I said:

Sridhar is trying to convince you that he's made a fuel cell without platinum, the super expensive catalytic material that has made it so hard for them to be financially viable. Except those metal plates on either side of the disk are in EVERY fuel cell, and they are NEVER platinum. Ever. The platinum is not a huge flat plate: it is micrograms of the stuff sprayed onto the central membrane. His fuel cell has platinum: it is in the inks. I guarantee it.

What I meant to say, and was instead said by former co-worker and all around smarter-than-me-guy Rick in a response on Facebook:

Assuming the technology works (which it probably does -- Google, etc, testing it), it seems to be performing in the ballpark of the best solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC) in terms of stack power density [...] If it's an SOFC (and Zirconium is in "beach sand" as ZrSiO4...), it also doesn't require platinum because of the high-temperatures.

Duh. Right. Yes. Leslie Stahl mentions in the video that Sridhar based his fuel cell technology on his Mars oxygen generation technology. A quick internet search finds the title of a paper Sridhar wrote: "Oxygen Production on Mars Using Solid Oxide Electrolysis."

Electrolysis, as you might remember from high school, is when you apply an electric current across water, causing it to break up into hydrogen and oxygen (presumably Sridhar's oxygen production device would use water found in the Martian ice caps). When you operate a fuel cell, you combine oxygen and hydrogen to get water and electricity. So this is, in fact, electrolysis backwards.

Sridhar's fuel cell doesn't use platinum to catalyze the reaction. There are actually two ways to make a reaction more energetic: you can catalyze it, or you can heat it up. Solid oxide fuel cells heat it up. Really heat it up. Existing SOFCs operate between 500 and 1000 degrees Celsius. But now you have another set of problems, because that is face meltingly hot. That's almost hot enough to melt steel. So while you no longer need expensive platinum, you do need other expensive materials that can withstand that type of temperature.

However, everything else I said in the original article stands true, with one addendum: instead of platinum, you have a fuel cell that is about the same temperature as a house fire.