It's not high-tech. It is low-tech. NaOH is lye. Anything in the 50% NaOH solution that is not water is there to make it viscous, but not get it wet

Lye itself is pretty low-tech -- but being able to safely and repeatedly hydrate and dehydrate it while controlling the heat transfer, that itself may require some finesse.

That's perfect! You can also dip dough into the NaOH solution and get nice crispy pretzels.

High-tech, by definition, is tech which can make high profit, i.e. c1 sand into $500 processor. Sand is not low-tech or high-tech by itself.

PS.

Quote from Wikipedia for downvoters:

High tech is often viewed as high risk, but offering the opportunity for high profits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_tech

Definition: "Technology that is at the cutting edge".

Fact: Chemically produced lye dates back to at least 1791 with the Leblanc process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leblanc_process

Fact: green energy/renewable energy/energy saving technologies are cutting edge now.

Fact: your processor is made from sand which was discovered by first human ever.

Yes, it's a little known fact that Babylonians were casting huge perfectly pure silicon crystals. They were also pioneers in x-ray lithography!

Processors are made from sand in the same way people are made from carbon. You're skipping a few important steps.

Skipped steps are called "high-tech".

Who says that high profit implies high tech? Your Wikipedia link only says high tech often offers the potential for high profit.

Is the Large Hadron Collider not high tech if it doesn't turn a profit?

Is potential profit for Science and whole our civilization low in case of Hadron Collider?

Because you would have to insulate the water. This instead stores the heat as stable, chemical, energy.

Well, isn't that what happens in oceans already? That is why coastal cities are more temperate and experience more moderate swings than inland cities.

I'd imagine there's not enough water to do this inland..

As others have pointed out, there's no need to store heat for six months. But you bring up a common enough viewpoint, one that I think bears re-examining:

>I'd imagine there's not enough water to do this inland..

We quite often forget that there's no physical limitation on the amount of water available inland. Water is constantly flowing from the oceans onto land, being recycled (mainly by trees pushing it back up into the airstream), and flowing back out and mixing with the ocean.

So the amount of water per square meter of land is limited by only two variables:

* The rate at which fresh water falls on land (liters/hectare/year)

* The time it takes that water to flow to the ocean (years).

The amount of water available on land (liters/hectare) is simply these two quantities divided by each-other.

The flow is fundamentally limited by the energy balance of the sun, so there's not much we can do there. But the time is entirely determined by our ability to design infrastructure and land use patterns that store water on the land in useful catchments instead of draining it off rapidly. Farm-scale dams are one visible way of doing that, but it's much cheaper to store water in the ground via infiltration systems.

The amount of water is inversely proportional to the amount of time it takes water to flow back to the ocean after it falls. So if we want to "wet up" the landscape, we should make it follow a loooong path with a lot of passive friction and storage buffers.

Just to show my math here, in the USA on average there's 715 mm of rainfall per year, which works out to 19,000 gallons for the average 100 m^2 house footprint. And next year you get that much water again.

In extremely arid areas like California it would even be possible to use salt water for thermal storage.

That's true for west coast cities, but not for east coast cities like Boston and New York, which experience terrible temperature extremes.

How much water do we need? I wouldn't try to affect large regions, just specific urban areas. The water doesn't actually have to go anywhere, it just sits around storing heat. All we have to do is bubble a lot of air through it. As a nice side benefit, this should clean the air.

(This is my version of the Reber Plan).

Are you proposing that we capture heat this way to warm houses (in which case it's a terribly ineffective and inefficient system) or to actually raise the outside temperature? If you're proposing the latter, there's just no way. Water might store 400 times as much heat per unit as air, but there's an absurd amount of air hovering around a town and an enormous area that air mixes with constantly.

It's true for Boston and NY as well. Those cities have milder weather than the cities inland of them.

NaOH is a super cheap, common chemical. It's the principal ingredient in Drano and similar plumbing cleanout products.

High concentrations of NaOH in water are strongly basic. It will corrode many oxide-based ceramics (like toilet bowls) and aluminum, but it's no problem for most other common metals and plastics.

> It will corrode many oxide-based ceramics (like toilet bowls) and aluminum.

...and human flash quite rapidly. So if your NaOH radiator leaks you might get sprayed with meat dissolving viscous liquid.

I think practical applications would transfer the heat to pure water in a heat exchanger instead of delivering the NaOH directly to the radiator. In a well insulated system, the losses should be minimal

And trying to rinse it with water (which is probably the first thing that anyone would do) will only make things worse.

No, if the sodium hydroxide is already in solution then diluting with copious water is one of the best ways to deal with a splash on skin. You're right that adding water makes the problem worse if you have e.g. a spill of prills to clean up.