[perihelions]

The downside is that ammonia is a heavier-than-air poison, like chemical weapons from WW1. Its hazards are significant.

- "Anhydrous ammonia is lighter than air and will therefore rise (will not settle in low-lying areas); however, vapors from liquefied gas are initially heavier than air and may spread along the ground."

https://wwwn.cdc.gov/TSP/MMG/MMGDetails.aspx?mmgid=7&toxid=2

[ncmncm]

We already synthesize and handle industrially millions of tons of it annually, and have done for going on a century. If there were a worrying problem with ammonia, you would already be hearing about it.

[pixl97]

Heh, this is how I know you didn't grow up on a farm. You ever see a leaking anhydrous tank and you run for your life.

[ncmncm]

My father reports feeding raw ammonia directly into furrows being cut.

Yes, a leaky ammonia tank would be a problem, but it is not exactly odorless.

[jacquesm]

By the time you can smell it from a leaking tank depending on the speed of the spill you may already be inviting lung damage, if it overwhelms you you're as good as dead. With some regularity farmers here are overcome by ammonia that has pooled in manure storage pools.

This article starts up with 'three dead per year through fertilizer vapors, one breath and you are gone'.

https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/nederland/artikel/5022231/no...

[ncmncm]

Three from a population of how many? Compared to how many in some other possible world?

As long as people are being killed in numbers many orders of magnitude greater, just so sugar sellers will have good quarterly profits, it will be hard to count those.

[jacquesm]

That's now how it works though. If you lump all of the preventable deaths in a profession together it starts to add up, and NL is efficient enough that three people in a population of 10K farmers, a much smaller fraction of which is into animals is high enough to be noticed. Farming is a dangerous profession (lots of open rotating machinery) and we value life enough that doing something about things like this (workplace accidents) is strongly culturally ingrained.

It's also an entirely different domain from the 'sugar sellers'.

[perihelions]

- "If there were a worrying problem with ammonia, you would already be hearing about it."

We hear about it pretty regularly,

https://www.google.com/search?q=ammonia+spill+site%3Areddit....

Fortunately the main use of anhydrous ammonia (agriculture) is in sparsely populated places, so its impact is limited. I think it's a questionable idea to put it in urban vehicles though.

[ncmncm]

Ammonia will not be used in urban vehicles.

It will be used in farm equipment, and in place of bunker oil in ships, and burned in combined-cycle turbines in times when wind and sun are not providing, and other, cheaper storage has been used up.

[Jistern]

Ammonia seems too dangerous. With cheap electricity from solar and wind, cheap hydrogen seems like a better answer. Sure, it's not a perfect answer, but it seems better because it seems much safer.

As recently as approximately 200 years ago steel was very expensive, as was aluminum. Now both of those materials are cheap and used in a plethora of applications.

Cheap electricity will similarly enable us to cost-effectively do many things that heretofore were prohibitively expensive.

The whole, "Hydrogen is bulky and difficult to store" canard of an argument doesn't sway me... at all. Hydrogen storage could certainly be improved, but even if it never were, for long distance shipping and air travel it's good enough as it is.

"But, but, but... you'd need to build ships and planes 50% larger!!!" Sure. Ok. Yes. The world is not running out of steel.

And, of course, if ships and planes were running on hydrogen instead of gasoline and diesel, a huge amount of research would go into improving hydrogen storage.

The Ford Nucleon (a nuclear-powered concept car) never made it into production, yet we do have nuclear submarines. Choosing the correct fuel for a given application is important.

[ncmncm]

You will see a very great deal of anhydrous ammonia stored, transported, and used, but will not be asked to handle it yourself. Shipmakers are already gearing up to retrofit ships with ammonia tanks, to burn in existing engines. Probably important ports will start to forbid docking of bunker-oil craft.

You probably will not have much contact with hydrogen, either.

[ncmncm]

A safety argument does not favor consumer-level use of hydrogen. Nor, of ammonia.

But synthetic liquified hydrogen, produced at airports from power delivered on transmission lines at times when power is cheapest, and banked, will certainly come to drive aircraft where cost matters.

[Jistern]

I think you are correct; I was very probably wrong. I did some research. NH3 (Ammonia) seems like it will be used, at least, to power large cargo ships in the near future.

I didn't realize that Ammonia is essentially a cheaper and easier way to store hydrogen.

Thanks for enlightening me! I appreciate it.