Question: How safe is Hydrogen fuel?

Jamie Gallagher answered on 15 Jun 2011:

Yay, Welcome to my world! This is what my group works on, renewable energy.

Right now hydrogen fuel is not great. The gas is very dangerous. What we have to do is build something that will contain the gas no matter what happens. Sadly we have to assume that cars will crash- if this happens and the car is carrying hydrogen it would cause a huge explosion and be very dangerous.

Now there are hydrogen vehicals out there and they are not too bad. They are limited in how much hydrogen they can take each trip and a lot of the wieght is made up of protective material to ensure the gas can never escape. As these are available now I wont say they are too unsafe, but the technology is still not perfect.

What we work on up here is storing the hydrogen as a solid. We take some powders and fill up every little gap with hydrogen. This would be very safe if there was a crash as it would not explode it also take up a lot less space than the gas

So basically- hydrogen is far from perfect, in my opinion it is still more dangerous than petrol – but it has the very good advantage that it is clean! We will continue to make hydrogen safer and it will be more and more used over the next few decades.