Hydrogen Explodes Onto Car Scene?

  • A Honda FCX Concept and hydrogen refueling station. There is concern about the safety of handling hydrogen. (Photo courtesy of Honda)

Within the next few years, you might see a new type of car in dealer
showrooms… one that runs on hydrogen. Many engineers and car company
officials predict that hydrogen vehicles will replace gasoline power in
the next 10 to 15 years. But lots of people think hydrogen is too
explosive and wonder if a hydrogen-based economy will be safe.
Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

Within the next few years, you might see a new type of car in dealer
showrooms… one that runs on hydrogen. Many engineers and car company
officials predict that hydrogen vehicles will replace gasoline power in
the next 10 to 15 years. But lots of people think hydrogen is too
explosive and wonder if a hydrogen-based economy will be safe.
Julie Grant reports:


Sales associate Chris Beckham hears a lot of concerns about the new
Honda fuel-cell car on display at a recent car show:


“I know a lot of people are kind of worried about the safety of the
hydrogen vehicle because it’s basically like running on an atom bomb.”


Honda fuel cell marketing specialist Steve Ellis rolls his eyes when he
hears comments like that. The Cold War-era hydrogen bomb comes to mind
for people because it’s one of the few times they’ve heard the word
“hydrogen” used in conversation. Another time is when people talk
about the hydrogen-filled blimp, the Hindenburg. Ellis wants to
clear the air about the Hindenburg disaster.
The huge zeppelin burst into flames, and a lot of people blame the hydrogen:


“But history has now shown that it was the coating, the covering of the
material that actually was sustaining the fire. The hydrogen itself of
course being flammable, whatever that cause was, it did ignite. But
the flame was sustained by the coating. That’s what people see.”


Ellis says hydrogen has gotten a bad rap:


“When in reality, science has proven that it wasn’t the guilty party.”


(Grant:) “But it is a very flammable substance?”


(Ellis:) “Sure. As is gasoline.”


There’s still controversy over whether the hydrogen or the coating
caused the Hindenburg to burn. Regardless. Many energy experts say
hydrogen is more flammable then gasoline, but Ellis says the dangers of
a hydrogen fire aren’t any worse then a gasoline fire, they’re just
different.


He says people are used to dealing with liquid gas at the fueling
station. But in some ways, hydrogen could be considered less dangerous
then gas. When gas spills it pools up on the ground, and if someone
drops a cigarette – yipes! – it could be a long day for firefighters.


But hydrogen goes into cars in gaseous form. If there’s a hydrogen
leak, Ellis says it’d be easy to put out a fire:


“So with, you know, fire systems at the station, if there’s any
detection of a flame or any incident like that, as soon as the source
is shut off, the fire’s out, it’s gone. First responders and many fire
departments have said they feel like responding to a hydrogen fire…
it’s like, by the time they’ll get there, they’ll be nothing to put out.
It’ll likely have taken care of itself.”


That’s one advantage of using a light-weight fuel like hydrogen: it
dissipates quickly into the air because it’s lighter then air. But
because it’s so light, each cubic foot doesn’t pack that much energy.
That’s why cars can’t store that much hydrogen in the tank.


Hydrogen-expert Paul Erickson says that low energy content also creates
other safety problems. Erickson is director of the Hydrogen Production
and Utilization Lab
at University of California-Davis. In order to
make cars that hold enough hydrogen to travel a respectable distance
between re-fuelings, he says they have to use a lot of pressure to
squeeze enough hydrogen into a tank:


“It’s just very difficult to get the range out that you’d like. And so you
end up having to pressurize the hydrogen to 3,000, now we’re up to
5,000, now up to 10,000 pounds per square inch. I wouldn’t want to sit
on a 10,000 psi tank of anything, much less hydrogen.”


Erickson says car companies understand the dangers of combining
hydrogen’s high flammability with high pressure in the tanks. They
don’t want any hydrogen to escape from the tank if there’s a collision
and they don’t want the tank to blow up. So, the tank is probably the
strongest component on the hydrogen vehicles being built today.


That’s not the case with regular gas cars. Steve Ellis at Honda says
they won’t release too many consumer vehicles to start. One reason is
to slowly get people used to handling hydrogen safely.


For the Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Cold War Clean Up Near Completion

Clean up at a former Cold War-era uranium processing plant is nearly complete. A train carrying the final load of radioactive waste is now making its way from southwest Ohio to a disposal site in Utah. Tana Weingartner reports:

Transcript

Clean up at a former Cold War-era uranium processing plant is nearly complete. A train carrying the final load of radioactive waste is now making its way from southwest Ohio to a disposal site in Utah. Tana Weingartner reports:


It took three engines to slowly haul away the last 60 railcars full of radioactive dirt, concrete and debris. The waste came from the former Fernald Uranium processing facility in southwest Ohio. During the Cold War, workers at the top-secret plant processed uranium for nuclear weapons. Johnny Reising is the Fernald Site Director for the Department of Energy.


“It’s one of the largest waste shipping operations that the department of energy has had to date. There will probably be larger ones in the future, but to date this is the largest that’s taken place.”


Reising says the overall clean up is ahead of schedule and expected to cost about $70 million less than the projected $1.9 billion price tag.


Following completion, the D.O.E.’s Office of Legacy Management will maintain Fernald as an undeveloped park.


For the Environment Report, I’m Tana Weingartner.

Related Links

Defense Dept. To Clean Up Military Mess?

The Defense Department will be paying for a study to find ways to remove ammunition barrels the military dumped into Lake Superior during the Cold War. For 30 years, environmentalists have been asking the government to clean up the mess. Mike Simonson reports that the federal government is now paying for a study to find ways to remove the barrels:

Transcript

The Defense Department will be paying for a study to find ways to remove ammunition
barrels the military dumped into Lake Superior during the Cold War. For 30 years,
environmentalists have been asking the government to clean up the mess. Mike
Simonson reports that the federal government is now paying for a study to find ways to
remove the barrels:


The Red Cliff band of Lake Superior Chippewa will study ways
to remove the barrels of munitions. Documents show that between 1959
and 1962, the Department of Defense had 1,437 drums dumped into Lake
Superior. It amounts to about 400 tons of munitions containing toxic chemicals such as
PCBs, mercury, lead, chromium, benzene and even uranium.


Patricia DePerry is the Red Cliff Tribal Chairwoman. She says the barrels must be
removed:


“Not only the time is of essence, it’s the not knowing what the contaminants have been
doing at the bottom of the lake.”


DePerry says not only is the ecology of the lake at risk, but the barrels of munitions lie
within a quarter mile of Duluth, Minnesota’s drinking water intake.


For the Environment Report, I’m Mike Simonson.

Related Links

Turning Nuke Waste Sites Into Playgrounds

  • Grassland prairie flowers from Weldon Spring, part of the Department of Energy's restoration effort to control erosion and add aesthetic beauty to the area. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Department of Energy)

Across the U.S., there are more than 100 sites contaminated by radioactive waste from the nation’s nuclear weapons programs.
The government is trying to return these Cold War relics to safe and useful purposes. Some of these once toxic zones are being treated much like public parks. The GLRC’s Kevin Lavery visited one that was recently opened to the public:

Transcript

Across the US, there are more than 100 sites contaminated by radioactive waste from the
nation’s nuclear weapons programs. The government is trying to return these Cold War
relics to safe and useful purposes. Some of these once toxic zones are being treated much
like public parks. The GLRC’s Kevin Lavery recently visited one that was recently
opened to the public…


A thick grove of trees opens up to a clearing that reveals a white mound of limestone
rock. It rises like a tomb from some long-forgotten civilization, were it not for the water
towers and golf courses on the horizon.


Mike Leahy and his 9-year-old son Cameron came to this rock dome to catch the view
atop its 75 foot summit. But the real attraction was what they did not see:


“We read the sign and saw what was buried and how they did it, and – it’s kind of
disturbing, what’s in there.”


Beneath their feet lay more than a million cubic yards of spent uranium, asbestos and
PCB’s. The 45 acre mound is a disposal cell, where the government buried thousands of
barrels and tons of debris. That history didn’t bother young Cameron:


“It’s really cool. They keep all that nuclear waste under all that and it can’t harm
anybody.”


The Weldon Spring site, 30 miles west of St. Louis, Missouri began during World War
Two as an Army TNT factory. In the 1950’s, the plant refined yellow cake uranium for
later use in nuclear weapons. All that stopped in 1966 and all the radioactive waste just
sat there. Weldon Spring became an EPA Superfund site in 1987. After a 900 million
dollar cleanup, the site was opened to tourists in 2002.


(Sound of frogs)


Today, frogs sing in a native prairie at the foot of the cell. In April, officials opened a
hiking trail adjacent to a once-radioactive landfill. The route connects to a state park.


Weldon Spring is not a park per se, but project manager Yvonne Deyo says urban sprawl
prompted them to think like one:


“There’s subdivisions and lots of infrastructure going in…and that just kind of hits home
how important green space is, and that’s kind of what we’re trying to do a little bit of
here at the site.”


Weldon Spring is one of about 100 such sites the Department of Energy is converting to
what it calls “beneficial re-use.” Many are becoming recreational venues. Another
closed uranium plant near Cincinnati is adding horseback riding trails. In Wayne, New
Jersey, a former thorium processing facility is becoming a baseball field. And a national
wildlife preserve is in the works at Rocky Flats, the site outside Denver that made the
plutonium cores of nuclear warheads.


The Department of Energy says Weldon Spring is safe for visitors – though some residual
contamination remains.


(Sound of Burgermeister Spring)


Burgermeister Spring runs through a 7-thousand acre state reserve adjacent to the site.
This is where uranium-laced groundwater from Weldon Spring rises to the surface.
Though the spring exceeds the EPA’s drinking water quality standard, there’s no warning
sign here. Officials say the contamination is so low that it poses no immediate public
hazard. The spring feeds into one of the most popular fishing lakes on the property.
Most visitors are surprised to hear that:


“Huh.”


Jeff Boeving fishes for bass four or five times a month:


“(Does that concern you to hear that?) Yeah – absolutely…I mean, they’ve got a great
area out here and they’re kind of messing it up if they’re going to have contaminants, you know, going into it.”


The government’s vision of post-nuclear playgrounds is not without its critics. Arjun
Makhijani heads the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research in Takoma Park,
Maryland. He says recreational sites near urban development zones risk losing their
original purpose:


“Institutional memory tends to be very short; after 30, 40, 50 years people forget, they
begin to develop the land, and pretty soon you could have houses, farms and schools in
the area. So it’s not necessary that it will stay recreational forever.”


Recreation is only one option the Department of Energy is considering for all of its sites.
In the last two years, the agency’s budget has doubled with the addition of nearly a dozen
radioactive properties. Officials say Congress has so far supported its fiscal requests.
And with the future of a proposed permanent nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain still
in doubt, even more tax dollars will likely be spent converting the nuclear dumps in
America’s backyards to a place where families play.


For the GLRC, I’m Kevin Lavery.

Related Links

Searching for Salamanders at Old Nuke Site

  • Salamanders are a good indicator of wetland health. (Photo courtesy of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife)

Government workers are slogging around in man-made wetlands.
looking for salamanders. Back in the 1950’s, the United States government
selected a plot of land to be the home of its newest uranium processing plant.
Since the end of the Cold War, the now-closed nuclear processing plant has
been undergoing the long and arduous task of returning to its natural wetland
state. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tana Weingartner reports on the search for salamanders at the site, and why
their presence is so important:

Transcript

Government workers are slogging around in man-made wetlands looking for salamanders. Back in the 1950’s, the United States government selected a plot of land to be the home of its newest uranium processing plant. Since the end of the Cold War, the now-closed nuclear processing plant has been undergoing the long and arduous task of returning to its natural wetland state. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tana Weingartner reports on the search for salamanders at the site, and why their presence is so important:


It’s a cold, windy day in late March as specialists from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency head out to check their traps at the Fernald Nuclear Plant. The 1050-acre facility sits in a rural area just 18 miles north of Cincinnati. Although the EPA is in charge of cleaning up the uranium contamination here, today they’re on a different mission. Today they’re hunting salamanders.


“Salamanders basically are a sign of an established wetland usually, and in this case would show that we put a wetland in a location where salamanders need additional breeding habitat.”


In other words, Schneider says the presence of salamanders indicates the first level of success for these manmade wetlands. The wetland project is one of several ways the EPA is ensuring Fernald is properly restored to its natural state.


“Well, we’re looking forward to the day when we get the site cleaned up, and it can be like a land lab, and people can bring kids out here and do environmental education on the importance of wetlands, and it’s going to make a great contrast with what used to be here and the environmental contamination with the environmental benefit the facility is providing down the road.”


Today, the site is 70 percent certified clean, and officials expect to finish the cleanup by June 2006. Creating healthy wetlands full of insects, amphibians and salamanders is one of the first steps to success.


“So the method here is to set ten traps equidistant, hopefully, around the perimeter of the wetland. And they’re passive traps, whereby animals that are moving over the course of the 24 hours or so that the traps have been in, will bump into the traps and it’s a funnel that directs them into the center part of the trap, and they’re held in there until we release them.”


(splashing sound)


Schneider and his team laugh and joke as they pull the traps up by brightly colored ribbons. Train horns and construction noises mix with bird calls – one a reminder of what has been, the other a sign of what’s to come.


“That’s probably a one-year-old bullfrog there and then these big guys are dragonfly larvae and these other guys are back swimmers. Mayfly larvae and dragonfly larvae are both good indicators of high water quality.”


The third pond, or vernal pool, turns up 46 tadpoles and a tiny peeper frog, but no salamanders.


(truck door slams)


So it’s back in the truck and on down the dirt road to where several more wetland pools sit just across from the on-site waste dump. That dump will be Fernald’s lasting reminder of its former use. These pools are younger and less established, but they do offer hope. Last year, adult salamanders were found in the one closest to a clump of trees.


Each spring, as the snow melts away and temperatures rise, salamanders venture out in the first 50-degree rain to begin their search for a mate. Schneider had hoped warm temperatures in late February and early March prompted “The Big Night,” as it’s known.


“So, no salamanders today?”


“No salamanders today. I think we learned a little bit about the difference between wetlands that are three years old. We saw a lot more diversity in the macroinvertebrates, the insect population, than we have down here.”


Perhaps the salamanders haven’t come yet, or maybe they have already come and gone, leaving behind the still un-hatched eggs. Either way, the team will check back again in April and a third time in late May or June.


“And we have high hopes, high hopes, high apple pie in the sky hopes. That’s the kind.”


(sound of laughter)


For the GLRC, I’m Tana Weingartner.

Related Links

Cold War Toxin in Drinking Water?

A toxic leftover from the Cold War is polluting soil and water at sites across the country. More than two dozen sites in the Great Lakes region could be contaminated by a chemical used in rocket fuel. The chemical was either used or stored at the sites. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:

Commentary – Plutonium to Stay in U-S

The U-S recently announced that it’s abandoning plans to export
weapons-grade plutonium to Canada. U-S activists opposed the idea of
shipping the material along American highways. As Great Lakes Radio
Consortium commentator Suzanne Elston observes, in winning the battle
over transport, those activists may have lost the war: