Comment on China tests world's first megawatt-class flying wind turbine

oyzmo@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

• Blade9732@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Wouldn’t hydrogen be better for lifting something like a wind turbine.

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  • oyzmo@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yes, but I think hydrogen likes to go bang 😆

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    • bus_factor@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      No worries, that only happens if there’s a spark, like for instance some static electricity. Shouldn’t be a problem here, surely this thing won’t generate any of that.

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      • kbobabob@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Wouldn’t this still need to be tethered to the ground? Would that likely have grounding cables?

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    • paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Image

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      • porcoesphino@mander.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        “Skytanic” was a great episode of Archer. For anyone that hasn’t seen it, the running gag is that Archer thinks the non-flammable helium is going to explode leading to things like this slap

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  • GreenShimada@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Not necessarily. It’s not about the boom factor alone - hydrogen is a small atom, and so under pressure, most commonly used materials are permeable to it. It leaks through every material. It really takes something as solid as steel pipes for hydrogen atoms to not work their way through and escape. So while hydrogen would be cheaper to produce at scale, it’s also constantly leaking out of any container.

    For wind turbines, static electricity and storms would be huge risks as well, so the application of a floating wind turbine would not be ideal.

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    • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Even with steel pipes you get problems with hydrogen embrittlement because hydrogen diffuses into the steel and can cause it to crack.

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    • wewbull@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Helium does a pretty good job of that too.

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    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      If you’re producing electricity in it, you can always bring some water up and use some of that electricity to extract hydrogen from the water to make up for any leaks.

      It really depends how bad the leaking is since that dictates how much weight of water is needed to be brought up and electricity must be used for hydrolysis.

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  • ramenshaman@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Yeah, that’s what the folks who designed the Hindenburg thought as well.

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    • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      For an autonomous platform with some sort of safety mechanisms for jettisoning the air bag if a catastrophic failure occurs, hydrogen does in fact sound like a way better and less scarce lifting gas.

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    • Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Wasn’t the way the Hindenburg burned due to both the Hidrogen AND the alumium oxide paint covering it?

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    • WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Nah, it’s perfect!

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• BussyCat@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Helium may not be renewable but we can manufacture it from things like boron

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  • trolololol@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I need someone to explain the joke. Waiting 100,000 years for radioactive decay seems to be a bit boring as a punch line.

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    • sneezycat@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’ll be really funny in 100 000 years.

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    • BussyCat@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      It’s not a joke if you hit boron with a neutron it releases the energy in the form of an alpha particle which is just a helium atom.

      So take some boron-10 put it in a neutron flux and you get helium. This is being done in nearly every nuclear power plant in the world every second

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  • yakko@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I did not know that

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• recked_wralph@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Not once we get fusion reactors up and running, then we’ll be drowning in that sweet sweet helium-4

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  • jaennaet@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Not once we get fusion reactors up and running

    Yeah, about that…

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