Environment & Energy

In the 50 years of ongoing hydrogen bullshit, it's become an element of public mythology, stupid public mythology, that hydrogen is a clean fuel.

Recently in a Nature Journal, a new one, Nature Clean Technology, Vol 1 page 351-371 there is a review of the subject of which the abstract begins with the statement "Hydrogen has been promoted as a revolutionary fuel for 50 years, yet usage is confined to oil refining and fertilizer production."

One of the authors is from the Berkeley Department of Nuclear Energy.

I don't have any use whatsoever for the reading level of antinukes, but the open sourced paper lists all of the standard objections to this scam.

The nuclear industry is cleaner and safer than any energy technology, but until it has eliminated the use of dangerous fossil fuels, wasting it for stupid bourgeois fantasies - dangerous fantasies given hydrogen's horrible physical properties noted in the article - it is stupid to waste clean energy to make it.

Happily for the antinike cults, the authors demonstrate the requisite genuflection toward the useless so called "renewable energy," industry as if it were a serios thing, something it isn't. Still, the authors suggest that the only reason to make hydrogen will be for the reasons it's already used, fertilizer and oil refining.

These points are made in the list of "key points" that precedes the text.

Personally I would like to see oil refining phased out to replace petroleum with methanol and DME but given my general perception of the power of ignorance i doubt that will happen in my life time.

In any case, I consider myself well enough informed to reject "appeal to authority" arguments. The fossil fuel industry has been spectacularly successful at marketing the hydrogen made from their products overwhelmingly, as "green." We never run out of fools to buy it, going way back to the assshole Amory Lovins in the 20th century. There are wiser uses for nuclear energy than representing it as suitable for a stupid idea built around hydrogen as a consumer product.

The authors note that the doubling of the so called "renewable energy" scam would be required just to make enough hydrogen for its current use, oil refining and ammonia synthesis, leaving nothing for anything else.

I do not control the marketing of the nuclear industry but I understand the use of such marketing by that maligned industry to get buy ins from credulous fools, who have been handing out hydrogen hype and carrying on insipidly about a putative "hydrogen economy," for half a century. In that period the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste in the planetary atmosphere has risen by around 100 ppm to over 430 ppm. I guess "renewable energy" didn't save us any more than "green hydrogen" lies saved us.

The reality remains that the laws of thermodynamics still hold, which means storing energy wastes it. This is true for batteries as well as hydrogen. All these absurd bullshit fantasies rely on the publicly embraced belief that electricity is "green." It isn't, but the idea of marketing as such has worked spectacularly, as well as cigarette ads got people to smoke in the 1940s and 1950s.

Have a nice evening.