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Comment Re:Liquid hydrogen [Re:A sad day] (Score 1) 176

True, you can always have leaks, but hydrogen leaks seem to be way, way more common than leaks of other fuels as a percentage of launch attempts. The shuttle was scrubbed on average almost once per launch, and a large percentage of the scrubs were caused by hydrogen leaks (source).

And that's on top of the whole embrittlement problem, which can lead to catastrophic hardware failures if you're reusing parts over a long period of time, which is another reason why folks trying to do reusable rockets (e.g. SpaceX) tend to avoid it. And if you think embrittlement is a risk in something that gets used once, imagine the effect on fuel lines in cars that are pressurized for decades at a time.

It is a really, really nasty fuel, IMO. Mind you, hydrazine is worse in some ways, but that doesn't mean hydrogen isn't nasty. :-)

Comment Re:A sad day (Score 1) 176

When it comes to charging EVs, time is a huge resource. Everything is simpler, cheaper, safer, lower wear, etc when you don't have to do it fast. Fleet vehicles are really a perfect fit for that because you typically do have 11-12 hours to 'trickle-charge' them at 14 amps.

One possible exception: Rental cars at airports. But only to a point.

Comment Re:Just say no (Score 1) 104

It's pretty easy to beat this. Just stop buying from Delta.

Do you have any idea how difficult this is? That's like telling people to stop buying from Amazon because of how awfully they treat their workers and all the fake Chinese stuff they sell.

It's impossible to do. I haven't bought from Amazon in years, that's how difficult it is.

Comment Why DVDs are better (Score 4, Insightful) 22

I know there are people who will grumble and whine that DVDs are sooooooo outdated, but this is another example of why they are superior. You never have to worry someone else will take it away from you.

You bought it. You own it. Unless someone breaks into your home and takes it or your home burns down, it is yours forever. You can watch it as many times as you like whenever you want. You are not restricted to someone else's schedule. Nor do you have to worry about it breaking up because the signal got botched.

Further, DVDs don't change. No one can alter the movie with "new and improved" scenes or added "features". Han will always shoot first.

That Microsoft has told users there are no refunds is further justification why DVDs are better than streaming.

Comment Re:Well done! (Score 0) 28

Sensible humans? The ones in India? The most populous nation on the planet? The one where air pollutants are so thick in major cities it looks like fog? Where farmers openly burn their fields to make way for next year's crops contributing to the air pollution? The country which the article states will increase its use of coal-fired power plants? Those sensible humans?

Comment Re:A sad day (Score 1) 176

School buses, mail trucks, plumbing vans, and the like don't actually need all that much range, maybe 200 miles.

You're grossly overestimating the required range for most of those things. School buses travel an average of just 63 miles per day. Mail trucks? 25 miles per day. Or were you planning to charge them only on weekends? :-)

Mind you, that's not the whole story for school buses, because they also have to be able to take the sports teams and bands to out-of-town games and competitions within a 200-mile radius or thereabouts, so for those long runs, you would need at least a 400-mile range to do a round trip, or else the driver would need to be able to take it to a Megacharger or similar close to the destination with a 200-mile range. But you could also keep a small number of diesel or gasoline buses for that purpose if you want, at least for the foreseeable future.

Comment Re: A sad day (Score 2) 176

" You can put probably ~500 miles of range into a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle in 7 minutes versus 200 miles in 15 minutes on a modern EV."

When all goes well, sure. At other times the fill connector freezes up and it takes much longer. At least three times, there has been an explosion during filling just in the limited service in California alone.

Sure. That's common when technology is in its infancy. Those problems could be solved, given enough time and money. In theory, so could the leaks, though given that NASA tried to fix them for three decades and still had leak problems on Artemis, that remains a theory. :-D

Hydrogen has much bigger problems than filling time, freezes, or the occasional explosion from dispensing a gas at high pressure incorrectly. If those were the biggest problems, I'd be totally in favor of doing more with hydrogen and fuel cells, because those are manageable and/or fixable technical problems.

A much bigger problem is fact that almost all hydrogen comes from natural gas, which makes it anything but green. The dirty little secret is that your losses from leaks would make distributing it over oil pipeline infrastructure completely infeasible, so you'll end up distributing natural gas instead, and cracking it to make hydrogen. And now, you have all the CO2 emissions from burning natural gas, plus all the efficiency loss from cracking the natural gas ahead of time, and you're about as green as a forest fire.

And of course, if you get it through electrolysis instead, you're likely wasting considerably more than half the energy you put in, versus more like 1% loss when charging a battery, making it a huge drain on our power grid.

And the elephant in the room is the cost per mile. In California, current prices for hydrogen fueling are hovering around $36 per kg, or about 50 cents per mile in a typical hydrogen-powered car. This makes it almost an order of magnitude more expensive than BEVs, and there's no real reason to believe that this will improve at this point, given how long it has failed to improve. At best, the whole thing feels more like a glorified government subsidy capture scheme, rather than a serious means of powering cars.

Hydrogen is a terrible idea on multiple levels. The fact that ostensibly it could have been a short-term workaround to provide multiple means of getting energy into rural areas (gas pipelines and power grid) is nice in theory, but in practice, the losses are just way too high, and batteries just work way too well, so the benefits just don't hold up in practice.

Comment Re:Liquid hydrogen [Re:A sad day] (Score 1) 176

I've said similar things about NASA's Artemis mission for the same reason. Doesn't everybody want to use a fuel that is almost impossible to keep from leaking, and then spend the better part of a year with the rocket stuck on the pad trying to fix the leaks so they can launch it? :-D

Not sure what your thinking is here. Hydrogen stages for rockets have been in routine use for well over sixty years. By now it's a well-developed technology.

But orbital boosters can afford liquid storage at -253C; they only need to store the liquid hydrogen for a few hours, and the cube-square law means that the 150 tons of hydrogen needed for a rocket takes a lot longer to boil off than a hundred kilograms in a car. Liquid hydrogen would be an absurd choice for a car.

*shrugs*

Hydrogen leaks were one of the most hated aspects of the Shuttle design, too. It's routine until it doesn't work. Then it's a huge pain in the backside. The shuttle, Artemis... both of the two big NASA designs that used hydrogen had big headaches from hydrogen leaks. At some point, you start to see a pattern. (Whether that pattern is hydrogen or defense contractors, I couldn't say. :-D )

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