The Hydrogen Hoax | Hacker News Reader

The Hydrogen Hoax

thenewatlantis.com

48 pointsiamelgringo46 comments

No one has ever seriously suggested using Hydrogen as an energy source - that's impossible. What we are suggesting is using hydrogen as a battery, until we get things like super-capacitors working. And, we can fill the battery with nuclear energy.

Nuclear didn't fail for technological reasons. It failed for political ones. Nuclear Breeder reactors are still, by a huge margin, the cheapest, safest, and most sustainable energy solution that the world knows. Using them to power the energy grid directly, and then to charge whatever portable battery we're using (hydrogen, etc) is sustainable for at least another thousand years.

Of course, there are huge technological hurdles to using hydrogen as a portable energy storage device. But, I think we're closer to production on hydrogen energy than we are with any alternative. Super-capacitors of sufficient energy density and low enough cost are (imho) at least 20 years off. Man made gasoline (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/science/19carb.html) shows promise, but no one has ever done it - so we're a decade away from that at best.

The author of the article proposes biofuels, but they are arguably even more inefficient than hydrogen. Not to mention that we have millions of starving people on this planet already. When it takes ~26 lbs of corn to make one gallon of ethanol (that's about an acres worth for every 250 gallons) I really think we should be looking at alternatives.

Nuclear Breeder reactors are still, by a huge margin, the cheapest, safest, and most sustainable energy solution that the world knows.

I've often heard this, but is it really the safest? I haven't heard of anything like Inside Chernobyl, a strange new lifeform is blooming (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=257454) for any other power source (oil spills aren't in the same league).

At Chernobyl they messed up big time... The incident actually occured while performing an ill-planned test with some safety measures disabled.

All safety measures had been disabled.

Let's also remember a couple of other facts:

Chernobyl was in an office building, with no additional containment built around the reactor core.

Chernobyl was an outdated, graphite-modulated reactor. Several years prior to the disaster, German nuclear engineers had found that this reactor design would go uncontrollably critical if certain conditions were met. The Chernobyl engineers didn't know about this, thanks to the Soviet government.

I suspect any engineer in a position of sufficient power did know about this, but no orders were given to upgrade the process appropriately, or, gasp!, take the reactor offline; doing so would be equated to admitting defeat of the Soviet nuclear physics program, a result that was very clearly unacceptable.

And let's not forget that a large fraction of casualties after the Chernobyl accident is attributable to the fact that the general public was not informed for an entire day after the accident, in fact not until a powerplant in Sweden reported heightened radioactivity levels. This, with Kiev, Ukraine's multi-million capital, only 100km from Chernobyl.

I appreciate the information everyone - thanks.

The thing about nuclear power is that errors such as these have more serious consequences than for other sources of power. Or so it would appear.

But all this is relative: if nuclear power is the safest source of power, is there another source of power that is more dangerous than it?

Here's a nice list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Comparison_w...

Several of those disasters, of scales arguably larger than Chernobyl, were caused by attempts to generate power. And although I do not have any evidence to back this, I suspect the total number of casualties resulting from burning fossil fuels over the past century far exceeds that from nuclear power related accidents.

The one aspect of nuclear accidents I'd be willing to concede is the long-term contamination of the area, but while rendering chunks of land unusable, it is not a direct threat to life.

Thanks, informative. Hydroelectric power sounds very clean and safe, but dam failure is catastrophic.

I'm sure you're correct on the fatalities for fossil fuel vs. nuclear, but fossil fuels are also much more widely used (I imagine by several orders of magnitude).

Making land unsafe is a less dramatic aspect of safety, but actually destroying usable land is an amazing feat of destruction. I guess if reactors were located on land that was already unusable (eg. desert, esp Antarctica) it wouldn't matter so much. But I think (present-day) electrical transmission requires them to be close to the power consumers?

> but fossil fuels are also much more widely used (I imagine by several orders of magnitude)

True. Also consider the relative efficiency of the generation methods. Supplying the world's demand for energy with nuclear power would probably require far fewer powerplants than doing so by other means.

> I guess if reactors were located on land that was already unusable (eg. desert, esp Antarctica)

Except for the melting of the Antarctic ice and all that, in case of an accident :) Most technology seems to involve a trade-off of evils.

OK, you may have me there :). All power sources are dangerous, but we need fewer of a more efficient one.

New dangers with nuclear power may be discovered (like those that those German researchers did), but that seems to be true also of new technology in dams and oil transport etc.

We agree totally on nuclear power.

I think that the concerns about feeding the starving people in impoverished countries should be better-directed at their governments. In many cases, food supplied as aid by the U.S. and U.N. is either rejected outright due to political bias, sold on the open market to produce money for corrupt officials, or left to rot in warehouses due to the local government not doing anything to put infrastructure in place to move 'the food' to 'the starving people'.

I'm not an advocate for biofuels, but making the argument that biofuel production is a direct cause of world starvation is more than a little far-fetched; the causes are complex, and more political than technological in origin, much like the failings of the nuclear power industry in the States.

Also don't ignore that, in the U.S., a great deal of arable land goes to waste because of government farm subsidies and other political buggery.

For the sake of playing with some numbers, let's assume that a reasonably efficient car, powered by ethanol, would require ten gallons of fuel per week, or around five hundred gallons per year. That's two acres per car, per year. There are approximately sixty million registered cars in the U.S., requiring a hundred and twenty million acres of farmland be dedicated to producing fuel for these cars, and this is only if the cars ran solely on ethanol.

So, if every car in the US were to run on Ethanol, it would consume one-fifth of the total agricultural production capacity.

Also note that some quick Googling for me shows that yields might be almost double the 250 gallons/acre number for biofuels.

This doesn't mean that biofuels are the ideal solution, but they are certainly a strong contender.

Actually, I may have just become a biofuel advocate. The technology to build flex-fuel cars exists now, and can take advantage of the existing transportation infrastructure until such time as a better means, be it hydrogen, super-capacitors, or dilithium crystals, is available. Doing so would reduce dependence on foreign oil, help boost the national economy, and would likely have the positive side effect of promoting research into increasing long-term, sustainable, high crop yields.

The current food crisis cannot be blamed on third world governments, as was the case in most earlier famines. This crisis in caused by a sudden spike in the price of rice, grain and other staples. See also this article: http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...

Moving from growing food to growing biofuels is necessarily going to influence the price of food - basically the prices of oil and of food staples are going to move in tandem. And we should be very careful before we commit one fifth of arable land to biofuels.

Ultimately this food crisis is caused by poverty, and there's no easy cure for that.

Not debasing the currency is a start.

That is simply not true! See Zimbabwe. Not long ago they were a huge exporter of food, the "breadbasket of Africa" everyone called them. Now look at them. Mugabe has brought them to ruin.

Sure, Zimbabwe is a total disaster, but the current food crisis is world-wide: in Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Haiti, the Philippines, Egypt. etc. The price of rice has almost tripled in less than two years.

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cf...

The vast majority of corn grown in the US is for cattle feed. And if we're talking about energy efficiency, that's pretty much as bad as it can get. Not to mention that if we worry about feeding the planet, we should immediately stop growing cattle, except possibly where they can graze on land too marginal for agriculture. Growing a heavily fossil-fuel based crop like corn to feed cattle only makes sense because a) most of the costs of the fossil fuel are externalized, and b) no one actually cares about how many people we can feed, because the people that can pay want beef.

The author claims that mining Hydrogen from the surface of the Sun would be difficult, but ignores the solution of doing the mining at night.

Great article which completely savages the myth that hydrogen cars are a viable solution.

But then he goes on to recommend methanol and ethanol without at all going into the problems associated with biofuels (effects on foods prices, efficiency, effect on CO2 emissions, potential capacity, etc.) Can anyone recommend an similarly well-researched article on biofuels?

Yeah, it was sensible until the part where we're supposed to believe that corn ethanol can save us. Aside from the fact that the net energy gain is almost zero or less once you account for the fuel, fertilizers, and the fact that its susceptible to drought, flood, and pests it really starts to make OPEC not look so bad. The future is electric, hydrogen and ethanol are just more problems looking for a solution.

> The future is electric,

We'll that's a nice idea, but you didn't explain where we get electricity from.

There are several different implementations of solar power that are suitable to produce the electricity we need. It is going to take time and money to implement, but it can be done without inventing something new.

Nuclear reactors. See above.

Nuclear power is only commercially viable because of huge subsidies (up to 80% in the US) and because the state usually assumes the liability for disasters. And even then, it's the most expensive form of power in wide use. I suspect that with the same amount of subsidies, wind and solar would be very competitive.

And as far as its environmental sustainability goes, even if we ignore the fuel storage problem, look at what uranium ore mining looks like. Then imagine what it would look like if the whole world was powered by it.

I don't know anything about economic viability of nuclear power, so I won't comment. I understand that wind and solar both receive substantial subsidies in the U.S. as well. There is also a possibility that were nuclear power as trendy as wind and solar, it would receive more development unhindered by politics, potentially leading to lower costs. This is of course pure speculation.

As for the environmental impact and total carbon footprint, that of wind farms is not small either. Vast areas of otherwise-usable land concreted, carbon expended on building, maintaining and dismantling wind mills, backup power required to buffer against weather conditions, and the like. I haven't seen any comparison of various energy forms with all the costs included, but would certainly like to take a look at one.

[edit:

A quick search led me to this: http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/pnucpwr.asp

It seems that while existing nuclear power plants (constructed over 3 decades ago) provide marginally cheaper electricity than fossil fuel based powerplants, new nuclear powerplants are indeed not viable economically, at least as compared to fossil fuels. The report suggests that including a carbon emission tax of $100/tC will bridge that gap.]

[another edit:

A paper (http://gabe.web.psi.ch/pdfs/Annex_IV_Dones_et_al_2003.pdf) claiming that total carbon footprint of nuclear power, from mining to waste disposal, is in the range of 6-12g CO2-equivalent per kWh, mostly attributable to mining, compared to 500g/kWh for natural gas and >1000g/kWh for coal.

Hydro weighs in at anywhere from 3 to 3000g CO2-equiv per kWh depending on region (alpine hydro stations are clean, flooding tropical forests is not) with weighted average somewhere in the 300g range, wind is at 14-21g/kWh depending on weather conditions, and finally solar at 79g/kWh with potential to fall to 30-40g with future technologies.

The concluding graph shows only [European] hydro beating nuclear in terms of total carbon footprint.

Lots of other interesting reports on that site (http://gabe.web.psi.ch/research/lca/), most offering similar results. One 2007 paper also considers land use, ecotoxicity, and radiation emissions, allowing certain types of wind generators to approach nuclear in terms of total environmental impact. Solar is still way off due to high levels of inorganics and toxic non-greenhouse air pollutants. ]

About the subsidies, I found this discussion interesting: http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/15/104213/829

Thanks for the nuclear link. Haven't had time to digest the swiss documents.

Not sure where you got the idea the article advocates corn-based ethanol. The emphasis is on methanol, which would use the existing infrastructure, cost about the same as gasoline, and be made from any biomass. Could be a viable "transitional fuel" to get us off gasoline.

Right, corn ethanol won't save us. In fact it's not doing anything but pushing up the price of corn, with all the bad effects we are currently seeing.

However, methanol produced from 'biomass', sugar cane, other plant matter, etc., does have a pretty good shot at saving us. Brazil have done great using sugar cane to produce fuel.

Just to correct you, we make ethanol, not methanol, from sugar cane. By now, it's proven technology: In my whole life I had, perhaps, two cars that ran on gasoline and could not run on ethanol. The other ten or so all ran on ethanol. My wife has one of the newer "flex-fuel" models that, I joke, can run on anything flammable, while my own car runs on ethanol only.

According to local auto magazines, ethanol running engines last longer and are in general better shape after long-duration tests than gasoline running ones. After having a major engine problem (I was 19 and I pushed it waaaay too hard) I can tell you the blown engine was very neat, with little to no sign of carbon build-up or corrosion. Even after a very unhealthy period of abuse by a then much more adventurous motor sports fan.

A distinction should be made between corn ethanol (which most studies say has a net energy gain of ~20% compared to gasoline) and cellulosic ethanol, which has enormous potential. Certainly more potential than nuclear.

Yeah, I thought he was just going to say "put the electricity directly in the car with a battery". All these conversions just don't make sense, if you have the electric power, just run the vehicle on it directly. People complain about the range of electric cars, but if your competition is a 3000 pound hydrogen tank you can put in a lot of batteries! ;-) Plus, from a carbon perspective, purely electric vehicles have high enough efficiency that it's a net carbon reduction over gas even if you run them with coal-based electricity.

For an article about biofuels, you can check out "Growing energy" and "Bringing biofuels to the pump" by the Natural Resources Defense Council, http://www.nrdc.org/air/energy/biofuels/contents.asp

Bush: "The sources of hydrogen are abundant. The more you have of something relative to demand for that, the cheaper it’s going to be, the less expensive it’ll be for the consumer.... Hydrogen power is also clean to use. Cars that will run on hydrogen fuel produce only water, not exhaust fumes.... One of the greatest results of using hydrogen power, of course, will be energy independence for this nation.... If we develop hydrogen power to its full potential, we can reduce our demand for oil by over 11 million barrels per day by the year 2040."

I didn't know political policies could be adopted based on theoretical, unproven, futuristic techniques such as generation of power from hydrogen.

It's a bit like saying: "With flying cars we could reduce the costs of road maintenance by 90% by 2040!"

I can't see anything in that quote that would cause anyone to think Bush is talking about political policies. The words "demand", "consumer", "energy independence" sounds more like economics to me.

Are you kidding, most political policies seem to be have essentially no connection to scientific results. Be it in energy policy, climate policy, education policy, economic policy, or whatever...

"[...] our addiction is enriching and empowering those who seek to destroy us. We are funding, if indirectly, the madrassahs that teach vile hatred of Western civilization and the backward cultures that create death-seeking soldiers for Islam."

I hoped this was tongue-in-cheek for a moment, but it does not seem to be. Credibility revoked.

Are you suggesting that the existence of madrassahs that produce fundamentalists who are likely to become involved in what we call terrorism is a myth, or simply that the prevalence of such schools is overblown?

I love Hacker News. Even the credibility police hang out here.

He was repeating an argument made by hydrogen proponents.

Hm, re-reading the thing, you might be right -- though I'm still not sure. Anyway, the whole piece seems to be setting up a straw man just to tear it down. Is anyone really that naive about hydrogen?

Yes, many people really are that naïve about hydrogen. My university works closely with General Motors, and every time there's an event a GM fuel cell car shows up. People go nuts over the things, and the GM people are right there with their whole spiel.

As the article mentions, the government has given billions of dollars for hydrogen car research in just the last few years. So yes, some people are that naive about hydrogen.

Yes, I think we've all seen articles where a dignitary drives the Honda FCX concept car, or other fuel cell vehicle up to a lone hydrogen pump, promised as the 'first of many'.

Meanwhile, a thousand engineers pray that it doesn't pick that moment succumb to metal fatigue and explode.

Not to mention Arnold's hydrogen Hummer...

So gas then.

I have 2 vehicles that run on it right now and there is a lot of it around and it can be synthesized. We aren't doing anything else with it (besides plastics and such).

The universe has yet to provide us with an energy "free lunch."

smanek - note that almost the entire article was about using Hydrogen as a battery - the author pretty much quickly proved, and did not feel the need to belabor the point, that hydrogen is incapable of being used as an energy source. He also went on to show that it's pretty unlikely to ever be used as a battery either.

I'd love to see the article that refutes this article though...

Yes, there's a lot of "left field" research in this direction that might yield a breakthrough that would make H2 energy production and storage viable. Buckyball materials for storing, bacteria that create it from sunlight to create it, etc.

I have yet to see a really good synopsis of the promising research in these various directions and a decent analysis of which ones have promise and which are hype.

Anyone know?

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