this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2026
238 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
82087 readers
3779 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Wouldn't hydrogen be better for lifting something like a wind turbine.
Yeah, that's what the folks who designed the Hindenburg thought as well.
Wasn't the way the Hindenburg burned due to both the Hidrogen AND the alumium oxide paint covering it?
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.
Nah, it's perfect!
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.
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.
Even with steel pipes you get problems with hydrogen embrittlement because hydrogen diffuses into the steel and can cause it to crack.
Helium does a pretty good job of that too.
Yes, but I think hydrogen likes to go bang 🧨💥
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.
Wouldn't this still need to be tethered to the ground? Would that likely have grounding cables?
"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 the blimp they're on leading to things like this slap
"What part of this you're not getting?"
"All of it, obviously!"