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A number of tech blogs are reporting a humorous and green-sounding new battery technology: the NoPoPo Japanese battery that can be recharged by filling it up with… urine. Sounds great, right? Free electricity! The ultimate recyclable resource! Not only that, but this battery can run on any liquid – beer, tea, juice, coffee… even water!
That’s where I stopped to think. Water? Really? How does a battery “run” on water? Every now and then a video goes around showing some garage inventor who has managed to generate energy from water, or salt water, or something like that. Every time it’s proven to be a hoax. Because you just can’t create energy out of nowhere; to quote the Simpsons, we follow the laws of thermodynamics in this household.
So then how do these batteries work? Nearly all of the posts refer to the fact that “the liquid reacts with a mix of carbon and magnesium”. They also mention the fact that the battery can only be recharged a limited number of times. But if the liquid were the fuel, why would it be limited like that?
The best explanation I found was in a comment by “retired Chemistry Professor” on the blog Hexus. He pointed out that when the liquid is introduced it allows the magnesium to oxidize, thereby generating a current. As soon as the magnesium runs out, the battery is dead. In lieu of an official explanation of the technology from the NoPoPo people, this sounds the most plausible to me.
So is there value to this battery? Maybe a little. It claims to be made of environmentally benign materials. Also, whereas a regular battery slowly dissipates its charge no matter what, maybe this one would be able to “hibernate” in between liquid injections, thereby giving you the full potential of the magnesium inside. But the battery is only rated to give you 500 mAh (milliamp hours) – as opposed to 1700-3000 mAh in a normal alkaline battery – and it’s only powerful enough to run a small device like a clock or a radio (when’s the last time you even used a portable radio?).
Moral of the story – be skeptical when someone tells you something runs on water.
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written by a. brown, February 18, 2009
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written by Kris, February 18, 2009
I suppose Yuri is assuming a certain level of scientific education on the reader's behalf. Perhaps this is wrong; although, I would certainly hope not. Regardless, explaining every point would be far beyond the scope of the story.
Also, scientific truth is NEVER subjective!!! NEVER EVER EVER! If an idea is to describe the physical world at all, it MUST be logically consistent (hence UNIQUE). If there is more than one logical interpretation of a phenomenon (i.e. it is subjective), then it simply can't be interpreted as a 'truth'. That's the whole point of scientific research: finding a logically consistent, unique, description of particualar phenomena. This holds for all true sciences (e.g. psychology could have many interpretations of a particular phenomenon since it's more of a psuedo-science - not bagging psychology at all; I think it's fascinating).
In discussing this, I'm reminded of this old post: http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/2223/
;)
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written by Nick, February 19, 2009
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written by Brandon, February 19, 2009
Just to clarify, nuclear reactions are considered under the scope of chemical reactions.
I would also like to throw out there that I did mention that I didn't think that this battery was working on that level, but I guess it ended up being a little obscure (I just mentioned it in a caption thingy [whatever you call these kinds of comments]).
Lastly, the comment about truths SOMETIMES being subjective was meant to refer to truths like scurvy being a vitamin C deficiency (when it was "known" at the time to be a disease that you could catch) or Einsteins own beliefs that nuclear power could not be achieved because it did not yield enough power return on input (when they used protons to start the reaction before realizing that they needed to use neutrons). These were known to be true until proven false.
Laws are only theories that have yet to be disproven. I'm not gullible, but I don't like to just assume things to be impossible.
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written by Kris, February 19, 2009
My only point re: truths was that for something to be called a 'truth', then there shouldn't be more than one explanation. So yeah: semantics.
Thanks for the clarification on the use of the term "chemical reaction"; being in physics, I typically refer to electron-transfer reactions as "chemical", and nucleon-based reactions as "nuclear". After a quick Wikipedia search I see that you're 100% on nuclear reactions now generally classed as "chemical" - it's on Wikipedia, must be true ;)
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written by Joannah, April 08, 2009
Joannah
http://myscones.com
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All atoms contain energy and a simple example is the atomic bomb, where an unbelievable amount of energy was created by breaking the atoms of an unstable material. We only believe that the atomic bomb works because "smart people" already figured out WHY it happens (Einstein didn't believe it at first until a friend of his explained it to him how he figured it out).
I can't say that people DO know how to create energy from water (I doubt this battery has the answer), but people have reverse engineered inventions without completely understanding the principles before.
And I just don't like when people throw out little things as if they were obvious truths (of course, truth can be subjective sometimes) just to make the point they are proving even more obvious.