by KaiserJeep » Sat 30 Aug 2014, 04:58:36
I happen to be a fan of fuel cells. But I do not regard them as a source of energy, rather they are an energy storage medium where energy is expended to create hydrogen, and then the hydrogen is burned in the fuel cell to make water vapor.
Fuel cell vehicles thus have effectively unlimited range, based upon refilling the vehicle's hydrogen storage tank. In the case of a residence, supplies of hydrogen can be produced from other fuels such as natural gas.
The downside to this tech is that hydrogen is difficult to store and use safely, and users suffer the risk of explosions and fire. That risk is more manageable in a residence than it is in a vehicle, and in fact the risk of a natural gas explosion is only slightly less than that of a hydrogen gas explosion - add some additional hazard due to hydrogen's colorless and odorless nature, and the practical difficulties that storing it and using it as a fuel requires.
In the recent past, these additional hydrogen fuel storage risks required someone with the knowledge and skills of an astronaut to use fuel cells safely. The on-demand nature of producing hydrogen from natural gas reduces the quantity of dangerous gas that need be stored and brings about an overall risk reduction. Certainly we could automate many of the tasks of monitoring the hydrogen store and then utilizing hydrogen fuel safely using electronic monitoring and the proper electronic sensor suite.
The risks should not be minimized. For example during the reactor malfunctions at both Three Mile Island and Fukushima, radioactive hydrogen (more precisely "heavy hydrogen", aka Tritium) accumulated inside the containment structures and exploded. The heavy ferro-concrete dome at TMI contained the explosion, while the inadequate rectangular containment structure design at Fukushima did not. (Still, compared to the radioactive cooling water leaks, the Tritium explosions from Fukushima did not release any significant amount of radioactive isotopes.)
Thus hydrogen fuel cells remain a valuable alternative tech that could stretch natural gas supplies and provide substantial power on a small or medium scale, at some level of risk. Automation can reduce the risk - whether or not the risk reduction can be had at an affordable price is an excellent question. The $300,000 hydrogen fuel cell public transportation buses are not yet practical, perhaps in a stationary application such as a residence, enough cost savings can be realized to make the risks acceptable.
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Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0