Hydrogen cars 'are not the enemy' of electric vehicles as calls grow for more UK refuelling stations

[Caribbeans]

Hydrogen cars 'are not the enemy' of electric vehicles as calls grow for more refuelling stations

GBnews.com | Felix Reeves | 06/06/2025

Car manufacturers have voiced their frustration at the UK Government's failure to support hydrogen filling station infrastructure as an alternative to battery electric vehicles.

The automotive industry is calling for the government to match European ambitions for hydrogen fuelling networks.

Many experts called on the Government to launch a similar strategy to the European Commission, which requires at least one hydrogen filling station every 120 miles on all major routes by 2030.

Additionally, all towns and cities with populations exceeding 100,000 must have hydrogen fuelling facilities...snip

BMW''s Dr Guldner explained that there's significant demand for hydrogen vehicles, stating: "Even if we can get [EV charging times] down to 20 minutes at some point, we still have an infrastructure issue." more
https://www.gbnews.com/lifestyle/cars/hydrogen-cars-electric-vehicles-refuelling-stations

RELATED from 2021:

Boris Johnson's plans to make the UK the 'Qatar of hydrogen' could be 'torpedoed by civil servants' who have 'made a bet' on clean electricity to provide the nation's energy in shift away from fossil fuels
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10149821/Civil-servants-resisting-Boris-Johnsons-hydrogen-energy-plans.html

In the US, decisions are made by those who hold stock in companies that could be affected by those decisions. What could go wrong?

Hundreds of Energy Department Officials Hold Stocks Related to Agency’s Work Despite Warnings

also: Federal Report Favors Battery EVs Over Hydrogen
https://cars.usnews.com/cars-trucks/features/feds-favors-battery-evs-over-hydrogen

[NNadir]

1. Hydrogen is only slightly more stupid than batteries. The idea that storing energy is "green" is pernicious bullshit.

The issue is primary energy which is increasingly provided by dangerous fossil fuels.

The laws of thermodynamics are not subject to slick marketing. Making hydrogen, in all cases, destroys exergy.

In the case of hydrogen, it has been so since 1976, not that this prevents the fossil fuel industry from promoting hydrogen, to a credulous scientifically illiterate set of people, as "green."

Hydrogen stations are an obscenity, in the same class as carbon sequestration, and, for that matter, wind and solar energy, all of which have had no effect on the collapse of the planetary atmosphere other than to make it worse.

[thought crime]

2. Obviously, hydrogen produced from fossil fuel energy is not "green".

Hydrogen produced from wind/solar can be green, if the total energy involved in building and operating and eventually decommissioning the production site is net positive.

The potential for "Power-to-X" (P2X) of wind/solar is that "fuel extraction" and processing is relatively green (no destructive fracking, oilspills, radioactive or toxic mine tailings, pipeline leaks, etc). Likewise, there is much less climate destroying waste product as in fossil fuel, or dangerous-forever toxic waste as in nuclear.

The environmental costs of fossil fuels are unacceptable.

The overall social, economic costs and environmental risks (including waste handing, effectively forever) of nuclear are high and in some countries, prohibitive.

The social and economic costs of alternative energy are high, but the potential may exceed costs, as shown by the growth of use and the tremendous increase of innovation in alternative energy around the world. Combined with existing technology of the offshore industry, alternative energy has a viable path to very large scale use.

[NNadir]

3. I am really, tired, as we just passed 430 ppm of concentrations CO2, of the substitution of the word "could" for "is."

Last edited Sat Jun 7, 2025, 07:48 AM - Edit history (1)

Wind and solar energy are not green, and not sustainable because of their grotesque material and land demands. Making the already unacceptable material, financial and land demands worse by claiming that this reactionary and useless form of expensive energy worse by pretending the second of law of thermodynamics is without consequence is a horrible fantasy.

There are not enough minerals on this planet to support this fantasy of returning for our energy supplies to dependence on the weather at the precise time we have destroyed the stability of the weather. We do have antinuke morons publishing - incredibly in major scientific journals - that the solution to try to ameliorate the awful environmental demands of so called "renewable energy" is to tear the shit out of the ocean floor to get "critical minerals:"

Sustainable minerals and metals for a low-carbon future

Subtitle:

Policy coordination is needed for global supply chains.

Appalling bullshit, that.

We have already a developing understanding of this failed enterprise - with the awful result that people foolishly believe in batteries and hydrogen as if they will address climate issues - and its destructive impact on terrestrial species, which will only get worse:

Impact of So Called "Renewable Energy" on Biodiversity (Not That We Really Care).

We are already tearing the shit out of the benthic ecosystem for the useless enterprise of offshore wind energy, spewing all kinds of polymers, metals, and other garbage, fed and maintained by diesel powered barges, for crap that will be landfill (or seafloor garbage) in less than 20 years. We''ve industrialized vast areas of wilderness for this failed, multitrillion dollar scheme. Now we're going to tear the shit out of the ocean floor because tiresome fools like Benny Sovacool are afraid that someone somewhere might die from exposure to trace radiation?

I'm an old man. When I was young and stupid and poorly educated half a century ago, I thought solar hydrogen was a good clean idea. I grew up and took the time and effort and trouble to educate myself. I've been listening to this bullshit for half a century.

Right now, not in some vast amorphous could be so called "renewable energy" universe, a putative so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here, and won't come, hydrogen is overwhelmingly made from dangerous fossil fuels with exergy destruction, a thermodynamic, and thus environmental, nightmare. It is an essential captive industrial reagent for the manufacture of ammonia, on which the world food supplies depend. Rather than childish bourgeois toys like hydrogen cars, hydrogen trucks, hydrogen lawn mowers, and hydrogen kitchen blenders, we ought to see if we can make industrial hydrogen sustainable. It is possible to do this I think, using process intensification with nuclear heat, feasible, but tearing the shit out of the ocean floor doesn't cut it.

A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

It's a little too late however to save much of what is left to save, or even less likely, to restore what can be restored. The planet is in flames. We will hit 500 ppm of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the 2040's. There will be hell to pay.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

Have a nice weekend.

[thought crime]

4. You are maximizing costs of wind/solar and minimizing costs and risks of nuclear.

In the US, Nuclear is the ultimate could be, or rather, could have been.

Wind/solar are available now. In China a floating offshore wind turbine is producing hydrogen with "raw" (undistilled) seawater.

But I anxiously await the success of Fusion. It could be the best solution.

[NNadir]

6. Nuclear energy vastly out produces, in units of energy (Exajoules) the combined trillion dollar solar and wind garbage.

Wind and solar are not "available now."

They are trivial and useless forms of energy, soaking up trillions of dollars for no tangible result.

The United States remains the world's largest provider of nuclear energy, relying on reactors built in the 20th century by engineers lacking access to modern computational power. The willful destruction of US nuclear manufacturing by people who, as I often describe them, "arsonists complaining about forest fires" was a crime against all future generations.

The nuclear industry produced in a climate of mindless criticism and attacks, 30 EJ of primary energy in 2023, whereas the useless solar and wind affectation combined, produced just 16 EJ of primary energy, all of it dependent largely on access to dangerous fossil fuels. They can't even keep up with the growth of dangerous fossil fuels.

I have never met an antinuke who can tell the difference between 16 and 30:



IEA World Energy Outlook 2024
Table A.1a: World energy supply Page 296.

Advocates of so called "renewable energy," have never given a flying fuck about fossil fuels. Their entire goal has been to attack nuclear energy relying on specious and ignorant criteria.

Their indifference, moral and intellectual, to sustainability killed people, in vast numbers, since nuclear energy saves lives:

Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power (Pushker A. Kharecha* and James E. Hansen Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895)

Nuclear energy need not be risk free to be vastly superior to all other forms of energy. It only needs to be vastly superior, which it is.

[thought crime]

8. Your chart shows energy output from wind/solar growing.

"The nuclear industry produced in a climate of mindless criticism and attacks, 30 EJ of primary energy in 2023, whereas the useless solar and wind affectation combined, produced just 16 EJ of primary energy"

But your chart shows wind/solar surpassing the output of nuclear by 2030, and eventually surpassing coal. I think the potential is greater than that, because costs are coming down and the industry is gaining momentum, although Trump is fighting it in this country.

Doesn't seem useless to me.

[OKIsItJustMe]

9. OMG Table A.1a again

Have you read the rest of the report?

Start with table B.4a:


Here’s an edited version of the table, showing the figures of the most interest:

[NNadir]

10. Oh my fucking Gawd!!!!! Denial and soothsaying AGAIN! I've been listening to soothsaying about...

...energy my entire fucking adult life, and I'm hardly young. My contempt for soothsaying is based on something called "experience."

The results are in, not that the soothsaying squad gives a flying fuck about DATA.

This, like the IEA report on the the busbar costs today, in fucking 2025, of the cost of electricity in that coal dependent hellhole Germany, $76.29/MWh (USD), compared to the same cost in France, $23.55/MWh. (USD), DATA , not soothsaying:

Week beginning on June 01, 2025: 430.05 ppm
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 427.20 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 403.37 ppm
Last updated: June 07, 2025

Weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa

I produce this DATA again and again, not that there are all that many people who give a shit, most recently here:

New Weekly CO2 Concentration Record Set at the Mauna Loa Observatory, 430.86 ppm

This DATA comes decades into start, in the 1990's, of the endless and tiresome the antinuke soothsaying about the grand so called "renewable energy" miracle that is did not come, is not here, and won't come, no matter how many crystal balls are pulled out and worshipped. Understanding this requires something called "critical thinking," something at which antinukes are not particularly experienced at exercising.

Now of course, contempt for data that doesn't sink in no matter how many times it's presented, does not invalidate it through whining about its repetition. I do recognize that no matter how times its presented it won't get through thick heads, but listen, I've been experiencing the thick heads of antinukes for many decades, even before the world starting burning because of their obtuse obsessions.

I really, really, really don't give a flying fuck about soothsaying, particularly about economics from people who detach the costs of extreme global heating from the cost of energy production. I leave that for the fossil fuel airheads, including advertisers who come here to greenwash fossil fuels as "hydrogen." I include external costs.

I respect the IEA's accumulation of data, but as a person who has been reading the IEA's WEO for decades, way back in in the 1990's, when the grotesque failure of so called "renewable energy" to do anything about the appalling DATA reported at Mauna Loa this morning was not predicted by all the soothsaying therein, I have no use for the IEA predictions, any more than I have use for the soothsaying in 1976 by the moron Amory Lovins about how we could all have solar molten salt tanks in our backyard.

Article | 1976
Energy Strategy: The Road Not Taken?
By Amory Lovins

The guy, typical for a soothsaying antinuke, has such a low sense of self respect that he actually posts a link to this garbage on his website. Of course, if one wants to read it on his website, you have to fill out a form so he can ask you for money, but I downloaded this mindless bullshit decades ago from the original source in the social science journal Foreign Affairs. A soothsaying excerpt:

Energy storage is often said to be a major problem of energy-income technologies. But this ''problem" is largely an artifact of trying to recentralize, upgrade and redistribute inherently diffuse energy flows. Directly storing sunlight or wind—or, for that matter, electricity from any source— is indeed difficult on a large scale. But it is easy if done on a scale and in an energy quality matched to most end-use needs. Daily, even seasonal, storage of low- and medium-temperature heat at the point of use is straightforward with water tanks, rock beds, or perhaps fusible salts. Neighborhood heat storage is even cheaper. In industry, wind-generated compressed air can easily (and, with due care, safely) be stored to operate machinery: the technology is simple, cheap, reliable and highly developed.

"...perhaps fusible salts..."

What an asshole!

In 1976, when this bullshit came out, in October of that year, the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere (the week beginning October 3, 1976) was 328.46 ppm. I don't have much hope for people complaining about nuclear energy to do simple math, even like addition and subtraction, but the reading this morning was 101.59 ppm higher than that value recorded nearly 50 years ago.

Now, complaining about the repetition of data from the Mauna Loa Observatory will not make it go away. It appears that soothsaying in 1976, by a shit for brains self declared "scientist" didn't prevent this outcome either.

I'd love to hear from anyone who knows someone with a "fused salt" solar storage tank in 2025 in his fucking bourgeois suburban backyard.

I'm not a fucking mindless mystic pretending to give a rat's ass about the writings of say, Jim Hansen and Pushkar Kharecha, to moan about the extreme global heating now observed, clearly without having a shred of insight to the problem they discuss or into the other work of those respected scientists laboring to change the world up until their dying breath.

I'm not a clone of the orange slime mold in the White House, claiming that data isn't real or that repeating the data makes it unreal, that is lying.

Instead I'm the father of a developing nuclear engineer, of whom I am extremely proud, who clearly doesn't give a fuck about the stupid penny pinching whining of bourgeois antinuke soothsayers. He's not sitting on his ass buying into dubious predictions using bourgeois selective attention to pennies. He's doing the work, not to lazily embrace bourgeois credulity, but rather to make the world in which he, and all future humanity will need to live, a safe and sustainable world.

I can write him about the approach to the fast fission of americium because he's, um, educated and because he is interested in building a future, rather than predicting one.

He knows, as I know, that nuclear plants can last for periods close to a century, which effects their economics measured over periods of well over half a century, and he believes, as I believe that whining about nickels and dimes because one does not have the moral (or intellectual) depth to invest in future generations out of a sense of something called "decency," is well, to use a truism, indecent. He's not a cheapskate wanting to rob future generations by worshipping wind and solar junk that will be landfill before todays newborns finish college. He wants to leave something for children born in the 22nd century, when both he, and I, and all the shit for brains antinukes moaning and pissing about pennies here and now, in 2025, in a burning world, will be dead.

Got it?

No?

Why am I not surprised?

Have a nice weekend.

[NNadir]

5. Oh, and by the way, I always hear this bullshit about so called "nuclear waste" from people defending the indefensible.

In response, I remind people so carrying on with their deadly selective attention, that 19,000 people die every day from fossil fuel waste.

Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.

Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:

The top five risks for attributable deaths for females were high SBP (5·25 million [95% UI 4·49–6·00] deaths, or 20·3% [17·5–22·9] of all female deaths in 2019), dietary risks (3·48 million [2·78–4·37] deaths, or 13·5% [10·8–16·7] of all female deaths in 2019), high FPG (3·09 million [2·40–3·98] deaths, or 11·9% [9·4–15·3] of all female deaths in 2019), air pollution (2·92 million [2·53–3·33] deaths or 11·3% [10·0–12·6] of all female deaths in 2019), and high BMI (2·54 million [1·68–3·56] deaths or 9·8% [6·5–13·7] of all female deaths in 2019). For males, the top five risks differed slightly. In 2019, the leading Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths globally in males was tobacco (smoked, second-hand, and chewing), which accounted for 6·56 million (95% UI 6·02–7·10) deaths (21·4% [20·5–22·3] of all male deaths in 2019), followed by high SBP, which accounted for 5·60 million (4·90–6·29) deaths (18·2% [16·2–20·1] of all male deaths in 2019). The third largest Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths among males in 2019 was dietary risks (4·47 million [3·65–5·45] deaths, or 14·6% [12·0–17·6] of all male deaths in 2019) followed by air pollution (ambient particulate matter and ambient ozone pollution, accounting for 3·75 million [3·31–4·24] deaths (12·2% [11·0–13·4] of all male deaths in 2019), and then high FPG (3·14 million [2·70–4·34] deaths, or 11·1% [8·9–14·1] of all male deaths in 2019).

I then ask them to show - insisting that only reference to the acceptable primary scientific literature - that in the now 70 year history of commercial nuclear power, that the storage of used nuclear fuel for that period has killed as many people as will die in the next 8 hours from air pollution. That would be a little over 6 thousand people.

I never get an answer, although I often get the subject changed with really, really oblivious rhetoric.

The economics of nuclear power, given that nuclear reactors are designed to run for 80 years, is obviated by the simple comparison of numbers. One does not even need to compare the economic costs of the destruction of the planetary atmosphere about which bourgeois antinukes couldn't care less, to see the cost to poor people of antinukism. The real time numbers are readily available to anyone who looks, as I pointed out here:

So much for "Nuclear Energy Is Too Expensive."

Used nuclear fuel is a valuable resource for all future generations, particularly because it contains plutonium with an acceptable isotopic vector. I argue that all of the fission products are valuable materials.

As for this bullshit about "forever," it's garbage from people who have a limited understanding of mathematics, since fission products, and indeed actinides, are subject to secular equilibrium defined by the Bateman equation.



By reference to this equation one can easily establish that unlike the mercury and lead released by fossil fuel combustion, as well, of course, the carbon dioxide, about which antinukes also couldn't care less (they're burning coal in antinuke Germany) that nuclear materials can only accumulate to a maxima to a point at which they are being destroyed at the same rate as they are formed.

It can be shown, as I have referenced here, 828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels that nuclear power has the possibly less than desirable outcome of reducing the natural radioactivity of the planet:

The following figure shows the very different case obtained if one separates the uranium, plutonium and minor actinides (neptunium, americium and curium) and fissions them, whereupon the reduction of radioactivity to a level that is actually below that of the original uranium in a little over 300 years:



The caption:

Fig. 4. – Radiotoxicity (log-scale, unit: Sv/tSM) of 1 t of heavy metal (SM) from a pressurized water reactor (initial enrichment 4.2% U-235, burn-up 50 GWd/t) with regard to ingestion as a function of time (log-scale, unit: years) after discharge. Left-hand frame: contribution of fission products (FP), plutonium (Pu) and minor actinides (MA) to radiotoxicity. Right-hand frame: Modification of radiotoxicity due to separation of U, Pu or U, Pu, MA. The reference value is the radiotoxicity of the amount of natural uranium that was used to produce 1 t of nuclear fuel. Source: [17].

(Hartwig Freiesleben, The European Physical Journal Conferences · June 2013)

Source 17, in German, is this one: Reduzierung der Radiotoxizität abgebrannter Kernbrennstoffe durch Abtrennung und Transmutation von Actiniden: Partitioning. Reducing spent nuclear fuel radiotoxicity by actinide separation and transmutation: partitioning.

It is important to note that simply because a material is radioactive does not imply that it is not useful, perhaps even capable of accomplishing tasks that nothing else can do as well or as sustainably. Given the level of chemical pollution of the air, water and land, in fact, the use of radiation, in particular high energy radiation, gamma rays, x-rays, and ultra UV radiation may prove to be more important than ever, but that's a topic for another time.

Antinuke rhetoric and selective attention is fucking killing the planet. It's burning up. It is not only scientifically illiterate, it is, perhaps more importantly, morally abhorrent.

Have a nice day.

[thought crime]

7. In my experience, most people advocating alternative energy are not defending the indefensible.

I prefer wind/solar because it does not produce fossil fuel toxins/carbon or radioactive waste, and is economically viable, now.

I would not call myself an "anti-nuke", but I do know there is a record of mismanagement of radioactive material. Very strict regulation is necessary at every step of the cycle, and that drives cost. Relaxing regulation increases the probability of contamination.