More Discussion of ammonia's potential over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38053586
Just don't, say, descend an elevator shaft into an un-ventilated sub-basement with ammonia storage.
The amount of inconsequentially small ammonia leaks which nevertheless the owner insists on a service technician fixing immediately because of the alarming odor, actually form most of the case against ammonia as a refrigerant, which it's otherwise well-suited to.
Ammonia seems like a grid scale storage solution, not something we can distribute across people’s homes. Home storage we should start focused on thermal batteries since it’s highly proven technology that needs almost zero maintenance.
Besides, differently from what the GP claims, it does need to be pressurized. It can indeed be used as a fertilizer, requiring careful application because if it's over-applied it's pretty deadly to any plant, and if applied incorrectly it can leak from the soil and become pretty deadly to anything above it.
But some people really do love the stuff and believe it's a solution to everything.
Sure, we have the experience and infrastructure to handle it - just not at the scale required to use it as fuel.
https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/green-ammon...
It's a pity break away billionaires with heavy industry backgrounds haven't heeded your sage advice and are pressing ahead regardless.
* https://www.ttnews.com/articles/phoenix-hub-plug-power
* https://norwegianhydrogen.com/
* https://www.incitecpivot.com.au/sustainability/projects/gree...
I'm all in favor of alternatives for gasoline. We just need some that don't perpetuate carbon fuel use. The mirai folks end up paying way more for hydrogen than gas, way way more in that subreddit, run into unavailability of fuel, the stations break and aren't repaired. I was quite surprised when I came upon the discussions there. When or if we can create h fuel without using lots of fossil fuel and energy it would be great. Today it's primarily companies and govts perpetuating their industrial bases in Japan that seem to be pushing hydrogen.
With an excess of sunlight hydrogen can be used to generate electricity at night to recharge mobile equipment batteries and cable powered semi mobile equipment, with conversion of hydrogen to ammonia it can be bulk shipped to large scale generation plants elsewhere.
> Consider looking at the disastrous situation in California for people with hydrogen powered cars.
Not especially relevant here to the current reality of large scale green hydrogen generation for direct industrial application to reduce greenhouse gas emmissions though, is it?
Californians struggling with small cars doesn't negate what else is happening in our current reality.
When gasoline spills the fumes aren't pleasant (to most people) but they seem fairly tolerable even at close distances.
Contrast with my experience of concentrated ammonia in the chemistry lab, where if you get one strong whiff it can send you reeling with burnt sinuses.
But I may not be aware of safety strategies that are already in use.
Then non-toxic freon was introduced and rendered those efforts irrelevant.
ammonia-absorption refrigerators of more or less the einstein-szilard type still aren't leak-proof, even without moving seals as you will easily learn if you go to a junkyard to find spare parts for one (they're still popular in rvs, and i stayed in a hotel room earlier this year that had one, manufactured within the last decade)
freon was a huge safety improvement over early vapor-compression refrigerants like propane and sulfur dioxide, but ammonia-absorption refrigerators are a different beast entirely
hopefully it's less dangerous now?
gas is combustible aka it explodes.
What we need is better batteries, not Ammonia or Hydrogen, those are essentially obsolete given present day tech, another billion or two into battery research and we should see the end of Lithium Ion (we're pretty much there already but for a penalty in density, but that's not a limitation for stationary storage systems) cost wise.