blog is increasing in its readership, but its still not anywhere near any of the more popular blogs like PZ or Skeptico. I probably won't have to institute strict rules, but here are the basics:


Short notes:
If you are just going to write a short note, without debatable claims, then I don't really see any limitations to impose. If you want to tell me you liked a post, or hated a post, I'm all for it. I would encourage you to do this so I can have some feedback as to what I am doing right to entertain and inform, and what I am doing wrong.

Disputing Claims
If you disagree with me, or think I left out something glaringly stupid, or something like that, please tell me! I blog, read blogs, and write comments to learn. No where in this entire blog will you find me saying that I am 100% certainly right. I'm happy to change my mind about something, but I am not willing to do it based on fallacious arguments.

Avoid logical Fallacies.
I dislike responding by saying "Strawman, argument from ignorance, poisoning the well, ad hominem..." It boring and a waste of everyone's time. However, I do recognize that it actually takes some time to realize that you are making them, or even detecting them in other people. I ask that you put in your best effort. Here is a list of common ones, and why they are fallacies.

Name Calling
Also boring. I don't care if you think I'm an asshole. I care if you think I am wrong, and more importantly, why you think I am wrong.

Support your claims
If you think I am wrong, guess what, I don't believe you. I would not have written the post if I thought I was wrong. If you want to show me how I am wrong, you need to be using reasoned arguments and provide links to information that backs up what you said. I will change my mind on a subject with referenced data and logical reasoning. If you blather on this blog without supporting your claims, I'm simply going to ignore or delete you.

None of this is to say that if you type a single, short unsupported statement that I'm gonna go all medeival on your ass. But if you actually want to make your point, spend the extra time to back up what you say. Further, I encourage you to coment and truly enjoy calm reasoned debate, its one of the reasons I do this. So don't feel shy, don't feel like any innaccuracy is going to release the fllodgates of hell.

Other folks have pretty good commenting guidelines. Instead of duplicating all that here, I encourage you to read them to get a feel for what I find important.

Update: I have installed IntenseDebate. Mostly because I am lazy and didn't want to spend a lot of time looking for a tool that gives me better power over my comments and VJack recommended it.

Please sign up and use it. I may go threaded if the chatter gets confusing, but for now, i'm leaving threaded comments off.

Update II: OK, looks like I got IntenseDebate to work. Hope you like it. Took me a while becuase of the way I post (using Livewriter) and my custom template. But after I got that worked out it looks like it is working ok.

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Wesley, over at antievolution.org has made another creationist bingo game with direct links to Talk Origins. The one I did, is so that you can print out random cards, with the supporting information and take em with you. This is a good one to use if you happen to be near a computer.

I think his ultimate plan is to let you make bingo T-shirts. Keep an eye out.

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If you want to see the actual act that Obama signed, it is here.

Addition:

FOSSIL ENERGY RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
For an additional amount for ‘‘Fossil Energy Research and
Development’’, $3,400,000,000.

really? Do we really think that we have not hammered out most of the problems with finding, getting and using fossil fuels? Now if it were more specific (it isn't), and said this money was for improving efficiency and sequestering carbon, I'd be all for it. Gristmill seems to think its going that way simply becuase of the people who are in charge of that money.

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  If you have read this blog for any amount of time, you probably know that I do not hold a very favorable view of fuel cells. I think they suck in general and good ones provide marginal benefit over other solutions.

For example, batteries are better than fuel cells in cell phones. They keep promising cell phone fuel cells, but the stuff required to make the fuel cell work makes it too bulky to be inside of a cell phone, no matter what companies are showing in their PR. At best we will see some box-on-cord systems that will still be bigger and more expensive to run, than keeping an external battery charged up.

I recently mentioned fuel cell cars in another post. So far, they are all requiring hydrogen infrastructure to work. And where do we get most of our hydrogen? Natural gas. That means that even if we use hydrogen for these things, we are still creating just as much CO2 (although there might be an efficiency play to be had, but we aren’t talking about a dramatic reduction in greenhouse gases).

I only mention fuel cells for this article, because the company I’m talking about uses fuel cell materials but doesn’t make fuel cells. H2Pump LLC uses fuel cell materials to pump hydrogen with no moving parts. In pumping hydrogen, they also pressurize it and purify it. They are specifically not a fuel cell company.

Background

Before looking into it deeply, lets take a minute to try to understand why that is significant. The most common way to move gas and pressurize it is to use a compressor. We are all probably familiar with air compressors and may even have one in your garage. The issue with hydrogen is that the molecule is so small, that a normal compressor can really pump it. Further, the gas itself can embrittle steel. There are a host of problems with pumping pure hydrogen. But to date, the only way to do it is with a mechanical hydrogen compressor.

There are also hydrogen purification systems available. These are generally done with a PSA (pressure swing adsorption) system. Basically, gas is fed into a tank with these pellets in it. The pellets, when under pressure, adsorb everything except hydrogen which passes through the tank. Then when the pellets are full of the contaminants, the inlet gas is routed to another PSA tank, and the first tank is depressurized, releasing the contaminant into a waste stream and making it ready to start again. There are also low pressure Temperature Swing Adsorption units which do the same thing, but release contaminants upon heating. These systems can be used to purify a variety of other gases, not just hydrogen.

So, in order to pump and purify hydrogen, you would need a hydrogen capable compressor and a PSA system. There are companies that make the system I just described.

Why would you have a system like this? Where is hydrogen recovery useful? Fuel cells consume hydrogen, so there is nothing to recycle. Well it turns out there are a variety of industries that use hydrogen, but do not consume it. Instead it is simply released, either by flaming it at a stack, or just releasing it into the air! Industries that do this are:

• Heat treating industry

• Metallurgical processing

• Steel production

• Semiconductor manufacturing

• Float glass production

• Fats and oils (hydrogenation)

• Any chemical process which generates by-product hydrogen such as biogas production

Its amazing to think that these companies are getting hydrogen, in huge quantities, flowing it into their process and then dumping it out the vent. Can this possibly be true? At worst it seems like they could burn it and use it as heat. However the heating value of H2 is only 2 or 3 times higher than that of natural gas but pure H2 is over an order of magnitude higher than natural gas in cost. So who knows? As mentioned before, companies make systems to recapture this hydrogen, but they are generally sized for the huge quantities of hydrogen and have very short times before failure (multiple failures per year), usually due to the compressor (there is little to go wrong in the PSA part).

H2Pump

OK, we know why we might recycle hydrogen, we know how we might recycle hydrogen, and we know a couple of companies who make equipment to recycle hydrogen. Now we can focus on H2Pump.

H2 pump has a different technology. They use fuel cell materials, but unlike fuel cells which consume hydrogen to generate power, these pumps consume electricity to pump hydrogen.

Hydrogen is fed to one side of the membrane with a catalyst on it (the anode electrode). The hydrogen molecules are split and pass through the membrane as  protons. On the other side of the membrane is another electrode, the cathode, where the two proton recombine to produce H2. This action doesn’t happen to any other molecule. So if there is hydrogen and carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide (common ingredients in a process), only the pure hydrogen appears on the cathode, the other things get passed through the anode.

The flow rate of hydrogen coming off the cathode is directly dependant on the current. The more current supplied the higher the flow rate. If a restriction is placed on the outlet, the pressure will rise. The molar flow rate coming off the cathode will remain constant, however the volumetric flow rate will be completely dependant on the pressure differential between the anode and whatever is after the flow restriction. Some of these membrane are very strong because they are fluouropolymers, like Teflon. Therefore large pressures, even in the hundreds of PSI, could be generated.

Costs and value proposition

Hydrogen is expensive. These guestimates don’t take into account the purity required for most of these processes (1 gallon of gas equivalent is about 1kg of H2). (I gotta write a post on the farce that is the difference between projections of hydrogen costs and what pure hydrogen actually costs right now). I’ll get hard data later, but  depending on purity and volume, hydrogen costs between 4 dollars/kilogram (high volume, lower purity) and 100 dollars per kg (high purity, low volumes) according the H2Pumps website. They claim to be able to recover 90% of the hydrogen in the waste stream for what is essentially just the cost of the electricity to move the protons from one side to the other.

So how much does it cost to reclaim the hydrogen? Well, get ready for some arithmetic.

On their technology page, they explain how to calculate hydrogen flow based on current (actually they say how to calculate current based on flow), and they say that a typical voltage of a cell may be 50mV. If we do an example, of say, 100 kg/day of H2 (=1.157 grams/sec =1.148 mol/sec) , you would need 220,000 amps. In order to make that reasonable (to have a decent power supply), you would break that up into multiple cells, lets say 220 cells (just to make math easier). Each cell runs at 50mW, so you would consume,  0.050V x 220 x 1000 amps = 11kW.

So for each hour you run the machine you use up 11kWhs of energy. Its easy to find out the cost of energy where you live. For industrial use, the average cost of energy is 7 cents per kWh. So, for each day you pump 100kG of H2, you would pay $18.50, we are talking about 19 cents per kg of hydrogen if it is reclaimed instead of being thrown out the window! And this is for pure, pressurized hydrogen from a system with no moving parts (I can imagine valves being required). I gotta say, these numbers seem a bit too good to be true, but even if their numbers are off by an order of magnitude, it is still cheap hydrogen.

Now I am quite sure I have left out some stuff that they have not included on their page. For example, how much power does the system use to make the stack work? Are there things I have to replace every year? Are there other consumables? Then there is the cost of the system, they say a one or two year payback, but what are they assuming about my gas and electricity use?

So there are tons of questions to ask. However, they do not have many of the problems of fuel cells, namely oxygen screwing up a lot of things up and the fact that there is no flooding on the cathode (because hydrogen evolves there and no water is made). Further they do not have the big issue of PSA systems, namely a failure prone compressor. It seems like this may work.

Maybe all those companies making fuel cell materials may find a market after all.

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