A Promising Alternative for Sustainable and Highly Efficient Solar‐Driven Deuterium Evolution at Room Temperature by Photocatalytic D₂O Splitting

Abstract

Motivated by energy shortages and in view of current efforts to develop clean, renewable energy sources based on fusion, a solar-driven strategy has been developed for deuterium evolution. Deuteriumi sacriticalr esource for many aspects. However,t he limited natural abundanceo fd euterium and the complexity of established technologies, such as quantum sieving (QS) for deuterium production under extreme conditions, pose challenges. The new method has the potentialf or robust and sustainable deuterium evolution, enabling deuterium production at ah igh rate of 9.745 mmol g À1 h À1 .T he activity,t hermodynamic, and kinetic characteristics are also investigateda nd compared between photocatalytic heavy water (D 2 O) splitting and water (H 2 O) splitting. This study opens an ew avenue to discoverp romising photocatalytic deuterium generation systems for advanced solar energy utilization and deuterium enrichment.Deuterium is av ital raw material in numerous industrial and scientifica pplications within almoste very subdiscipline in the nuclear,m edical, and life sciences and beyond, including in nuclear fusion reactors, [1] reactionm echanism labeling, [2] lighting, [1] neutron scattering, [3] and isotopic tracing. [4] As one particular example, deuterium can serve as fuel for fusion reactors, which have long promised virtually unlimited power in what is essentially ar eplica of the sun. Ongoing construction of practical-scale nuclear fusion power generation under the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program represents the ambition to solve the looming global energy shortage crisis. [5] However,a sanaturally occurring hydrogen iso-tope, deuterium has al ow abundance of approximately 150 ppm. [6] As the ITER reactor will consumea round 125 kg per year of deuterium at just 500 MW powerg eneration capacity,s ourcingt his much deuterium will require the processing of at least 75 000 000 kg of seawater. [7] Not least for the high demandf or deuterium for other applications, this issue results in high capital costs and large energy consumption. [8] Moreover,t he separation of hydrogen isotopes has been the focus of deuterium production since the 1930s. [9] The conventional separation method remains challenging because of the nearly identicalp hysicochemical properties of deuterium and hydrogen (Table 1), which impede the separationa nd purification of their isotopic mixtures.To day,f easible methods of deuterium productiono na ni ndustrial level include H 2 distillation, [10] which relies on the discrepancy in the boilingp oint of isotopes, and the Girdler sulfide process, [10] which relies on the discrepancy between the reaction rates of isotopes as af unctiono ft emperature. Unfortunately,t hese separation methodologies are extremely time intensivea nd have energy costs. Usually,h undreds of stagesa re required to achieveasatisfactory degree of separation. As ap romising development, in 1995, kinetic quantum sieving( KQS) was first reported by Beenakker et al. [11] The KQS effect accumulates when th...

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