Last night I listened to the Art Bell show, with Ian Punnett interviewing a guy (Harry Braun, apparently) about hydrogen fuel. It was interesting.
The oil and car companies are actually behind this and some other alternative energy sources. BMW is making a car using hydrogen in its internal combustion engine, which is the way to go, according to the guy: better than fuel cells, hydrogen is still safe. Harry made the argument that Saudi Arabia isn't worried about alternative energy because of two things they have that, eg, the UK doesn't: sun and space, for things like solar generation.
The memorable safety arguments were that only 35 people died in the Hindenberg accident, 33 of whom died because they jumped out, and neither of the other two were burned by burning hydrogen; that researchers at some CA university tried to make a hydrogen tank explode, to the point of firing incindiary bullets at the thing, and they still needed a high-speed camera to catch any flames; and the appeal to apparent sense that hydrogen, being lighter than air, isn't going to stay around very long to burn you anyway.
Another safety issue was the recently revealed hydrogen bomb off the coast of Georgia, and how these prototype hydrogen fuel engines aren't potential hydrogen bombs. Harry, though, called the process in the bomb (that of joining the nuclei of two hydrogen atoms to make a helium isotope) fission--which is the reverse, the process performed on large uranium atoms to eventually make lead.
Harry also seemed a bit enthusiastic about this process of making energy out of nothing. One caller, admittedly not knowing much of the physics, asked if that meant they were turning mass into energy; Harry gave a cogent answer about the process actually using energy to make the hydrogen, then releasing it in the engine, but his entire discussion seemed to be less about using hydrogen as a transportable form of energy than as a real replacement for dilithium crystals. This kind of stealing from one part of a system to feed our need is worrisome, since that's what usually gets us in trouble environmentally, though upsetting the water cycle with this would be even more arcane than wreaking havoc with the weather by harvesting too much wind power.
Even though it did come across as kind of an infomercial, what with even his negatives being positives
as Ian said something like, it was convincing. I want one. Where do I queue?
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use pulsed resonant freq of hydrogen to break covalent bond in h2o uses little energy compared to electrolis to create hydrogen fuel there is no need to use oil other than for petro chemical