Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dnautics 3316 days ago
What exactly are you proposing? What do you do with the OH?
1 comments

This is a possible first step of a water-splitting reaction that does not produce oxygen.
I suggest going back to your chemistry text and reviewing mass balance, conservation of matter, and balancing equations.

What is that OH? Is it hydroxide radical? Hydroxide? Hydroxyl radical? Where does it go? Does it recombine to make hydrogen peroxide?

Btw... To make oxygen from water the first part of the first step is to split it into H and HO. You can't really break two bonds simultaneously, or anyways it's equivalent to doing them stepwise by the principle of microscopic reversibility.