"for god sake why are the nuclear scienstist no be put to produceing hydrogen plants and power stations or does the goverment have to many shares in nuclear ! get the scientist working on hydrogen its the most abundent gas in the universe and not that hard aparently to produce it green as green to atmosphire and has no side effects please vote"
This petitioner has an English name and describes himself as "of people uk", so I am not minded to excuse his appalling English on account of it not being his native language. Frankly, the vast majority of non-native English speakers of my acquaintance would be appalled to say or write something so ungrammatical, poorly punctuated and ill-spelt. I very much doubt that the petitioner is a scientist, because most scientists of my acquaintance can write quite clearly and articulately.
Possibly I'm also doubting he's a scientist because his grasp of science is lacking ... having looked at the minor form issues, let's progress to examine the functionality of his petition ...
Hydrogen is indeed abundant in the atmosphere (and the universe as a whole). But one can't generate power from it, as such - one can merely store energy from it. That is - most hydrogen is "locked up" in compounds - mostly water. If one uses energy to split the water into molecular oxygen and hydrogen, one can then store the hydrogen and use it to re-create the water, releasing the energy that was used to split the water in the first place. Great as a method of storing energy; no use for generating it.
That was my impression, anyway, but a scientist (which I broadly claim to be) is always prepared to be wrong, so I checked Wikipedia, that wonderful resource, and found it agreeing with me entirely. Hydrogen can't do what the petitioner appears to think it can - or else, of course, the petitioner's English is letting him down so badly that he's failing to make what he wants clear.
3 comments:
Why do you assume this person with the appalling English and lack of knowledge of science is male?
Toby
Could it be a reference to fusion power rather than hydrogen burning? If so then the only obstacle is that it doesn't actually work yet (at least, not to get more energy out than you put in while keeping the reaction controlled). On the other hand, the government is already funding a fair amount of research in that field together with many other industrialised countries.
Toby - I assume he's male because he's signed the petition John. :)
Cim - yes, that's possible. On the other hand, given that we can't actually control the reactions presently I'm not completely sure the process can be described as having no side effects ..! And as you say, it is being researched, so ... Well, who knows what the idiot means?
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