Hydrogen station explodes in Norway, fuel cell car sales suspended

[NNadir]

2. Well, not that old. Certainly not as old as the life of this now 50 year old line of crap to rebrand fossil fuels...

...as hydrogen.

As I often point out, the International Journal of Hydrogen Energy's first issue was in 1976.

It's not true at all, that the billions year old physical properties of hydrogen have changed have changed from 1976, these being its extremely low viscosity, its incompatibility with many metal alloys, its extremely low heat of vaporization, and its possession of the third lowest critical temperature, 33 K, 33K above absolute zero. Only ³He and ⁴He have lower critical temperatures.

I have posted more recent examples of this dangerous hydrogen scam.

I have seen here, in this space, from people working tirelessly at rebranding fossil fuels as hydrogen, much carrying on insipidly about the Fukushima reactors, which were destroyed by a hydrogen explosion, whines about trivial harmless tritium releases, but, there is very little evidence that radiation releases from the reactors killed anyone, meaning that the hydrogen explosion at AB Specialty Silicones in Waukegan, Illinois, which killed four people shows that hydrogen is more dangerous than failed nuclear reactors.

Hydrogen blast led to deaths at US silicones plant

Leaking and uncontained hydrogen led to an explosion that killed four workers and seriously injured a fifth last May at AB Specialty Silicones in Waukegan, Illinois, according to a preliminary investigation report released by the US Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board on Dec. 18.

The plant made custom silicone products that are used in a wide variety of industries, including personal care, chemical manufacturing, adhesives, sealants, and coatings. It ran 24 hours a day and employed 88 people who worked in three shifts.

However, despite the output, the quantities of material the facility used and stored fell below threshold levels triggering oversight by the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk Management Program or the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s process safety management standard, the CSB says.

The hydrogen explosion took place in an area where the company made a silicon hydride emulsion. The blast was felt 30 km from the facility...

Now, this too, was in 2019, and if I were working at rebranding fossil fuels as hydrogen by posting slick dishonest promotional videos on the internet, I would try to argue that all the problems have been solved, and that after billions of years, there's been a recent change in the physical and chemical properties of hydrogen, but that's not what I'm doing here.

I have posted more recent examples, for instance the million dollar fuel cell bus that blew up in 2023, which as of this writing was last year.

Fuel cell bus in California destroyed after explosion during refuelling.

The million dollar bus, as I noted in the post, may have well left the area contaminated with fluorocarbons.

Um it appears the properties of hydrogen, unchanged for billions of years, did not change between 2019 and 2023.

By the way, posting pictures of battery fires does not say a damned thing about hydrogen safety. There are vastly more batteries on this planet than there are Potemkin crappy hydrogen devices.. What matters is a per capita basis, fires per device. There are billions of lithium batteries on this planet. How many fuel cells?

For the record, I'm a scientist, and not a sales person trying to rebrand fossil fuels as "hydrogen." As a scientist, I am aware, as I often state, of one of the most important laws in physics, the second law of thermodynamics. Thus I can tell the difference between stored energy - which involves always the loss of primary energy to entropy - and primary energy. Batteries and hydrogen are both forms of stored energy, and thus both are thermodynamic wasting schemes, the hype for which I generally hold in contempt, but in my considered opinion, hydrogen is far more dangerous than batteries. I have worked with and used both, although hydrogen only on a lab scale.

I oppose utility scale batteries, but surely not as much as I oppose consumer hydrogen.

One of the notable things about collecting a catalyst from a hydrogenation, usually platinum, on a Buchner funnel is that the catalyst will sometimes spontaneously ignite the filter paper when exposed to air. It doesn't take all that much to make hydrogen burn, which is why it is too dangerous to be hyped as a consumer product, irrespective of how much fossil fuel companies want to push it as "green," which it isn't.

I have seen hydrogen ignite many times, spontaneously, albeit on filter paper where I more or less expected it, although I've used hydrogen far less than I use portable computers and cell phones. I have seen far more ignition of hydrogen than I have seen batteries ignite, although I have observed both. I don't need special detectors in my house to have a battery in it, but I wouldn't want to have hydrogen in my home without very specialized detection equipment.

Have a wonderful evening. Thank you for your revealing comment.