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by pfdietz
1908 days ago
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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. |
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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.