Picture a perfect white sand beach with warm ocean water. Imagine a middle age lady hauling her beach
bag and a comfortable folding beach chair. She scours the beach for a perfect spot and
finds what she thinks is the best location about twenty feet from a rocky jetty
and thirty feet from the tide line.
She sets up her chair, lays out her beach towel, decants a
glass a chardonnay into her plastic wine glass and sits in a slightly reclined
position starting to sip her chilled glass of wine. Enjoying the wine she thinks it is time for a
cigarette. She pulls out a Marlborough Light
and lights up her cig. Suddenly there is
a kaboom and she is flung from her chair onto the rocky jetty 20 feet
away. She is injured and needs hospital
treatment but survives.
Is this Tunisia and a terrorist act? No this is Rhode Island and not a terrorist
act. This actually happened and happened
by accident. Many years before she sat
on the beach the US Coast Guard had laid copper cables on the beach and had abandoned
the cable. Over the years the insulation
on the cable wore away and the seawater corroded the copper. A resulting chemical of the corrosion reaction
is hydrogen. The hydrogen got trapped in
pockets under the beach surface.
The lady had perfect timing of lighting the cigarette and
disturbing the beach sand to ignite a pocket of hydrogen that had sufficient energy
to propel her like a human cannon ball into the rocky jetty. Hydrogen has a very wide flammability range
in air (4% to 75%) but needs a spark to ignite.
Here is the fox news article on her story
I wrote a textbook on hydrogen (Hydrogen – Hope or Hype?)
and never ever conceived that an accident like this could happen. As part of my work I investigated a fire in a
semiconductor manufacturing facility where an incompetent contractor switched
hydrogen for nitrogen and helped cause a billion dollars of insurance loss
burning down the factory. Simply put
hydrogen goes kaboom pretty easily when there is a spark.
Just yesterday I read the US Department of Energy link below
to use hydrogen to store the energy of intermittent wind generated electric power.
The technical aspects of this are very simple. But the expense is enormous and it is
actually not competitive with simply storing the electricity in a lithium ion
battery. The DOE idea is kind of like
the Rube Greenberg idea that AC Transit wasted eighty seven million dollars on
for their few fuel cell buses. Here is
my blog on that.
My advice to folks going to the beach is that you don’t smoke
cigarettes, just enjoy the fresh air.
Also pick a spot high enough up the beach that remains dry during high
tide thereby preventing the buildup of pockets of hydrogen via the corrosion of
buried cables. Also make sure that the
Department Of Energy is not producing hydrogen from wind power anywhere close
to your favorite beach. Yeah life is a beach
and because of entropy shift happens. It
is the buried shift that will get you.
The Department of Energy is about 65 years behind times. I remember in the early 1950s Popular Mechanics had an issue about the up coming hydrogen economy. Fuel cells where around and we could run electric cars off them. Time showed this was impractical and now DOE is wasting more tax dollars on items proven impractical 50 years ago.
ReplyDeleteJames H. Rust, Professor
The department of entropy is lead by an idiot. I saw him on CNN
ReplyDelete