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Comment by Amarok | Hacker News Reader

Ideally the future is nuclear fission transitioning to fusion, with hydrogen fuel cell vehicles.

Lithium battery production and recycling is still very damaging to the environment, even if it stopped relying on coal for energy[1][2].

Hydrogen vehicles also have a longer lifespan and range compared to electric vehicles, while needing less time to refuel[3]. Now if only we invested as much in hydrogen harvesting technology as we are investing in lithium batteries.

[1]https://amp.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/aug/24...

[2]https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/11/battery-batteries-ele...

[3]https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/hydrogen-fu...

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"Ideally the future"

When, how ?

Yes ideally the future can have magical technologies that will solve humanity problems. We had this magical "nuclear" thing in the sixties. Today a huge majority of electricity worldwide is produced by coal, oil and gaz.

Hydrogen is a no go, you're loosing 70% into transforming electricity to hydrogen and back to electricity. And no you cannot simply "throw money at it" to turn 70% into 5%.

This is just plain desinformación, hydrogen has an efficiency of 70%, which means a loss of 30%, and yes this figure is improving by "throwing money at it"

For cars ?

https://insideevs.com/news/332584/efficiency-compared-batter...

Battery-Electric 73%, Hydrogen 22%

This article is 2 years old and rather misleading. The battery electric vehicle itself is much less efficient than both the fuel cell electric and conventional vehicles. This is because of the weight of the batteries that need to be transported. If you also take into account the energy used to produce the vehicles, in particular, the batteries, the BEV becomes the least efficient of the 3. It also doesn't account for on site hydrogen production and PEM or Alkaline technologies, which reduce the losses in transport, production and compression for an 86% efficiency.

I am sorry you are so misinformed.

Lithium is a common abundant resource and battery packs are easily recycled but more importantly there is a financial incentive to do so.

Manufacturing technology for cells is improving rapidly. Much faster than the pace of innovation in Hydrogen fuel cells. Most are focusing on reducing Cobalt and other techniques to reduce or eliminate chemicals and energy used in wet electrode processes.

Hydrogen is pretty much DOA for cars. This is a good video on the subject: https://youtu.be/f7MzFfuNOtY

"common abundant"

> Even though 365 years of reserve supply sounds very comforting, the point of the EV and stationary storage revolutions is that current demand will shoot up, way up, if these revolutions do happen. The 100 Gigafactories scenario could come true. And if that happens, the 365-year supply would be less than a 17-year supply (13.5 million tons of reserves divided by 800,000 = 16.9 years).

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/is-there-enough...

Is 17 years "common and abundant" ?

> But very little recycling goes on today. In Australia, for example, only 2–3% of Li-ion batteries are collected and sent offshore for recycling, according to Naomi J. Boxall, an environmental scientist at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). The recycling rates in the European Union and the US—less than 5%—aren’t much higher.

https://cen.acs.org/materials/energy-storage/time-serious-re...

Perhaps lithium battery manufacture is improving rapidly because we're investing more on it.

And your video has one huge logical fallacy "assuming energy comes only from Green and renewable sources" If that's the case then hydrogen is the most environmentally friendly choice even with the loss of energy, which is also improving.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_recycling#Lithium_ion_...

Li-ion batteries are very poorly recycled if at all. There is poor financial incentive to recycle batteries, and in fact you lose more money than you get back for many components.

Pace of hydrogen fuel cell innovation is moving at warp speed: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/news/fuel-cell-powertrains-...

We could see FCEVs no more expensive than ICEVs.

> Hydrogen is pretty much DOA for cars. This is a good video on the subject: https://youtu.be/f7MzFfuNOtY

It's a nonsense youtube video, citing claims that are a decade out of date.

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