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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3799 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 9, 2022

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It should be feasible to directly produce hydrogen with reactors soon, but the stuff is such an everloving bitch to store and use that even rockets are moving away from it, despite its incredibly high specific impulse. The idea of hydrogen tanks at gas stations just seems ridiculous.

I think any realistic use of hydrogen will involve turning it into synthetic natural gas (or ammonia). Although short term storage of nuclear-produced hydrogen for daily peaking power would be amazing.

I understand hydrogen is more difficult to store than regular gas but is it difficult enough that it's ridiculous to store at gas stations? FWIW, there are already some gas stations with hydrogen in Europe Here's a map and I know there are some hydrogen buses being used as well in public transportation. Maybe it will turn out to be too impractical or to expensive to scale it up to the point where everybody rides hydrogen cars or something. I don't know enough about it to tell you how successful these initiatives have been so far, but there are some serious initiatives which currently implement hydrogen as fuel for motor vehicles, both public transport and for private use.

It requires either extremely high pressures or extremely low temperatures to store an appreciable amount of energy per volume. That's why rockets use super-cryogenic liquid hydrogen and vehicles use expensive COPV vessels capable of containing thousands of PSI. These problems in themselves are not deal-breakers, but the other hydrogen fuel cells needed to utilize it effectively have stubbornly refused to come down in price, namely I think due to the inability to find a suitable replacement for the platinum catalyst.

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