bjb in Tx from Ne said: (quoted from post at 04:48:01 06/30/09) Is no more dangerous than natural gas, propane, or gasoline.
That's simply not true. Because of it's low molecular weight, it takes special fittings and materials to try to contain the gaseous hydrogen from leaking through normally gas tight fittings. If it's stored as a liquid, it has to be continuously vented. That means you either have to flare it off or you are one spark from igniting it. Natural gas, propane or gasoline are relatively easy to contain. Hydrogen is several orders of magnitude more difficult to deal with.
In my other life, we made a study of what it would take to supply hydrogen to aircraft for just Los Angeles International Airport. For that airport, using elctrolysis (can't use coal fired produced electricity because that generates too much CO2) it would take sixteen 500 megawatt nuclear generating plants to supply the facility with enough hydrogen to power aircraft using that one facillity at the level of operation it had in the mid-90's. And by the way, water vapor is a green house gas! So what are we saving?
Safety of the distribution system and the aircraft operations has yet to be worked out let alone how to store the fuel on the aircraft. Ever watch a space shuttle launch? And that's done what, maybe 4-6 time a year at the most, not 50 times an hour. Operating the engines was piece of cake. We demostrated that in 1956 on a 707.
When you take a systems approach and look at the whole process and infrastructure, hydrogen as common fuel to repace petroleum is going to take an enormous investment and a lot of develpment time. And I'm not just talking about aircaft. (I just used that as a for instance because I have some familiarity with it.) I really resent all these greenies acting like these technologies are right around the corner and the big, bad oil companies are holding back progress, yadda yadda, yadda. As usuall, those making the most noise, really know the least about the problems associated with these complex issues.
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