How Hydrogen Fuel Works: Part Two

If you listen to our last episode, we talked all about the basic science behind hydrogen and as well as the early exploration of hydrogen by philosophers and proto scientists. Right because although it is the most abundant element in the universe, we don't find it, uh flying free very often and usually bonded up with stuff. So there was a long process of everyone trying to figure out exactly what it does and how to get it free, and yeah, what do you do with it then? Like, can do

anything useful? Or does it just set your hair on fire? I'm sure there were a lot of interesting laboratory incidents. Is that what happened to your hair? Let's not go into my lex luthor like past, because then my my

nemesis will learn too many of my weaknesses. So so we left off around the eighteen hundreds, eighteen twenties specifically, and we were coming up on eighteen thirty nine is our next day on our timeline, wherein Sir William Grove invented what was essentially the first fuel cell, although he didn't call it that. It was called a gas voltaic battery.

Based on what he knew about electrolysis, which is the process where you apply electricity to water and separate it into its constituent elements, being hydrogen and oxygen, he hypothesized that you could go the opposite way, that you could combine hydrogen oxygen gases to create an electric current plus water. Yep, that's which is exactly the very basis of fuel cells. And we'll talk a lot more about fuel cells as well.

And then we get to the eighteen sixties and eighteen seventies, and that's when a certain in a auto O T T O. He's the guy who created the first four stroke combustion cycle. We actually call it the auto cycle. Use synthetic gas for fuel. Now, it's believed, it's not fully documented, but believe that this gas was at least hydrogen, probably more than that. Now. He reportedly also experiment with gasoline, but he dismissed it because he felt it was too

dangerous to work with. This is coming from the guy who's using hydrogen. Oh, I get gasoline is scary. Well, to be fair, they had not yet invented the carburetor, and the carburetor is what makes gasoline really a useful fuel for engines. I'll talk a little bit about that in a second. And it's really the only thing holding back Michael Bay. Yes, exactly. If you listen to our last episode, you'll realize that Michael Bay being allowed to make cars is a terrible, terrible mistake that we cannot

allow hat to happen. Also, movies, he shouldn't be allowed to do those either, so neither prep. The four stroke combustion cycle is what most cars today are based on. So if you listen to our last episode, you heard me talk about the vacuum based engine where it creates It creates this expanding gas, and as the gas cools and is released, it creates a vacuum which pulls the piston that allows you to do work. Yeah, it's it's

not that practical, but this one was very practical. And this one involves pushing rather than pulling, So the for the whole thing. You have a piston that is uh inside a chamber. Right, you have a combustion chamber. The piston can be all the way in the chamber, in which case it's closed off, or it could be all the way up to the very other end of the chamber where it's all open, so you've got an open space there. The other end of that piston is attached

to a crank that can rotate. So when the crank is in the upward position, the pistons pushed all the way in. When the crank is in the downward position, the pistons pulled all the way out, and as it rotates, the piston can move in and out. So here's how this four stroke combustion cycle works. You have four different phases. You have the intake. Now this stage, the piston, which is attached to that crank is at the top of the cylinder and intake valve opens and this inserts a

mixture of fuel and air into the cylinder. That crank turns and the piston moves down, so you start getting this chamber filled with this mixture of air and fuel. Next, you have the compression stage. This is where the valve shuts off, so it can't it's not bringing in any gas, it can't let any gas out. But the crank continues to turn, pushing the piston up, and that compresses the mixture of fuel and air exactly, so you know you've got this very compact gas, this mix of fuel and

air together. This, by the way, is the same for hydrogen based combustion engines as well as gasoline based, same same principle. So you've got this compressed mixture of air and gas. Then you have the combustion phase. This is where you get a spark and that ignites that fuel and air mixture, which then rapidly expands essentially explodes. Okay, so you've got this explosion which then pushes against the

piston that drives it downward, turning the crank. Then you have an exhaust phase, where an exhaust valve opens up and all that exhausted air and fuel mixture gets vented out while the piston starts to move back up, and then you start all over. So once you get this going, it just keeps moving that crank around, and that's where you get the power to do stuff like move your wheels. So, uh, you know, engines have various different numbers of cylinders. You've

probably heard things like V eight. That's that's the configuration of cylinders and the number of cylinders there are. Technically, the more cylinders you have, the more power you're generating. Up to about twelve cylinders. At that point you kind of start getting into a wash. You have a diminishing the law of diminishing returns, that kind of thing. But this is the basis, and this is what made internal

combustion engines useful. Before that, you had external combustion engines, which you know, first you would think that makes it sound like there's gonna be all these explosion is everywhere, But no, we're talking things like steam engines stuff like that, where you actually had open flame boiling up steam so that you could generate this this same sort of power because you know, the steam would push pistons too. We talked all about that. It's pretty much that's the way

of the world, speaking of steam. Our friend Jules Verne, Wow, eighteen seventy four. Yeah, Jules Verne, so the the famed writer, the one of the earliest in I don't know if you call it science fiction of that era, but it's certainly the precursor to modern science fiction and what a lot of stuff like steampunk is based upon. So Jules Verne wrote in The Mysterious Island a prediction. Now, granted, this is a prediction within the context of a work

of fiction. I say that because as a Shakespearean I get really irritated people who attribute a quote to Shakespeare when really it's one of Shakespeare's characters. But anyway, so what he said in The Mysterious Island was that one day water itself would be whyly used as fuel by breaking it down into hydrogen and oxygen. So it was a very you know, futuristic kind of of of vision he had, but also a realistic one. It wasn't one outside the realm of possibility. Oh yeah, sure, and it was.

It was almost thirty years after Sir William Grove had had made those those hypotheses and improved them about the opposition of electrolysis. Yeah. Yeah, So it was an interesting science thing that he picked up on, and it's now seeping into the public consciousness because now you've got it popularized by fiction as well as in the scientific literature. Uh. In the eighteen seventies, and eighteen eighties, you had several engineers working independently and they all came up with this

idea for the carburetor. The reason why I have it worded this way is because if you ask people who invented the carburetor, you get into a lot of flame wars, not literally, the figurative kind of flame war. Well that's good, I'm I'm glad. I would hope they don't battle it out with flamethrowers or something. I actually kind of hope that just make me a bad person. I'm not going to comment one we're or the other for fear of

you turning a flamethrower on me. So yeah, this, uh, this is where you know, depending upon whom you ask, you get a lot of different answers about who actually invented the carburetor. But the carburetor's purpose is to mix together gasoline with air to run an engine safely and efficiently. Now, this invention made gasoline powered UH internal combustion engines possible, It made it made them practical. So because of this attention starts to shift away from hydrogen and towards gasoline.

Because gasoline was easier to come by, UH, you could uh, use it as a fuel now with this way instead of trying to just use pure gasoline. So, uh, that's kind of why the hydrogen based car, I would say, I would argue, this is the big reason why the hydrogen based car didn't become the car like this, It didn't become the way we used vehicles and why gasoline

ended up taking over. So eight nine we have Ludwig Mond and Car Longer who actually coined the term fuel cell, and their version used cold gas and air as the fuel. So we've talked to a couple of times mentioned fuel cells like twice already in this podcast. Yeah, so let's talk a little bit about how they work. Yeah, So basic idea is that you've got two compartments, two chambers and into one. This is this is for a hydrogen based fuel cell, which is what most of the fuel

cells we talk about are. You put in one chamber hydrogen pure hydrogen. You put in the other chamber pure oxygen between the two. Yeah, yes, ideally you could meddle with this, but then the byproducts you get afterward are more than what a pure hydrogen based fuel cell would do. So then you put between the two a semi permeable membrane that's coated with a catalyst, and a catalyst is essentially something that makes other stuff happen or makes it

happen more easily. Now the hydrogen uh cannot pass through the semiperbiable membrane unaltered. The only way it's going to be allowed to get into the party with all of its oxygen buddies is to shed a pesky electron. And if you remember from our last podcast, what's the hydrogen atom. It's a proton and electron, So that's it. So you want to get hydrogen ions, they have to ditch their electron buddies and then they get on across the semi

permeable membrane. They're fine, they can go join their oxygen buddies. All those electrons start to build up. They don't like each other, okay, they're all negatively charged, their negative nancy's. They don't want to be there. They want to get out of that and head over to the other side of the party, where at least there's some tolerable have elements and ions hanging out and not all these just electron jerks. So if you create a pathway from the

hydrogen side to the oxygen side. Then they're going to take it because now they've got a way to get away from all these other jerks. And if you force them to do a little bit of work along the way, yeah, then they're like, you know, I don't like doing this work, but I'm totally gonna do it if it means I want to get into that party. Uh So this sounds like and you know what happens when you put a battery in a circuit. That's essentially what we're talking about here.

We're talking about creating a circuit, a pathway for electrons to follow to go from an area of negative concentration to an area where there are positive holes that's what we usually call them, for the electrons to fill. So we create this this pathway, the electrons from the hydrogen side will go through it, do work, enter in on the oxygen side where the hydrogen ions already are start

to recombine with these things, which then forms water. So the output you get from your typical hydrogen oxygen fuel cell, assuming you're using pure hydrogen and pure oxygen, is electricity, water and heat. That's it. Fantastic technology. There are some there's some drawbacks. One of the big ones is that the materials tend to be really expensive. The catalysts tend to be things like platinum, which, don't know, if you've priced it recently, it's yeah, yeah, it's a little on

the deer side. Now we're talking about nanoparticles of platinum, so a little goes a long way. But still it's really expensive, and it's expensive to separate hydrogen out from anything that it is connected to. Right, you could say, well, why don't you just separate out from water while you're making water too, You're actually you'd be spending more energy

trying to get the hydrogen out that way. Now, if you were able to harness some other form of electricity to do the work for you, Like let's say you had a solar panel farm and that solar panel farm was generating electricity solely for the purpose to separate out hydrogen from oxygen and water, and then you harvested the hydrogen and use that in your fuel cells. That's a possible solution. It would be, you know, a complicated infrastructure, but it's workable, and in fact, that's one of the

things Toyota is looking at. They're also looking at harnessing wind power to do the same sort of thing. So finding a renewable energy source so that you can produce this hydrogen, because otherwise you're just spending more than what you're making. And then again we're at that losing proposition. It is. It is one of the one of the several problems with fuel else But but we'll get a

little bit more into that later on. Yeah, So now we've got all of that, all the fuel cell stuff out of the way, We've got the combustion engine now the way. We got a lot of more stuff to get out of the way. But before we get that out of the way, there's something else we need to do. Lauren, and let's take a quick moment to thank our sponsor. All Right, we're back. Uh what year is it now?

It is? Okay, we're gonna talk about as scott Now a Scottish chemist named James Doer who used regenerative cooling and a vacuum flask to liquefy hydrogen at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in London. Now that next year he even managed to go a step further and reduce the temperature enough so that he could solidify hydrogen. Now you might wonder how cold are we talking about here?

That happens at a temperature of negative three eighty two degrees fahrenheit or negative two hundred and thirty nine point nine degrees celsius. And I think even our friends to the Great White North could agree that that's pretty chilly. I was out at like a like fahrenheits yeah, I'm like, yeah, you know, I gotta cover my tomatoes when it gets down to sixty. So we're kind of joking. But but so more about this vacuum flask. This thing is the

coolest thing. I mean, I don't didn't mean to make a pun, but it's I never believe you when you say that. I really, as I was saying it, I was judging myself. So if that makes you feel any better. It's a double walled flask, so you think of it as two flasks, one slightly smaller one set inside the slightly larger one, and that space between the larger one the smaller one is completely evacuated of all materials. So it's it's a vacuum, right, You've got a vacuum between

those two sides. Now, what this does is it allows you to insulate whatever material is on the inside that flask from the outside environment. It does not conduct heat very well at all. Therefore, you can conduct experiments at

particular temperatures. Yeah, you can have low temperature experiment. It's where you just keep reducing the temperature and you don't have to worry about the heat from the outside environment because then then you would never get anything cold enough to be able to do this stuff like liquefying hydrogen. I mean, you've got to get it really cold, and any sort of environmental heat is going to immediately move from an area of high concentration to an area of

low concentration. That's kind of sort of what thermodynamics do, you know. So the other thing is that it also is really good at keeping hot stuff hot, so you know, like a like a thermis. You know, it's it's because again it's not allowing the heat from the inside of the flask to leak out into the outside environment. Gradually it will still cool down or the stuff inside will gradually still get warm. Because it's not a perfect system.

At the neck of this flask, that's where the weak point is because at some point those two the inner and outer flask have to join together. You can't. You can't just magically suspended. So there are some weak points in this. It's not a perfect system, but it does work really, really well. Now let's go to one of my favorite parts of the podcast, because this is where we get to talk about some incredible music. Because in nine that's when Count Ferdinand Vaughan led Zeppelin launched the

first hydrogen filled rigid airship called the Ferdinand. Just just just von Zeppelin. It wasn't vun lead Zeppelin that my musical past has betrayed me once again. Well no, no, of course we don't call them the Ferdinand's. We call them Zeppelin's. But they were not made out of lead. I guess maybe some of the material might have been led low lead Zeppelin, maybe spandex or okay, that's fair, yeah, alright, so but anyway, this, this was the hydrogen filled rigid airship.

These are those dirigibles that you've seen in the past and were majestic vehicles. But we'll get into why we

don't really see those anymore in just a couple of years. Certainly, although I believe that hydrogen was being used, I think he was German, and I think Germany was using hydrogen at the time, because the United States was holding a great amount of the helium in the world at the time, and hydrogen was kind of considered the next best thing, right because you know, both hydrogen and helium have this

lifting property being being lighter than air. Sure, So so these zeppelins might have been using something slightly less combustible like helium, if they had had the opportunity to helium, by the way, significantly less combustible as in not but but yes hydrogen. Yeah, I mean, you use whatever you have available, and that's exactly what they did. Five we have Henry Garrett, who is was rather an American inventor who created an automobile that quote unquote ran on water.

So this is where a lot not all of them obviously, but a lot of conspiracy theories about uh, big car companies or big oil companies pushing down all these inventions that ran quote unquote ran on water. A lot of them come from this kind of thing. There are some there's some truth to vehicles that used water as a component for fuel, but they all had their own big drawbacks. So Garrett's was one that used electrolysis, like we had said, so it's using electricity to separate water out into hydrogen

and oxygen um. And then the car was really using hydrogen as a fuel, which is not the most efficient ride. You're already having to spend so much energy just to create the fuel that then continues to move the car, and he had to refill it a lot, so not necessarily the best approach. Now this is before we really had useful ways of storing lots of pressurized hydrogen which

would allow us to have kind of a consistent fueling source. Sure, but I mean, I can I can see where the conspiracy or or um fringe theorists as I hear they preferred to be called by many angry people on the internet, the ones I keep making mad uh, you know, I I can see I can see where perhaps um gasoline powered car companies would not have at that particular time wanted to donate funding to that kind of research, right right, well, and you know they're definitely there's a huge investment in

the gasoline automobile industry, I mean from multiple players, not just not just the car. So but yeah, then we have a truly terrible disaster in nineteen seven, Right on May six of that year, the Hindenburg zeppelin disaster occurred, and that has has put for the intervening time between then and now, this idea into the public's mind that hydrogen is an extremely dangerous substance, right, that that to use hydrogen is to court death. Yes, although it should

be noted that hydrogen was not the instigator of that disaster. Okay, So, so the blimp was coded in aluminum powder to reflect sunlight. Aluminum powder these days is a critical component of rocket fuel. Under that coat, the cotton fabric was waterproofed with a

flammable acetate. There was a lot of static electricity in the air from a storm that day, so when the crew dropped the mooring ropes, it electrically grounded the blimp and set off sparks that ignited this highly flammable material, which then of course came into contact with this hydrogen that's inside of it, and the whole thing let up.

Proponents of hydrogen fuel, though, actually is the Hindenburg as a as a point to hydrogen safety because the really lightweight hydrogen ascended up out of the blimp so fast that the flames went upward, not outward or downwards, So it saved the lives of everyone who actually remained on board, right, So yeah, I mean it's it's interesting that something we look at as being an example of this stuff is going to be too dangerous for us to use actually

is an example of No, you're you're looking at this the wrong way. You're not. You don't have the full picture, right right, it's I mean, sure, it's it's dangerous, but everything is dangerous, and what's more dangerous is coating your blimp and rocket fuel. Yeah, okay, alright, got the note, Lauren, I'm not going to use any more rocket fuel on my blimp. And that same year as the Hannonbury disaster, there was an experimental gaseous hydrogen fueled jet engine test

and that's the first working jet engine using hydrogen. So then we move on to nineteen thirty eight. That's when Igor Sikorski, who was a Russian American aviator, proposed using liquid hydrogen as a fuel for aviation. So you know, we already still had people saying that hydrogen had its place. By ninety one, we have the first mass application of

hydrogen internal combustion engines. That's when a Russian lieutenant whose name I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce ordered the conversion of several Ford Model G A Z dash A A cars, the the Double A, the Model Double A UH into hydrogen internal combustion engines converted from gasoline to hydrogen as part of the war effort during World War to forest Sheila shit, thank oh nice. I was not going to try because my Russian is worse than

my Swiss, which is worse than my French. I haven't I haven't looked that up, but but I'm that's that's my stab. Well well done, because you're braver than I am. In nineteen forty three, we have Ohio State University testing liquid hydrogen as rocket fuel, and in the nineteen fifties and sixties we see more work with these hydrogen fuel cells, this whole idea that had been proposed decades earlier, and mostly we see them in industrial applications like powering forklifts

or other heavy machinery. The first commercial use of a hydrogen fuel cell is in Project Geminy Gemini Gemini. Hey, I'm just saying that the way they old I know, yeah, that was that was in five and that particular fuel cell was developed by a General Electric. There's your conspiracy theories for you. Night. One, we're skipping way ahead because generally speaking, you know, we still had advances in technology on both the combustion side and on the fuel cell side.

But one, we have the Space Shuttle main engine test, which used liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen as the propellants. UM. In the nineteen nineties, Uh, yeah, in in some cities they started rolling out buses that were powered by hydrogen fuel cells. Pretty cool stuff. Two thousand three, we have another big moment in the United States. Yeah, that was

when the Hydrogen Fuel Initiative was announced here. Um. It was a dedication of one point two billion dollars in research grants and other governmental support to projects with the lofty but very worthy goal of of making fuel cell vehicles practical and cost effective. By I mean like like from harvesting hydrogen to the infrastructure that you need to get it to cars, to the actual cars. Yeah, this is this is incredibly ambitious. Not that other companies haven't

taken up that mantle. But you know, we'll have a little bit of a dicussion at the very end about why that's so ambitious. I think that's probably the best place to have it. But let's see then we have moving onto the late two thousands, several car companies began developing fuel cell concepts UM, although most never made it

to anything like the common market. That the only one that I've heard about even being semi available is the Honda f c X Clarity UM, which for certain select Southern California residents is available for a three year, six per month lease. It's like a severe waiting list kind of kind of situation, which which might change dramatically next year because two thousand fifteen is when Toyota plans to

bring a fuel cell vehicle to market. And there are other fuel cell vehicles that are out there, most of them are being used in commercial or industrial uses. Again not not really talking about, uh, you know, the vehicles for the average consumer. But Toyota's plans say that this is going to be a really serious effort to make fuel cell vehicles a real alternative to gasoline and all trip vehicles, uh in a specific market in the US.

We're talking about California. Yet again, that's really kind of the test market that Toyota is looking at, and they're looking at building out hydrogen fueling stations. You have to I mean that's and that's where this is where we're coming up to that discussion where not only is hydrogen a a potentially dangerous substance, not only do you have to take into consideration the right way to pressurize it and store it so that people can use it safely.

Not only is it difficult to get the hydrogen just all on its own, it's also expensive to build out an infrastructure that you're going from the ground up. There's nothing there really that you can already take advantage of. You have to start building in things like building in new pumps and fuel stations that are hydrogen ones. There are a few of those that are around, you know, most of those are for things like municipal use. It's

not necessarily meant for again, for the average person. It's not like, hey, I'm gonna go down and fill up this pressurized clast with hydrogen. Yeah yeah, you know. You you have to create an entire industry worth of of safety regulations and and standardizations. Yeah yeah. If you don't have those, then it's not going to work. So this is, uh, it's a it's a grandiose plan in many ways, but

it's one I think that was actually achievable. I got a chance to talk to a lot of folks at Toyota when I went to C E S and so I got a chance to to take a look at the fuel cell vehicle. Really, what I looked at was their test vehicle that actually had a fuel cell in it. And then I got to look at the what is the shell essentially the what what it's going to look like when it comes to market. But as I understand it, it did not actually have the full fuel cell set

up inside it yet. But it's very interesting approach. It is again a subset of electric vehicles. It runs on electricity. It's generating electricity which powers the vehicle as an electric motor. There's no engine. It's driven by an electric motor. It's got a battery on board as well. Um, it's not like it's just a combustion vehicle. It's not a combustion vehicle at all. It's more like an electric vehicle than a combustion vehicle, except for the fact that you have

to fuel rather than recharge. So so would you say over we we asked on Facebook if anyone had any questions about this, and Don asked, will all fuel cell cars be hybrids. So technically, technically yes, because a fuel cell is, like I said, kind of an electric vehicle. So if you think of it that way, it is a hybrid. It's not going to be a hybrid as fuel cell and combustion engine. That doesn't make any sense.

For one thing, you would have so much of your vehicle taken up by engines and motors and and fuel cells and batteries that there wouldn't be any room left for anybody else. So that's not the kind of hybrid you're going to see. But technically, if you think about it, a fuel cell vehicles already a hybrid vehicle. And you know, Daniel on Facebook had asked, is this really a viable alternative to say electric vehicles? And then that's a highly contested area of debate right now. But I would say

they each have their own advantages and disadvantages. The big advantage of an electric vehicle is that you can if you're just driving around, you know, going around town and then coming back home at the end of every day, you can recharge that at home and you aren't having to worry about refueling ever. Right with a hydrogen fuel cell car, it's like a gasoline car, eventually you're going

to have to refuel. On the flip side of that, if you're going on long trips, like you're not just driving around town, but you want to take like a cross country road trip all on National Lampoon's family vacation, because that really encouraged everyone to get on a road trip. I medium, wally World's only open for so long, Lauren, So if you want to go to wally World and you have to drive through all the states to do it, I do want to go to wally World. Who doesn't.

So the problem is that with an electric vehicle, whenever you need to recharge and you're not at a convenient stopping point, like you're not ready to stop for the day, that's gonna take you like a half hour or longer, depending upon how you're doing this, unless you're buying into Tesla's model where you can occasionally have your better charge or swap. Even with a super charger. Still it's like

minutes or a half charge. So I know that doesn't sound like a long time, but think about how irritated you get every time you have to go and fill up your tank at a gas station, Like if that takes me longer than than five or six minutes, I think that the world is ending. Yeah, Honestly, if I even just hit a slow pump, I'm just like, oh no, why did I pick this one? I could have gone anywhere else, and now the rest of my night is ruined.

So yeah, hydrogen fuel fueling stations will fuel at essentially the same speed as a gasoline fueling station. So when it comes to refueling, hydrogen cars have have the advantage right now. Now, if we ever get into a crazy super fast method of charging batteries which people are working on, and it ends up being equivalent or even faster than

fueling at a gas station, then that advantage disappears. The only other advantage you can say is that fuel cell vehicles, like electric vehicles, don't put out dangerous emissions, right, And that relates to the other question that we got in on Facebook from Ricardo he he was he was asking, is hydrogen really environmentally friendly because it also produces carbon dioxide. If you're using again pure hydrogen and pure oxygen, you're not creating carbon dioxide. Uh, you are just creating water

and electricity and heat. But if you're using something besides pure hydrogen or pure oxygen. You could be creating pollutants, like we had said at the beginning of the last podcast, part one. So it all depends on the implementation. Uh. And the same is true with with fuel cells or combustion engines. Either way, whether it's one or the other, that's what your output is going to be based upon

the input. Sure, and it also depends on how you're creating, well not creating, how you're getting that hydrogen to begin with, because some methods of of that hydrogen harvesting are cleaner than others. Right, if you're using fossil fuels, for example, to power your hydrogen operation, then the question is why don't you just use the fossil fuels to car the car? Right, Because if you're using it, why are you why are you have an extra step in there? The extra step?

You know, if it's a if it's a byproduct like methane gas out of natural gas deposits, then then that can be a relatively clean way to be using that material. Yeah, it's it's kind of like the co location idea of putting uh something that can use heat as a way of uh, you know, like like like the heat from say a power generator where you're using your generating lots and lots of steam that turned turbines, and those turbines

then generate electricity. You might also have a way of harnessing that heat to say, heat a building, and then you are getting kind of a two for one thing out of that. It all depends on the strategy you implement to get the hydrogen, to ship the hydrogen, and to act consume the hydrogen. So another thing we can look at two in the future is the possibility of using hydrogen to generate lots of energy through fusion, which is the same thing that our friend the Sun does.

And Okay, that's true. I can't. I can't. I can't hang out with the Sun for very long before he gets angry at me, or at least my skin gets angry at me. But at any rate, Yeah, the the Sun generates energy through that that that fusion process of hydrogen turning into helium. We might be able to harness the same thing here on Earth, and perhaps we'll do a full podcast on that in the future. There have been lots of different attempts at it, and we've seen

some promising results fairly recently. That suggests we might be able to finally get to a point where we can actually generate more energy than it required for us to put into it to make it happen in the first place. That's ridiculous. Yeah, and I'm being a little sarcastic, but no, that's actually ridiculous. I mean that's that that would be

beautiful and impressive. If it works out, then you could I would hesitate to say solve the world's energy problems, because I think it's much more complicated than just how much energy we have, but it can make things really interesting. So anyway, if you want to hear more really interesting things help us out, you let us know. Let us

know what those are. Yeah, we don't know until you ask like this, Yeah, if we If we didn't mention at the top of this episode, we mentioned at the top of the last one this was a reader question from Facebook and we appreciate it very much. Yeah, So, if you want to ask us a question on Facebook or maybe on Twitter or perhaps even Tumblr, you can find us with the handle tech stuff h s W

at all three. Or perhaps you're a little more you know, old fashioned, or you have a lot to say, or maybe you don't want everybody else reading the question you have you can send it to us via email. Our address is tech stuff at Discovery dot com, and Lauren and I will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it have suffworks dot com