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Comment by jules | Hacker News Reader

The real question is energy storage.

The nuclear advocate is betting that even in the face of a market worth trillions of dollars, and with thousands of potential chemistries, none of the battery technologies work out. This seems a poor bet.

But I tell you what: in the event that this bet incredibly pans out, the downside is just that batteries cost more than we had hoped. Civilization doesn't collapse. At that point nuclear plants could be built. Is it worth building nuclear plants now that we know are going to be expensive just because batteries have a chance of being expensive?

(Also: long term storage like hydrogen doesn't need advances in batteries at all. Combustion turbines that burn hydrogen have been commercially available for years.)

Conversely with all these attempts nobody is able to get a better ion battery _still_

And even Nasa had moved away from sorting liquid hydrogen and using it as fuel due to its crazy dangerous properties of being stored. This is not helium it effectively _eats_ the high pressure metal containing it.

And again we reach a stalemate that we would have avoided 30years ago if we had just invested in nuclear.

Nuclear is NOT perfect. No solution is. But its an excellent fit to the problems we as a species are trying to solve.

What? Li-ion battery makers are constantly making better batteries. That's why competing technologies often have a hard time getting traction: the front runner is refusing to stop running. And remember, it's not just advances in the battery itself that matter, but advances in the factories that make the batteries. Making the factory more efficient and productive is as important as, if not more important than, making the battery itself better on some metric.

Hydrogen storage would involve compressed gas underground, not liquid hydrogen. This is a demonstrated technology. It works.

Yes batteries keep improving. This is not something that is debatable it's a hammer and nail fact.

I'm not making any statement or argument to counter the fact that batteries will continue to improve a) their efficiency b) their longevity or c) their energy storage density. As you say this is a trillion dollar industry (at least).

The problem is the current state of play for _any_ ion based battery solution is that using them long term at very high scale (I'm talking national grid/infrastructure level) there are _serious_ issues they need to overcome. This isn't the same thing as building a tesla car.

By the statement of this is a demonstrated technology we should all be using nuclear batteries in our houses like the mars rover. It's a proven technology. (Incase this isn't obvious I'm being facetious).

The problems with storing compressed hydrogen isn't the long term storage in huge facilities, it's the doing something/anything with it. Transporting the hydrogen involves compressing it to liquid densities due to movement/transportation factors. A pipeline (even gas) to send this to regional burning stations would also be incredibly difficult to build/maintain due to the corrosive nature of the gas.

I'm not making an argument based the flammable/explosive nature of this, that stands for existing gas infrastructure, although this is a reason governments are looking to phase infrastructure such as this out, there are regular explosions/fires damaging houses in Europe and the UK so improving safety is a sensible concern. (Yes, albeit based on concerns that people can't do their jobs in such a way that everything is always up to spec)

If the point of hydrogen is just to store the energy for use on days when renewable capacity is limited, can't it can spend its whole life in the huge long term facility, from generation to use in a turbine at the point of generation? Why does it need to be transported?

It doesn't need to be transported, but it's interesting to consider how it could be. When you make hydrogen you can get several bites at the apple: storing that hydrogen near the point of generation, transporting the hydrogen in a pipeline, and storing it again at the end of the pipeline. This is what's done with natural gas, and it allows pipelines to be sized for average rather than peak loads, even in the face of unsteady supply and demand. The cost of making the hydrogen is amortized over all three use cases. Compare this to electricity, where batteries and energy conversion would be needed at both ends of a transmission line.

Producing hydrogen and storing at point of use is an option but it opens up a different problem.

With regard to efficiencies you lose several bites of the apple by taking this approach. The whole hydrogen battery chain then becomes; electrical -> stored chemical -> mechanical (via combusion) -> electrical.

I would strongly argue a gravitational battery would be more efficient (and simpler to construct) at scale for large energy storage.

i.e. electrical -> motor (pump water up into a dam) -> motor spins (via release of water from dam) -> electrical (or bricks if a dam can't be built efficiently)

And with the latter you need a hydrogen burning plant with variable capacity which is designed to be largely on standby throughout its serviceable life.

I'm not arguing against hydrogen cars, or hydrogen gas home heaters (the latter being great, thermal -> thermal for water heating is better than electrical -> thermal). I just don't see it playing a major industrial component of energy storage due to these shortcomings.

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