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MIT design would harness 40 percent of the sun’s heat to produce clean hydrogen fuel (news.mit.edu)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] aBundleOfFerrets 6 points 10 months ago (3 children)

The impact of real, clean, cheap hydrogen would be substantial. I hope they can scale this quickly and it doesn’t remain vaporware like everything else hydrogen related.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Storing hydrogen is a bitch. It readily ionizes and the H+ ion is just a single proton. It gets inside metal lattices easily, finds a stray atom to combine there and boom - suddenly it's 100 times the size it was. That's what's called hydrogen pitting.

So right now, if hydrogen storage was good and cheap, we could use hydrogen as a battery for supply regulated energy sources (solar, wind) and burn it in a turbine to generate electricity and water. You don't even need the storage to be mobile or miniaturized for that. And even that isn't a reality.

So I'll perk up when news of a cheap reliable hydrogen storage technology comes around.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Personally, I think methanation may be promising, since you can use the existing infrastructure.

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