WITAF.
At best, he doesn’t understand what a Hybrid Car is.
Wait till he hears about gasoline
The material safety sheet for gasoline is a lot scarier than the one for hydrogen
The worst part about the gas you put in your car are all the additives they cram in there. Gas for small planes you check it by sticking your finger in it to make sure it’s full. Your finger doesn’t even smell afterwards unlike car gas where you stink for a week. Also no skin cancer! Next you drain some from the bottom to make sure there’s no water. After a quick visual inspection, you just pour it out onto the ground.
Gas for small planes you check it by sticking your finger in it to make sure it’s full.
I know some people have different practices, but myself and the pilots I’ve known use a dipstick to check fuel level. You do you, but remember that aviation fuel contains lead, which is easily absorbed through the skin. I always use gloves when checking fuel.
I can’t deny that most pilots don’t use gloves, that there are fewer additives in aviation fuel, nor that we are trained to dump checked fuel on the ground. But I don’t see those as “green flags” for aviation fuel.
For anyone interested, here’s the Material Safety Data Sheet for aviation fuel. For comparison, here’s the MSDS for automotive gasoline. I wouldn’t want to touch either without skin protection.
From watching movies from the 60s-2020s, internal COMBUSTION engine’s also have a tendency to explode. I haven’t seen many hydrogen using vehicles exploding since the Hindenburg.
Theoretically a hydrogen fuel vehicle could explode because it has a pretty large tank of hydrogen on board. Practically it’ll just burn up because it won’t all be released at once. And I’ve never heard of a single case of that actually happening in the field. And you can be damn sure it would be all over the news.
I have a hydrogen car. H2 explodes more readily than it burns. The containment tanks are designed to mitigate this, and they are routinely tested with high-caliber rifles to make sure. There are YouTube videos of the tests.
EV battery packs are also designed to mitigate thermal runaway events, even down to Tesla packs making every cell connection a fuse on case of issues. That doesn’t stop them from catching fire anyway after some accidents.
Pretty sure the Hindenburg would have gone down the same even if it was filed with helium. Not that the hydrogen helped matters, just the initial problem wasn’t hydrogen’s fault.
No… No, that’s not true. Yes, hydrogen and helium are both lighter than air. But that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Hydrogen is unstable, which is why it can explosively combust when mixed with as little as 4% oxygen. Helium is stable, helium won’t burn. So if it had been filled with helium, it might have crashed. But it definitely wouldn’t have been a catastrophic fireball…
Downvotes for being correct, or at least, not entirely wrong. The exact cause may never be determined, but there are a lot of plausible theories that the fire did not start with hydrogen, but rather the outer coating.
If nothing else, hydrogen can’t burn without oxygen, and there’s very little oxygen inside the envelope. Something else has to leak first.
Thank you. After the deluge I did hit up Wikipedia. The skin was coated in flammable material as I remembered. It did say the skin being a major factor was controversial and that the burn patterns didn’t indicate that to be likely, which is fine. But just the blanket downvotes with no one addressing that is annoying. It stifles any conversation. Were I not a naturally curious person I wouldn’t have looked into it further. I’m sure plenty of the downvotes came from people that probably didn’t even know about the static discharge part and still don’t know because they just downvoted and moved on in their ignorance.
Lil bro remembers being traumatized by the hindenburg explosion when he was growing up. Fucking luddite.
Did you know: the Hindenburg was built before plastics were a thing. Most think that the metal shell held the gas but no. It full of animal bladders/intestines that were filled with hydrogen and tied up .
What hydrogen cars?
The sum total of Toyota and whoever else’s efforts still amount to an inconsequential fraction of the vehicles currently in operation, probably not even a notable portion of a percentage point.
Broken clocks and whatnot. Hydrogen cars are trash and completely unfeasible, not because they explode but because of the terrible efficiency and fueling problems
And would need a huge new infrastructure for production and distribution. I’m convinced that most of the push for hydrogen is from oil and gas interests wanting to have essentially the same business they do now.
Clearly one of the advantages of EVs is how cheap and easy the infrastructure is compared to any other alternative (and somehow we’re still finding it difficult)
EV infrastructure would be better if it was actually standardized and regulated to be like gas stations.
Right now, we have legacy charging ports and the new, now standard, Tesla port. So you have to make sure the charger will even fit your car. And, because we live in the future, everything is enshitified. Different charging companies have different apps that you need to download to pay for charging, many chargers are down for maintenance, but even with the app, there’s no guarantee you’ll be warned about the charger being down.
Chargers should be like gas pumps. Put in a card, put the plug in your car, and then wait for it to charge. Every plug should fit every car. The system that sprang up without government intervention is clearly insufficient, and needs to be standardized from the ground up.
- Most manufacturers pledged to support NACs starting next year, and a couple already have. Also, Tesla is adding the older standard to at least some chargers
- We might be losing “pay at the pump”, that was required for federal money to build out charging. Now we’re switching to NACs but Tesla hasn’t supported “pay at the pump” and I don’t know if that’s still a requirement. While it is actually more convenient to use the app and Tesla has been consumer friendly so far, I’m uncomfortable with yet another app holding my credit card hostage just so I can adult.
- we should focus on rest areas on highways, both to build out the trip charger network and as something that can more easily be standardized/influenced
and the need to build an entire new distribution network, but one that handles cryogenic fuel.
nah, no thanks.
Actually they can retro fit oil and gas infrastructure to work with hydrogen. Guess who is pushing the “huRdUGyun iS thE fuTuRe” narrative. Yeah the people who own the oil and gas infra.
Actually they can retro fit oil and gas infrastructure to work with hydrogen.
citation requested because this defies literal physics. I’d give you the benefit of the doubt if you suggested propane, but gasoline storage is NOT cryogenic, would not hold large enough volumes of it, and aren’t capable of the pressures involved.
Sure, you can bury a hydrogen tank and support plumbing NEXT to a gasoline storage tank, but you still have to deal with handling cryogenic fuel. Do they really claim that?
So even if that’s an agenda, it’s fucking bent. Green Hydrogen literally ISN’T.
Seems like every solution the petroleum industry pushes is really just another excuse to pump more oil to burn in an already choking atmosphere.
fuuuuuck.
But nobody’s actually taking about subsidising or making them, so there’s no point in ranting about it.
Hydrogen buses were a thing for a while, but it’s probably cheaper to just go with batteries now.
Feels like something that was surpassed before it ever got popular.
I could see hydrogen being useful for some applications where you don’t need the public infrastructure. Buses that refuel at a central depot could be one of those if there’s issues with battery electric being too heavy and stuff like that.
But for ordinary people that can charge their car at home or work without needing to go to a third place it’s hard to beat that convenience.
Hydrogen also has a history of being pushed by fossil fuel companies, probably because initially most hydrogen would be generated using fossil fuels, so it’s not exactly a fast track to reducing emissions.
Hydrogen fuel cells actually show quite a bit of promise. Mostly for large trucks. Batteries have a scaling issue. A battery powered 18-wheeler needs a much larger battery for a much shorter range.
Adding more load means you need more battery, and that larger battery is just more load that you need to haul.
This is sort of true with everything, but the important note is that a full battery and empty battery weigh the same.
Anyway. Commercial use is where it makes sense. There are actually a few other technologies that make sense in the commercial transportation space. Like ammonia.
Keeping these rather dangerous fuels commercial also allows for more strict safety standards.
