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Toyota Names Upcoming Hydrogen Fuel Cell Car
An anonymous reader writes Toyota has announced the name of its new hydrogen-powered car: Mirai, which means "future" in Japanese. Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda said: "Today, we are at a turning point in automotive history. A turning point where a four-door sedan can travel 300 miles on a single tank of hydrogen, can be refueled in under five minutes and emit only water vapor."
This car is going to have a major problem with most people because
The first time there's' a catastrophic failure the 24 hour news stations are going to be showing old films of the Heisenberg. Hydrogen will become the really scary new (again) bogyman. "Oh, the humanity"
But no one will think of all of the gasoline powered cars that came equipped with exploding gas tanks. Chrysler Jeeps being the most recent I can think of.
Why would they show films of the Uncertainty Principle?
Remember, Hydrogen is really just a battery when you think about it
How many batteries can be completely recharged in under five minutes?
Gasoline does not explode (detonate) under STP conditions, no matter what the concentration, distribution, environment geometry, you name it. It simply doesn't. In ideal situations you can get a rapid conflagration, but even that requires very specific, often hard to achieve conditions. What you linked is a page about car fires, not explosions. Simply burning the gasoline, over a period of minutes.
Hydrogen does explode (detonate) under STP conditions, given a proper environment for a DTD transition. It does burn rapidly in almost any fuel-air mixture. It ignites with a spark of only around a tenth as much energy as gasoline - even trivial static sparks and discharges from common household electronics are enough to ignite it. Liquid hydrogen is even worse - for example, if air gets accidentally entrained in liquid hydrogen, it freezes out and can detonate with properties similar to high explosives.
Both gasoline and hydrogen pool in the right condition - but while gasoline pools on the floor, especially in low points, hydrogen pools in ceilings, especially overhangs. Hydrogen does tend to dissipate faster (although this is countered by its wider combustion range). Two additional problems occur with hydrogen. One, it embrittles metals very easily, both from rapid leaks and from slow leaks. Two, when it pools, it tends to seep into pipes and then follow them to their destinations; there have been cases where a hydrogen leak in one builing has caused an explosion in a completely different building (which is why whenever pipes are in a series and one contains hydrogen, it's always supposed to be the highest up).
There are plenty of chemicals more dangerous than hydrogen, no question. But the simple matter is, hydrogen is far more combustible than gasoline. It's just a basic fact. Which is obvious just by looking at, say, NASA's hydrogen handling guidelines. I mean, any building that handles more than 10kg is supposed to have a roof that's designed to be blown off in an explosion.
On the upside, hydrogen is nontoxic, unlike gasoline! Surface environmental consequences of leaks are minimum to none, although it does destroy high-altitude ozone, at a rate that would be a serious concern if hydrogen became a common fuel given typical leakage rates.
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