Post by gregory on Aug 7, 2007 1:07:38 GMT -5
sonny said:
You know one of the reasons why they won't allow hydrogen powered cars is because they're afraid of people tampering with it and creating a speeding weapon.Imagine, rush hour on a hot NYC day. You're in the middle of 125th street, scare for your safety as it is. All of a sudden in your left mirror you see someone in a Ford Mustang going about 90 mph. You have no place to go. You're 30 cars from the front, as far as you can see, and at least 15 from the back. You could run. Yes you run. But BAM! The Mustang hits the car in the back. That tampered fuel cell car goes off, within split seconds all the cars within the blast radius go off. Those within their blast radius goes off. The blast radius goes over the Brooklyn Bridge, over the Verrazano Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel, everything just going and going and going. It goes into Yonkers, it goes into Newark, it rips right into New Jersey, to Trenton, into Philidelphia, it moves down and hits Maryland, west into Cleveland, Detroit, it's just bad all over.
That is why we don't have fuel celled cars. We could make them as safe as possible but if some terrorist wanted to tamper with it he could.
Do you have any idea how coolly hydrogen burns? You might burn off the eyebrows of people nearby, but the explosive chain reaction you describe isn't plausible because the heat isn't going to be intense enough to expose other cars' fuel supply to the fire, and those fuel cells aren't exactly open to the air.
Try it, some time - make some hydrogen (most junior chemistry books can show you how) and light it on fire. There's a pop, a flash, and then nothing - sorry, no Earth-shattering kaboom. The main reason the Hindenburg disaster killed people is because the hydrogen that caught on fire was the only thing keeping the blimp from falling out of the sky. You could achieve much the same effect by, say, tearing the wings off a plane while it's flying.
Tamper away. You can cause a lot more trouble with gasoline with a lot less tampering - gas, a rag, and a bottle, for example, or gas and styrofoam (which, as I understand it, produces a crude napalm-like material). As an added bonus, gasoline is poisonous, floats on water (making it more difficult to extinguish), and is easy to store.
I'm certainly not advocating such misuses of gasoline, nor am I some righteous defender of hydrogen fuel cells. But there are reasonable arguments for a position and unreasonable ones, and it's vitally important not to confuse the two.
Caveat here: I haven't studied chemistry in more than a decade. Hydrogen might behave differently under high pressure than my experience with low densities of the gas have led me to believe.