Understand this: unbound hydrogen is energy expensive to produce. People pushing it either don't understand, or understand but don't want the public to understand that hydrogen is NOT an energy source. It's simply a storage medium for energy produced somewhere else.
Like battery technology, if you drop your objection to burning uranium, most of your environmental problems go away, and that has nothing to do with hydrogen. But as soon as you say nuclear power you might as well say black magic voodoo. Because when you say nuclear power, that's what the scientifically illiterate masses (and altogether too many mis-educated scientists) hear.
Doesn't mis-educated scientist qualify as an oxymoron, just like the left likes to use that word to mock military intelligence?
I think the article was very clear that hydrogen is not being used as an energy source in the processes described.
What makes hydrogen interesting is that, though it is energy expensive to produce, it compares reasonably well in energy density to other portable fuels. It is more energy dense than electricity from conventional batteries, for example. It is, though, not quite as good as gasoline, but it is not so much worse that performance of hydrogen-fueled vehicles could not be comparable to ICE engines.
Furthermore, even if the hydrogen produced by electrolysis provides only 1/2 of the energy employed to produce it, if electricity is cheap enough to generate then an important step toward economic use of hydrogen can be taken.
Look, I'm as cranky as anyone about hyperbolic liberal worries about "peak oil" and other thinly disguised misanthropy. Still, the possibility of an economical alternative to gasoline for vehicle fuels, an alternative that can be produced in abundance entirely domestically, is so important that it is worth investigating. It's interesting to see the progress being made on the hydrogen front.
Here's a link to Shell's hydrogen page with some interesting information:
http://www.shell.com/home/Framework?siteId=hydrogen-en
*I* agree with your point binding acceptance of nuclear power and hydrogen (production). Subsequent posters seem to get stuck on hydrogen to the point of failing to acknowlege the difficulties in storage and transport, to the point of 'energy equal to equal amount of gasoline'.
Just this little bump of ignorance and so many problems are solved.
IIRC, what is now called "Magnetic Resonance Imaging" ("MRI") was originally (and accurately) known as Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging". The simple use of the word, "Nuclear" caused the brainwashed populace to shun the technique -- until the name was changed...
Now tell me that our public schools are doing their job properly...
The idiocracy waould probably panic themselves into imagining they were dying of cancer if they learned that every cell in their bodies has a "nucleus"...
Well said, Fred.
"the plan requires the building of a new kind of nuclear reactor"
Might as well be "the plan requires squirting lemon juice in the eyes of 9/11 orphans."