A Brief Note on the Toxicology Associated With Hydrogen Fuel Cells.
Intellectually, and morally, in my view, the hydrogen fuel fantasy should have been, and should be now, a non-starter, simply because of the laws of thermodynamics, notably the 2nd law. Like other "bait and switch" fantasies connected with diversion from the facts that fossil fuels can be rendered sustainable (or eliminated by wishful thinking) - including but not limited to sequestration, wind, and solar - the use of hydrogen fuels will make things worse, not better.
I laid out, in some detail, the facts connected with the nature of hydrogen as a front for the fossil fuel industry in a rather long post here: A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.
This is also laid out in the scientific literature in the case of China, to which fossil fuel salespeople and salesbots who write here and elsewhere often appeal here to rebrand fossil fuels as "hydrogen:"
Subsidizing Grid-Based Electrolytic Hydrogen Will Increase Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Coal Dominated Power Systems Liqun Peng, Yang Guo, Shangwei Liu, Gang He, and Denise L. Mauzerall Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (12), 5187-5195.
One of the "bait and switch" tactics used to greenwash fossil fuels by talking about hydrogen is to talk about hydrogen fuel cells for cars. Hydrogen fuel cells actually are commercial products occasionally used for back up power for things like cell phone towers, although they are hardly mainstream.
One of the major environmental risks garnering increasing attention, is the issue of PFAS - "per (and poly) fluorinated alkylate substances, so called "forever chemicals" - which are known to have profound toxicological profiles. I know, but I don't believe that most people know, that the issue of PFAS is very much connected with hydrogen fuel cells, and that the widespread use of these, for instance in cars, would make this already intractable problem far worse.
A paper on strategies to degrade these has appeared in the scientific literature in an open source paper that I came across in my general reading. It is here:
Oxidative Transformation of Nafion-Related Fluorinated Ether Sulfonates: Comparison with Legacy PFAS Structures and Opportunities of Acidic Persulfate Digestion for PFAS Precursor Analysis Zekun Liu, Bosen Jin, Dandan Rao, Michael J. Bentel, Tianchi Liu, Jinyu Gao, Yujie Men, and Jinyong Liu Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (14), 6415-6424
Again, the paper is open sourced, and will be generally arcane for people not familiar with scientific punctilios, but a relevant paragraph referring to fuel cells and the relationship to PFAS is this one:
Nafion, which is used in all commercial fuel cells, is the a fluoropolymer of PFAS compounds.
Two figures from the paper:
The caption:
The sulfate and hydroxide radicals in this pathway require energy to create. I regard oxidative radicals of this type as the best pathway for mineralizing (destroying) PFAS. The type of energy ideal for this purpose is ionizing radiation, high energy radiation in the UV to gamma range. The energy for doing this is best obtained from radioactive materials, the easiest access to which can be obtained from used nuclear fuels.
Have a pleasant Sunday.
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