This is a solved problem, why do people persist with stuff repeated in the 1980s?!
There are endless h2 vehicles on the road. Do you think the tanks used, are apt to become brittle, and leak?!
There are h2 refueling stations for said vehicles, all over the place.
Do you think these leak, and become brittle?
And amusingly, your comment is redirecting from the claim that transporting h2 is hard. You are now poking at storage, instead of at transport (which can be done with pipelines, and is done with them).
In my case it's been at least a decade since I looked at materials science and hydrogen destroys steel isn't as well known as hydrogen blows up easily.
But ignoring this, allows the anti-h2 crowd to continue to deride h2 tech.
The heart of this often claims that h2 is polluting, based upon the fact that currently, we source a lot of h2 from Ng.
Of course this disregards that electricity is often derived from dirty sources too, meaning, all the same arguments should be levied against battery based power sources too.
What we need, is to get non polluting engine/point of use tech out there, asap! And h2 is the only tech which provides the range, due to refueling speed, to replace many applications.
Without end of use clean tech, we have zero hope.
Any environmentalist should be happy, joyful, exuberant with h2.
Sounds plausible. Is the idea to build pipes out of the same stuff? Might be worth mentioning that fibre composite essentially means epoxy with fibres in, which is not necessarily environmentally superb in the thousands of miles of pipes format.
Wonder how people will deal with burying very stiff pipes without them breaking when the ground moves. Maybe sections with rubber joints, though the joints would leak.
The Mirai needs check ups and part replacement every 5000 miles[1]. It is car sold at a huge loss (middle 5 to low 6 digits) because the tech is super expensive.
The question is can this interval be reduced once the technology matures?
Let's look what the Miria II brings in that regard.
Compressed or chilled hydrogen storage is hard. I am huge fan of using geological structures for it (salt caverns f.e.), as they are voluminous the pressure route will be an unnecessary cost and security risk.
What is it with H2 crowd and their persecution fetish?
Before lion battery tech, in the 90s, h2 and fuel cells were the next big thing. The way to move to a pollution free engine.
All sorts of claims against h2 tech came out, such as the "there is no way to store it!", which was solved in the 90s and before!
These relentless claims, not just about storage, but anything h2 related, were used to erode public trust. BC, Vacouver had h2 buses in the 90s!
But that all failed, h2 evaporated, and who do you think pushed an endless whisper campaign back then, with said falsehoods?
It wasn't environmentalists!
Now, decades later this junk bull is repeated endlessly, by environmentalists, who ignore the buses and cars from the 90s, and all the current vehciles, and just repeat "oh, it's dangerous and you can't use h2. how silly"
Yeah. Sure. No reason for me to be upset.
So don't blame me if you get flack, for repeating oil industry lies from 30 years ago, which were not true even then.
You deserve to be hassled for this!
And now, you ignored my comment about Toyota safety verifying their cars, as it is new tech, because they want to know.
They aren't inspecting because they have to, or because the tanks are unsafe, they are doing so out of prudence, and correct procedure.
So there is nothing to improve with the next model.
If being on HN causes you this much mental anguish that it justifies hassling people.
> So don't blame me if you get flack, for repeating oil industry lies from 30 years ago, which were not true even then.
I blame you giving me flak as you are giving me flak. I was not alive nor in other ways able to influence the behaviour of companies 30 years ago.
Basic math suggests if all H2 in a Mirai where to react with 02 ignoring the energy released when compressed is 340 kg of TNT. And unlike liquid gasoline or solid batteries gaseous hydrogen will disperse enough to almost instantly release all that energy with in a second of of catastrophic tank failure.
The inspections are necessary to ensure the intactness of the pressure vessel meant to prevent that. Yet if a Miria would get hit by a train at high speed or fall of a cliff even a perfect tank won't fail catastrophically and the slow release mechanism burning off hydrogen in a controlled flame over minutes would make no difference. The tanks are unsafe in these situation. Regular inspections are needed to detect damage to tanks because those would make them as unsafe in more and more common situations the worse the tank is degraded. Regular inspection are necessary, not just because of some good will of Toyota. As for how regularly i can not comment.
> they are doing so out of prudence, and correct procedure.
Procedure on hydrogen tanks is not procedure because it is. Procedures are man made and high pressure tank (and especially high pressure hydrogen tanks) have those procedures for safety reasons. I ignored your assertion that Toyota requires these inspections and cars lose their road worthiness (at least in the EU) if they are not performed because i am utterly unconvinced that Toyota developing hydrogen cars for decades does this to gain insight into the technology or out of goodness of their heart.
> So there is nothing to improve with the next model.
If you think there is nothing that can be improved with regard to safety hydrogen cars are doomed as dead end tech. If you think that less frequent inspections wouldn't be an improvement you are out of touch with reality. Either way you seem possessed by some really vitriolic memes.
Storing hydrogen compressed is a horrible idea unless you really have to (the Miria has to, due to volume constraints of cars). Due to the fact that a catastrophic tank failure even in a small tank for cars leading to a explosion you should not place grid scale tanks to things you care about such as other grid scale tanks. This negates any volume/area advantage of compressed storage of stationary hydrogen storage and just introduces a horrible failure mode. Just store uncompressed hydrogen on sorta leak proof caverns with sensors to monitor O2 concentration.
The reason why H2 didn't take of the nineties is cost, lack of range and performance and no obvious way to improve storage and lack of infrastructure. H2 combustion cars and busses would actually be worse for the climate then gasoline cars. For H2 fuel cell cars i am not certain. Government action could have made H2 cars competitive but it did not. Oil companies would have sold the hydrogen anyway but their refineries would have become stranded assets so it makes sense to implicate them in a conspiracy against H2.
The reasons why electric cars could take of is because for the rugged early adaptors the charging infrastructure was their home and car companies only had to service highways with charging stations where ever existing electricity infrastructure made it easy. All things oil companies could not sabotage. The transition happened when it happened because Tesla started to sell cars which beat the range of hydrogen cars of the 90s handedly and provided an omnipresent charging infrastructure (the normal grid) which didn't slow down travel to much on long trips (super chargers).
