No, the best thing you can do with it is use it in Hydrogen Fuel Cells and have cars that emit water vapour from their exhaust. Our cities would become vastly more pleasant places to live and work. Healthier, too.
Hinkley Point C
- Thread starter Danthus
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No, the best thing you can do with it is use it in Hydrogen Fuel Cells and have cars that emit water vapour from their exhaust. Our cities would become vastly more pleasant places to live and work. Healthier, too.
Huh? There are loads of us. Hydrogen is a natural compliment to nuclear power. Much hydrogen today is taken from fossil fuels but it doesn't need to be. You can do it efficiently by taking it from water with electricity and that process is most efficient when you do it with high temperatures. And what do nuclear power stations typically have abundant quantities of? Electricity and very hot water under pressure. They're a perfect marriage. And it gets even better - what's the chief weakness of nuclear power? It doesn't ramp up and down very efficiently. You want to run it at the same (high) rate all the time. But demand has peaks and troughs. So you use the troughs to generate hydrogen in the off-times and get the constant demand that nuclear power wants.
Hydrogen isn't an energy source, it's an energy storage mechanism. Like pumping water up a hill. The difference being that you can ship it around and distribute it to power things like cars. Can't do that with valley.
The fiercest critics of Hydrogen that I come across are proponents of battery powered cars. HFC is just as clean as batteries (cleaner as few disposal problems) and has better energy density (giving equivalent distance as petrol cars which batteries greatly struggle with). HFC puts the typical battery proponent into a frenzy. But HFC is very popular as an idea with nuclear proponents such as myself. They go together so well.
what, you do not get similar distances to petrol, it is not a energy dense fuel, it requires he eergy to create, it is hard to store and transport and we have virtually zero infrastructure.
batteries have massive infrastructure which is being expanded daily.
has few issues and the ones it does have are having breakthroughs. and no they don't have waste issues, batteries are fully recyclable, which the new battery plants are designed to recycle them.
it in no way puts it into a frenzy as hfc don't exist and wont exist, other than in florida where they're wasting money there is zero support for it.
on top of that a million EVs would actually help the national grid, with peak demand for EVs being over night charging it would actually hep balance out the grid.
the best thing is to forget about it other than in research. Its a pretty silly fuel. with huge issues.
batteries have massive infrastructure which is being expanded daily.
has few issues and the ones it does have are having breakthroughs. and no they don't have waste issues, batteries are fully recyclable, which the new battery plants are designed to recycle them.
it in no way puts it into a frenzy as hfc don't exist and wont exist, other than in florida where they're wasting money there is zero support for it.
on top of that a million EVs would actually help the national grid, with peak demand for EVs being over night charging it would actually hep balance out the grid.
the best thing is to forget about it other than in research. Its a pretty silly fuel. with huge issues.
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Yes and no. Petrol is liquid and pools. Petrol fumes are actually heavier than air and also pool. The former leads to fires, the latter leads to fireballs. Hydrogen is the lightest gas there is and if there is a leak you get a very rapid and narrow just upwards. Yes, if it ignites it is very hot, but I'd far rather someone tossed a match around a leaking hydrogen tank than a petrol tank. The former is thicker as well so you'd likely get a very short-lived vertical jet. The latter could surround me with flame.
Soldato
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In response to h4rm0ny.
I'm an advocate of hydrogen but is not straight forward. Hydrogen is associated with steel embrittlement which become an issue for storage which fossil fuels have no analogous risk. Hydrogen needs to be stored under pressure, introducing a stored energy risk and mechanism for failure. Hydrogen is colourless and odourless and has a wide bands concentration for flammability and explosiveness. Hydrogen fires are very energetic and burn clear. I would imagine for domestic wide scale use some form of lattice storage or nano-bead storage will be required, fluid storage may well be too risky.
I don't agree with Glaucus that we should give up on it but it will need some genuine breakthroughs. The energy density issue is a real one, but unlike batteries you can always just make the tank bigger or top it up. Lattice storage may alleviate some of these problems it remains to be seen.
It may be that hydrogen is not used for domestic purposes at all but becomes a load levelling storage medium in much more controlled industrial environment.
I'm an advocate of hydrogen but is not straight forward. Hydrogen is associated with steel embrittlement which become an issue for storage which fossil fuels have no analogous risk. Hydrogen needs to be stored under pressure, introducing a stored energy risk and mechanism for failure. Hydrogen is colourless and odourless and has a wide bands concentration for flammability and explosiveness. Hydrogen fires are very energetic and burn clear. I would imagine for domestic wide scale use some form of lattice storage or nano-bead storage will be required, fluid storage may well be too risky.
I don't agree with Glaucus that we should give up on it but it will need some genuine breakthroughs. The energy density issue is a real one, but unlike batteries you can always just make the tank bigger or top it up. Lattice storage may alleviate some of these problems it remains to be seen.
It may be that hydrogen is not used for domestic purposes at all but becomes a load levelling storage medium in much more controlled industrial environment.
I didn't say give up. I said only research it. It is not viable at the moment, and more importantly isn't look viable in the near future. unlike batteries 5 years ago. let alone now.
and you can increase battery size, you can also top them up.
and you can increase battery size, you can also top them up.
Soldato
- Joined
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My apologies if I misrepresented you it wasn't deliberate.
Was there a sneaky ninja edit there?
I am sure there was more to this earlier today when I didn't have time to respond!
I disagree, I actually feel that HFC and BEV are the wrong approach.
The combination of a simple ICE and a chemical fuel that is liquid at STP (Or near STP) is an almost impossible combination to beat for mobile prime movers (Only Marine Nuclear is superior, and then only for large applications)
However, I feel a paper rather than a post coming on, so it will take me some time to do it.
