Right, but consider a punctured gas tank vs... well, have you played "spot the COPVs in the SpaceX explosion"? They spit fire and zoom around like party balloons. Good fun from a distance, but if I had to pick one to ride with every day, it's an easy choice in favor of the gas tank.
Do you know what the fuel is? Rockets are unique in that they carry a significant amount of oxidizer with them. A hydrogen container is unlikely to zoom around spitting fire, there's too much fuel for how much oxygen there is and it rises very quickly.
There are still dangers, but practically I'm not sure they are that much worse than a gasoline fire. There are also systems that reduce the pressures needed, like activated carbon beds. Research on them stalled mostly because there was no good way to generate H2.
I thought the fact that H2 burns invisibly combined with the fact that it goes boom once the burning mixture is stoichiometric is the big risk with H2 over typical hydro-carbon-based fuels, which burn a bright orange and are surprisingly hard to blow up.
The Mythbusters did a show on this exact thing with spraypaint, hairspray, and propane canisters. They didn't explode even when wrapped with flaming rags, but sometimes the released material would combust. In some cases the gas rushing out actually extinguished the flame.
You rarely by accident get a stoichiometric mix. With a slow leak into an enclosed container is usually how it happens. Otherwise there is too much fuel to O2 in the atmosphere.
People really need to stop trying to sound smart by thinking of imagined dangers. That is what stopped nuclear power, it's what's stopping hydrogen as a fuel, it's what's stopping gene therapy research, etc. Get over yourself.
> People really need to stop trying to sound smart
> Get over yourself.
Right back atcha.
Good grief, "stoichiometric mixture" is not a reasonable person's danger threshold. The mechanical energy alone is terrifying, which was the point of bringing up COPVs.
While we're at it, let's put giant flywheels in chemical cars to do regenerative breaking. They'll probably have less mechanical energy than the titanic so they're probably no big deal, right? Right.
Look, this stuff has been studied and you can find it with just a little bit of looking. How this conversation has been going is a bunch of chaff gets thrown up and then people are expected to answer.
I'm doing as best I can. I happened to have a coworker who was involved in alternative fuels research, specifically the H2 cylinders that operated at lower pressures using a carbon substrate. But even if you don't use that you can still construct and secure the container so it splits instead of shatters and contains most or all of the debris. You can install a shield bulkhead into the car to deflect debris to the ground. You can do loads of things.
You are not original, you are not the first person to raise these concerns, and very competent people have been working on them.
