Too much to easily comment on by phone but this doesn't look like it's burning slowly to me:
This is an example of what can happen when a lithium battery is punctured. Dem-Con Materials Recovery Facility
youtu.be
That burns very fast and escapes from the hole that gets poked into the casing. If the chemical runaway happens with no hole it will certainly pop ala boom and cause a big issue. That's only a laptop or e bike battery judging by the size of the thing.
That is not burning fast nor is it a big boom. It literally takes tens of hours for an EV battery to burn if left to its own devices. It’s contained in a steel box, it takes a long time to burn through.
In a car fire the flammability of the battery is the least of your worries, the interior is highly combustible and will go up in seconds.
If you want a big boom, look up how petrol burns and explodes.
The same thing happened with records. Loads of them, then not so much and now a whole HMV store chain opening again selling them. Just because there's less hydrogen fueling stations now doesn't mean they won't come back if the technology improves or public opinion for it changes. I don't see your point here?
What technology? The thing driving hydrogen is the fuel cell but the fuel cell is only a fraction of the process within a huge supply chain.
Producing, liquefying, transporting and the regasification process already happen at scale and has done for a long time, the cost is what it is. Improving it is not a technological problem, you are fighting against physics.
One cell in a lab was how lithium probably started and it just takes time for mass production of new technology to get to where it's commercially viable.
The storage of hydrogen is only one part of what makes it dangerous and how it's combusted or turned into energy is another. Yes hydrogen is highly flammable like petrol or diesel is so the storage of it is exactly the same.
No, it’s really not. The hydrogen molecule is tiny compared to petrol or diesel meaning it can leak through microscopic holes. Leaks are really bad because it’s explosive at almost all concentrations within air. Petroleum vapour’s explosive range is fairly narrow by comparison and diesel doesn’t explode unless it is heated or put under compression.
Turning it into energy via ice or chemical fuel cell conversion is what makes one process more dangerous than the other.
Citation needed. Burning hydrogen in a vehicle is significantly more dangerous than petrol and diesel for the leakage reason set out above.
Ice of hydrogen is fed slowly into combustion whereas a fuel cell, like lithium, is compressed into a single cell so a thermal runaway causes the whole cell to explode instead of keeping the hydrogen stored in liquid or gas form further away from where the action is.
I’m not getting the sense you really understand the fundamentals is what’s happening here and why something is or isn’t dangerous.
At the moment, no technology exists that's a perfect option for the future but I believe we're just a few steps away from one form or the other making big leaps forward and becoming the future option.
What steps would those be?
Hydrogen fuel cells as a technology is already viable and works, it just doesn’t make economic sense to anyone within passenger transport. Fuel cell costs are high and will come down with scale however that’s not the problem with hydrogen. The cost of hydrogen itself is simply too high and it’s not something that is going to come down materially with ‘technology’.
It’s already produced at a huge scale and has a wide range of applications in industry already. If there are options that would make producing hydrogen cheaper, they’d be doing it already and there wouldn’t be any links to road transport.
