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> as usual, the PR is excessive

I think articles that over hype lab results make it to the top of HN because there is no downvote button and flagging them doesn't seem appropriate. I wish there was a "meh" option.

"Meh" is about right. Various people have been making fuel-from-water-powered-by-sunlight announcements for years. This group is not the only one working on this. Lots of research groups have something that sort of works, but has some practical problem, such as the cell lasting only 40 hours.[1] But the press release ("Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have engineered a potentially game-changing solar cell that cheaply and efficiently converts atmospheric carbon dioxide directly into usable hydrocarbon fuel, using only sunlight for energy.") is written as if they just achieved the big success that makes it commercially feasible.

There are startups in this area. Here's HyperSolar. They have their own proprietary "nanoparticle" technology.[2] They announced success in 2012. No product yet.

That's why reports of "breakthroughs" in this area have to be viewed skeptically. There have been a lot of claimed breakthroughs that didn't pan out.

This problem looks more like a long, slow slog to something that works well enough to use. Silicon solar cells were like that. Efficiency has slowly improved since the 1950s. Manufacturing processes have slowly improved. There was no "breakthrough"; the curves of efficiency and cost per unit over time are smooth, not discontinuous.

[1] http://phys.org/news/2015-09-efficiency-solar-hydrogen-produ... [2] http://www.hypersolar.com/application.php

Is it excessive? It certainly doesn't seem to be BS. It's published in a reputable journal (which doesn't make it true). It discusses several of the questions raised by Animats directly (though I wouldn't say it answers them conclusively).

I do agree that the university press release isn't going to critically evaluate the work of its own researchers. That's too bad, perhaps, but it hardly renders the original result uninteresting.

Artificial photosynthesis may be old, but the advances in this work appear aimed at overcoming precisely the problems Animats raised, like catalyst preservation and efficiency.

Put another way, just because a university gushes about the work of its faculty doesn't mean the faculty's work is crap.

It's a long and arduous way from the lab to scale, and that's where the real hurdles are.

I think the main reason is the exact same one why wireless energy transmission, instant cures for cancer, harebrained windpower schemes and so on get hyped. They all fall in the 'wouldn't it be great if this were real, therefore it must be real' category.

The number of solar cell 'breakthroughs' that you read about in a given year is >= 5 or so, but 3 years later nobody even remembers what they were about. Meanwhile, the real improvements are incremental and process cost related, and those improvements then get eaten up by tariffs.

A high rate of comments without upvotes degrades a story's ranking, you seem to have done the right thing. I don't know exactly how much flaming there has to be before that kicks in, though.

+5, meh.

Slashdot voting options!

Or just a "Bullshit" option.

With the majority of articles about cutting edge science, very few HN readers would be qualified to state whether or not it's a breakthrough or bullshit. The option would protect HN from the bullshit, but it'd also hide the breakthroughs that people believed too good to be true. I think that'd be an overall drop in the quality of what we read here.

You're not wrong, but maybe on HN at least many of those people can be counted on not to vote out of reflex, unless they do really bring something to the table.

The other simple, sad fact is that the big breakthroughs that have some initial traction issues stick around. Often people point to the very early history of SR/GR, but it's worth pointing out how that turned out. When a shocking breakthrough is actually a shocking breakthrough, it ends up producing results that speak for themselves.

Until then, when it comes to extreme claims, so many more are just "bullshit" than "breakthrough". Our lives are finite, so it's not wise to ignore the role of triage in those lives.

Don't care, Dislike, Disbelieve, Downvote, Doesn't belong on HN. It just feels like a spectrum. Maybe we could rate each thread on a scale of 1-30, ranking where we think it should be on the page?

Or maybe pick from a number of descriptors just like the ones you listed, and if one breaches a certain threshhold, it gets tagged with "Widely Disbelieved" or the like.

>At least get to pilot plant stage before issuing statements like that.

To be fair, making statements like that can help you get to that stage. It sucks that this is how it works, but playing the game is understandable.

>"The ability to turn CO2 into fuel at a cost comparable to a gallon of gasoline would render fossil fuels obsolete." At least get to pilot plant stage before issuing statements like that.

They don't really say that they are cost comparable to gasoline, they just make the obvious statement that if something were as cheap as gasoline that would be a big deal.

I guess hyping these advances is supposed to make it easier to get funding for further research in the area. The sceptic in me expects them to hit the market right after the first fusion power plant comes online (another technology that is hyped for decades as "just around the corner").

To be fair, I never read anything about fusion being 'just around the corner'.

The most optimistic estimates I know of talk about commercial viability in a 30-50 year timeframe.

The initial expectations for fusion were even more ambitious and with good reason.

Fission was first done in 1938, by 1956 there was a commercial reactor.

Given that sort of time frame and the fact that fusion research was well underway it seemed that a decade or two was all that was needed.

Then you had breakthroughs with Tokomaks and so on, each time it seemed that fusion was potentially close.

There's a really good book called 'The Sun in a Bottle' that goes into more detail.

Well Lockheed Martin claimed they'll have a 100MW fusion reactor small enough to fit on a truck up and running by 2017 and a fully operational grid-ready machine by 2023:

http://www.americansecurityproject.org/lockheed-martin-outli...

To be fair, I never read anything about fusion being 'just around the corner'.

We've finally gotten a little smarter about the hype.

There were great expectations for fusion about 40 years ago. Here's a shady group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_Energy_Foundation that used the hype to raise money: In 1977, Executive Director Morris Levitt asserted that nuclear fusion power plants could be built by 1990 if the U.S. spent $50 to $100 billion on research.

>There were great expectations for fusion about 40 years ago.

I was at the NY world's fair, I think it was 1960 (56 yrs ago). I remember walking through an exhibit that showed fusion. They had a chitload of capacitors in a bank that dumped all the power into a big electric spark. It looked impressive and sounded great. They implied fusion was almost ready.

I was approached by nuclear fusion advocates during a 1981 Anit-Nuke demonstration in NYC. I have always been scientifically-minded, so it actually set me on a course of reading up on all things nuclear. A lot of the marchers were not generally educated on nuclear science.

Aside from military uses of nuclear science, there are a lot of obstacles to developing anything nuclear, fission or fusion. I think we would be further along, and better off, if less scare and more education were available about it.

Solar energy, the production, usage, maintenance and storage of panels, wiring, and battery banks are now a safety concern given that more than 25 people a year have died in Australia alone just installing and maintaining them (cleaning them). This is only the roofing aspect of it. What about the production and storage of batteries, the materials and chemicals used to produce panels, etc...

Roofing claims more deaths worldwide than nuclear energy has by many orders of magnitude. I believe this bias is due mainly to fear and ignorance, and the contemporary phenomenon of zero-risk. We don't apply the same risk analysis to nuclear that we do to other fields.

An example of how this is coming to bite us back is the discovery of the benefits of certain germs after most developed nations embraced anti-septics to an extreme (hand sanitizers, strong kitchen and bathroom cleaners to name two). The biome and snot are in!

Even Fukushima was a confluence of old reactors, on a seaboard and a tsunami which claimed almost all of the fatalities if you allow for theoretically higher rates of thyroid cancer and others. Taking a middle position, or better a geometric mean of Greenpeace's and others maximum claims vs. the nuclear industry's playing down of casualties in the three (Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima) major nuclear incidents to date, you arrive at a very safe industry that has operated for over 50 years in over 30 countries.

Fission reactors that don't need water cooling would allay any need to be near seaboards or water, and their shutdown on failure makes them even safer with no reliance on an outside water source or power as a potential risk.

The number of students studying nuclear science tripled from 2004 to 2013, yet the labor statistics show a -4% job growth vs. environmental sciences 11% growth, or a 15% spread. The nuclear engineer job pays roughly 33% more. I still think it is our best bet to date, but I am not saying like others, just pick one. Let's keep at the alternative 'green' energy-producing technologies and nuclear, not either/or.

The thing with falling-of-roof deaths is that they are poisson distributed. If 25 people fell off roofs then maybe if we are unlucky 50 people will fall off roofs this year. But no amount of bad luck will ever make 10,000 fall off roofs the year after.

Deaths from fusion and nuclear on the other hand are very unpredictable. It is easy to imagine that year after year, no people die. And then suddenly millions of people die. That means that equating actual danger with observed-deaths-so-far is just not possible.

Millions of people? Where do you get that number? We've had two devastating accidents with nuclear reactors, and one that came close to being devastating. All three were older designs that were more dangerous than the designs we could build today. The combined death toll is in the hundreds to thousands, at best. You don't get up to millions of deaths unless we start firing nuclear weapons at each other.

Exactly why I chose the geometric mean with the nuclear industry claiming less than a 100, and Greenpeace reaching for 850,000, that ballparks you to 9200. If you try and include hypothetical deaths decades later, you would also need to include coal-burning plants particulate causing respiratory diseases affecting longevity, and the fact that there is typically a higher radiation level on the perimeter of a coal-burning plant than right outside an operating nuclear power station. Nuclear looks better with each passing year in spite of the back pressure.

Also, I am not sure of the choice of the Poisson distribution suggested above. Roofers are experienced at walking on rooftops, and die due to, well, accidents. That and roofing work is fairly consistent. This number would follow some sort of normal or Poisson distribution, but homeowners are typically only used to a ladder to clean rain gutters out, not roofing or rooftop walking.

Death of roofers/installers during initial installation were the numbers I was quoting from Australia. I think homeowner fatalities will top the roofers in areas with increasing solar panel installations. I would think a Weibul distribution with a Beta of 0.5 would better suit this scenario to model all of the inexperienced homeowners cleaning their solar panels monthly, and then dropping off (no pun intended) after reports and education on working at heights diffuses into the populace.

The most optimistic estimates I know of talk about commercial viability in a 30-50 year timeframe.

Yes, and they have been saying that for 50 years . . .

Thirty to fifty years, if you fund it properly. We don't: http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg

There's actually some new breakthroughts that have been made in the last couple years that have pushed it to closer to 15-20 years. A group out of MIT has designed a new reactor type that shows promise, http://news.mit.edu/2015/small-modular-efficient-fusion-plan... there's also a lecture they did for and MIT alumni association down in silicon valley back in February on YouTube.

> Does the catalyst get used up, or crud up with contaminants, and if so, how fast? What limits the life of the system? What are the costs like? (Excessive catalyst cost has been a problem.)

If you had actually read the whole article before commenting you would know the answer to these questions. Your questions about efficiency are however valid.

I read the article and the answers certainly weren't clear to me.

'20x cheaper than some other catalysts' what does that mean exactly?

'special fluid keeps catalyst sites clean' does it get used up in the process? Is the fluid expensive and hard to manufacture?

The devil is in the detail here.

How exactly does this compare to other state of the art similar approaches? 10x cheaper? 2x cheaper? on par?

I think it's pretty valid to argue the article is doing some vague hand waving without actually saying if this is meaningfully better than other approaches.

I agree with your skepticism but even if the article included more stats there would still be many questions. The only way to prove conclusively that this is a viable method would be to produce it at scale.

Serious question: Is there a sassy phrase in the hardcore research world for over-hyping discoveries? Like how we can identify "vaporware" as a concept since we have a word for it.

If not there really should be

The press release at least attempted to answer some of your 'usual questions'.

It directly answered several of them, in actuality.

If this technology's been around for so long, I wonder who's been suppressing it?