On the one hand, that's some pretty encouraging news but yeah... that article header needs some work. xDD

Also that's a hilarious choice for "The couch kitties" backdrop!

Oh, yeah, hydrogen. Pollution free.

Now, where do you get hydrogen? I'm stupid, so all I can think of is hydrolysis, which is hideously inefficient: energy in far exceeds energy out. And how do you generate the electricity in the first place? Fossil fuel? The other option is chemical reduction --which creates some nasty chemical waste.

Fair point, indeed.

Could use nuclear reactors to supply the power for hydrolysis.

That would definitely scare all the tree-huggers away!

Dam-set turbines, which powers the electrical hydrogen/oxygen separation of water. Which condenses-dibbles out of the exhaust, which becomes rain to fill up the dam again.
Of course, that's the best way to do it pollution free. Which means that someone's going to try the directly opposite option to try to game the system in some way that I don't know of. It was bad enough when the "there's money being left on the table!" school was dealing with actual money. Now they've got carbon offset credits, speculative contracting over projected pollution cleanups, and state to state electricity purchace planning budgets. All of which is prone to dipping into for the right person with the right paper trail of alibis over where the money went.

All the tree-huggers want to blow up the dams, because even with the fish ladders, they kill a small percentage of fish. There's a small group the next town over from me dedicated to dynamiting a 150-year-old industrial hydropower dam for their kayaking club. Never mind that the river is dry during prime kayaking season -- we gotta blow that dam!

Currently we extract hydrogen from natural gas which is far cheaper, faster and easier than hydrolysis. Basically taking a good fuel and creating a less efficient fuel from it. It is a false economy as you are just removing pollutants from a widely distributed method to concentrated to local areas as they typically burn off the left over products. Like powering fleets of electric cars with coal fired generators.

My brother brought me up-to-date on this after I posted it. But yeah, your comment still reinforces my comment.

Needle nardle noo and the isotopes Peru!

Good!

The Earth-shattering BOOM!

Hindenburg tragedy image would also work.

That was suggested. My argument is that H-bombs, like the vehicles, use hydrogen as a fuel...

Boom goes the dynamite !! ^v^ 😂😝

Heh

^.^

Click n' Boom, Click n' Boom. Don't you just Love it?

Clink n' Boom Boom Boom!

To be fair it’s a hydrogen-oxygen reaction, not nuclear.

You know, like they used on Apollo 13.

Shhhh! You'll spoil the snark!

Anyway, they started it when they said 'boom'.

Apollo 13 came within minutes of becoming a coffin because of the use of such an interconnected system to power a spacecraft without a separate redundant backup. It was a failure of imagination as they say as individual systems had redundancies but not major systems. They had 3 fuel cells to generate power in case of failure but only two O2 tanks that were manifolded together so when one blew up, the other was damaged as well. The command module only had a battery that was way too small to power anything once the fuel cells died. The Apollo spacecraft were ticking time bombs and NASA couldn't really fundamentally fix the problems much like the Shuttle and was a factor in cancelling the program. All but 2 missions had very potentially catastrophic failures and it was only a matter time until crews died.

+1

*in my best marvin the martian voice* where is the kaboom? the earth shattering kaboom??

*insert Susan Ivonova meme here* No Boom today... Boom Tomorrow. Always Boom Tomorrow.

*laughs... but I can see the wisdom in it... much less pollution than creating and then disposing of batteries...

V.

Quite. And see above re: generating the hydrogen...