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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • I don’t think it’d be that simple.

    Any given website URL could go viral at any moment. In the old days, that might look like a DDoS that brings down the site (aka the slashdot effect or hug of death), but these days many small sites are hosted on infrastructure that is protected against unexpectedly high traffic.

    So if someone hosts deceptive content on their server and it can be viewed by billions, there would be a disconnect between a website’s reach and its accountability (to paraphrase Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben).


  • The company describes this generator as a solid state device, but the diagrams show the reliance on fluid/flow of hydrogen between the hot side and the cold side for moving some protons around. That seems to be something in between the semiconductor-based solid state thermoelectric generators that are already commonly understood and some kind of generator with moving solid parts.

    It still seems like a low maintenance solution to have a closed loop of hydrogen, but that seems like a potential maintenance/failure point, as well, to rely on the chamber to remain filled with hydrogen gas.


  • The inventor/founder at the center of the article, Lonnie Johnson, was on the team at JPL that designed and implemented the thermoelectric generators (heated by radioactive decay from plutonium-238 pellets) on the Galileo spacecraft sent to Jupiter. So I would expect that he’s more familiar with the thermodynamic and engineering challenges than even a typical expert.

    The PR fluff put out by the company mentions that the theoretical basis for this specific type of generator was worked out a while ago but needed materials science to advance to the point where this type of generator can be thermodynamically and commercially feasible.

    Looking at how this generator is supposed to work, it’s interesting in that it does rely on the movement of fluid, but is supposed to be a totally closed loop, to be a bit different than the pure solid state, semiconductor-based Seebeck generators that are already well known.

    The other area talked about in this article is that they believe that it can be effective with lower temperature differentials than any previous technology, which might make a huge difference in whether it can be deployed to more useful places and thereby make it economically feasible more easily than prior concepts.

    In the end, if these generators can output some electric voltage/current, it might just take on similar generation characteristics as photovoltaics, which could mean that hooking these up to the grid could draw on some of the lessons learned from the rise of grid scale solar.