[Manfredo_1]

It's not "nothing can be invented". It's "come back to me after it's invented, not before".

And uranium seawater extraction already exists: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

It's more expensive than mined uranium, but since fissile material is so energy-dense that increase in fuel cost amounts to hardly any change in overall cost.

[pfdietz]

LOL. Hydrogen storage is much more invented than seawater uranium extraction. All the components are close to off the shelf; it's just a matter of putting them together (and for the CO2 tax to be high enough to make it worthwhile).

Seawater uranium extraction is at a much lower TRL (technology readiness level).

This is an excellent example of your hypocritical double standards on this subject.

[Manfredo_1]

Name one hydrogen electric grid storage facility. Not prototypes, but actual commercial facilities connected to the grid.

You insist that hydrogen is so technically ready, yet nobody is using it.

[pfdietz]

I will repeat the reply I gave elsewhere to this argument:

Dude. You are falling back to the "if it isn't already being done, it can't be done" argument. Please stop this foolishness.

Hydrogen is being stored in a few places. That the storage isn't larger isn't because of any technical obstacles, it's because there's no reason to store it now. In particular, when we can burn natural gas without CO2 charges, using the hydrogen for energy storage is pointless.

This doesn't mean hydrogen CAN'T be stored, it just means the market conditions for widespread adoption of an off-the-self technology aren't there yet.

[Manfredo_1]

You're falling back to the "if it works on paper it'll be guaranteed to work at scale, and work cheaply" argument. Please stop this foolishness.

It's not just a question of storage, you can just use a salt cavern for that.

It's also a question of electrolyzing water into hydrogen efficiently.

And converting it back into electricity efficently.

And building all of these systems cheaply.

And deploying all of these systems at massive scale.

We're still on the first phase of that. As per your other comment we still don't even have effective elctrolysers to do this cost-effectively [1].

Will hydrogen storage pan out? Maybe. But until then it's not a solution. It's a potential solution, like fusion, or algae in vats, and thermal storage, and all the other potential solutions being proposed. It's not a solution that has actually demonstrated viability.

!. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26599346

[pfdietz]

Why shouldn't it scale? It's not as if it uses any rare materials. The geological formations in which hydrogen can be stored are abundant. The cost estimation should be good, since the technology is just integrating existing components. That's the easiest and surest kind of technology to roll out.

[Manfredo_1]

That's a question that can't be answered until people actually build hydrogen storage facilities at scale.

Why shouldn't nuclear plants scale? They're mostly just steel and concrete. Uranium is more than 40 times more prevalent than gold, and it's energy density is such that it represents a negligible cost of operations. The technology is just scaling up existing components, we had nuclear powered submarines for a while. This is what people thought about nuclear power in the 1950s and early 60s. As plants actually started being constructed problems such as corrosion, large amounts of earth moving, metal impurities, and more were discovered and made the plants more expensive.

We haven't discovered these issues with hydrogen storage. We won't discover these issues until we actually build hydrogen storage facilities at scale. We don't know what challenges will lie in store when building hydrogen storage, because we've never done it before. This is why it's useless to talk about the cost of hydrogen storage until we actually have experience building and operating hydrogen storage plants. Our knowledge of cost of hydrogen storage is in the same situation as nuclear power in the 1950s.