> You might be able to use less in town but swapping 5 or 6 canisters every day sounds less pleasant than simply unplugging your EV at the start of the day and plugging it back in later.

Have you been using an EV in your daily life for at least a few months? Honest question.

I haven't.

But still I'd imagine I'd strongly prefer swapping the canisters (even several times a day) over having to basically plan the structure of the day around the charging of the EV, as the foundational element. Which is what you'd probably have to do, if you don't always make short trips that only use 15 % of battery capacity.

Being spontaneous is really what makes owning a car useful for most people. And I think you'd loose a good part of that with an EV. (I don't even own a car, by the way. Nor do I drive one more than a handful times a year at most.)

Japan strategy just makes no sense. Some large companies in Japan have focused on it and Japan bought in so the whole 'hydrogen economy' dream has lots of institutional support in Japan.

It never really made any sense, so don't look for logic.

Japan should clearly have focused on nuclear, its the source of energy the have in abundance.

Hydrogen is an energy storage and transport mechanism. Comparing it against nuclear is like comparing apples and baskets and makes no sense.

It compliments nuclear reasonably well, because the cost of peak capacity for nuclear is completely off the charts. Cost for baseload is merely very high, so storage is important for nuclear. Especially given nuclear's increasing unreliability due to being over-centralised and sensitive to weather as we are seeing in france and china right now.

Hydrogen has a major advantage over batteries in that very large scale storage is much cheaper (if your tank is big enough to keep at cryo temperatures it's even reasonably compact). It's much worse than ither fuels in this regard, but the better efficiency of production makes it a good candidate for some things.

Well you can actually compare apple to baskets.

So when you are going into a shop and you have certain amount of money you can decide to invest into apples or a basket.

You get what I am talking about?

It also didn't make sense that Japan talked about hydorgen in terms of energy independence. But they did.

> It compliments nuclear reasonably well, because the cost of peak capacity for nuclear is completely off the charts.

If you actually invested in enough nuclear and build modern plants that can load follow way better then this isn't big problem.

It would only make sense if building storage over added capacity was way, way cheaper, and I not sure it actually is once you are pumping out lots of nuclear.

Even then, you would likely go for heat storage, not chemical storage if you are paring it with nuclear.

> Especially given nuclear's increasing unreliability due to being over-centralised and sensitive to weather as we are seeing in france and china right now.

Again this is mostly a problem if you have not built enough and every plant need to be on at all times.

In addition modern nuclear plants can be air cooled and should be way less sensitive.

So again with nuclear, the main problem is that we are building 60s technology that was designed for submarines.

> It also didn't make sense that Japan talked about hydorgen in terms of energy independence. But they did.

In a world where net energy is as easy as throwing up a solar panel, energy reserves are energy independence. Nuclear doesn't help here at all because Japan is not allowed to make fuel. Nuclear is dependence on one of the handful of countries who are. Also it doesn't solve portability at all -- my money is on something like sodium ion, but a cheap compact hydrogen canister solves the problem too if it doesn't use exotic materials.

> If you actually invested in enough nuclear and build modern plants that can load follow way better then this isn't big problem.

> It would only make sense if building storage over added capacity was way, way cheaper, and I not sure it actually is once you are pumping out lots of nuclear.

Nuclear capacity is the most expensive thing you can build. Building it to not use it is even stupider than building it to use it. Cheap long term storage is the only thing keeping niches that aren't solar + wind from disappearing entirely -- even with fossil fuels and nuclear being massively subsidized. Renewables are at the point now where building a heat exchanger and steam turbine is a commensurable cost even if the input heat came from fairy farts. This is why fossil fuel plants that don't have a primary turbine need subsidies to stay alive even if they were to get fuel for free.

> In addition modern nuclear plants can be air cooled and should be way less sensitive.

So making the thing that is limited by being too expensive and unable to run in hot weather more expensive and less efficient in hot weather is a step up?

> Nuclear doesn't help here at all because Japan is not allowed to make fuel.

Allowed to make fuel? Who is gone stop them?

> Nuclear is dependence on one of the handful of countries who are.

I'm sorry but that's nonsense.

> Also it doesn't solve portability at all -- my money is on something like sodium ion, but a cheap compact hydrogen canister solves the problem too if it doesn't use exotic materials.

Portability. Energy generation is best done mostly locally. For portability you have simply connect each local area with the one next to it and you dynamically shift north or south in Japan.

But for the most part demand is predictable enough for this not to be needed, and beyond that you can use price mechanisms and other things as well.

Just put 1 reactor down for each X people and its totally fine.

> Nuclear capacity is the most expensive thing you can build.

Given that there is very, very little storage on the global grid and lots of nuclear its not clear this is true.

And you assume that nuclear must always cost some huge amount, but if you are a country that is mass producing nuclear reactors (specially modern ones) at large scale, its not actually true.

Marginal cost per reactors goes down quite a bit even with PWR and if you would build modern GenIV reactor its even less true.

> Cheap long term storage is the only thing keeping niches that aren't solar + wind from disappearing entirely

The reliance on the grid to balance out solar + wind unreliability was always a hidden subsidy in most countries.

And you act as if 'cheap long term storage' and 'only' should be in the same sentence. Not sure what you mean with 'long term' here, do you mean 6hours or 6 month?

If its less then a few month, I wouldn't want to live with it. A single major even such as a volcano could have a major impact when you relay on a storage.

> So making the thing that is limited by being too expensive and unable to run in hot weather more expensive and less efficient in hot weather is a step up?

You clearly don't understand how air cooled nuclear works.

The nuclear non proliferation treaty limits uranium refinement capabilities to a handful of corporations and state actors. Moreover the overwhelming majority of available uranium is in a handful of countries which are firmly under the control of one of a few countries.

> Portability. Energy generation is best done mostly locally. For portability you have simply connect each local area with the one next to it and you dynamically shift north or south in Japan.

Let's just put nuclear reactors on trucks, planes and and boats then shall we? Also dense fuels can be shipped which allows trading energy with anyone with a port (which doesn't include hydrogen currently, but advances in storage would solve this).

> Just put 1 reactor down for each X people and its totally fine.

So you're proposing that instead of paying $100/MWh for nuclear plants used at full capacity, we instead the same price per capacity but run them half to a third of the time thus increasing the cost to about 100x that of solar?

Existing green ammonia and hydrogen tech costs less, doesn't take decades to come online, is dropping in cost by double digit percentage per year and is nowhere near as susceptible to earthquakes.

> You clearly don't understand how air cooled nuclear works.

You have a heat engine. It has a hot side and a cold side. The lower the thermal capacity and mass of the cold side, the bigger and hotter it is. The hotter the cold side, the less efficient it is and the lower the energy throughput. If your cold side is mid-heatwave summer air you're going to have the exact same trouble france and china are nowc

Dumping gigawatts into 30-40 degree air when the sun is already shining isn't a strategy for increasing energy density over solar (especially when you're competing against 20-year-from-now solar which will likely be on the order of 40% efficient). It just costs more. Your heat exchanger is going to wind up looking like a solar farm but with the side benefit of needing incredibly complex plumbing and killing anything within a few km.

Japan is follow allow under international law to build everything required for civil nuclear.

And Japan has enough nuclear material in Japan.

There are breeder reactors, you don't need to mine or buy much U-235. You can literally easily create a repository with thorium/uranium for the next 100 years. Not to mention the existing fuel.

> Let's just put nuclear reactors on trucks, planes and and boats then shall we?

Now you are just trolling. But I guess if you don't have actual argument.

You should really learn about high temperature reactors.

> Japan is follow allow under international law to build everything required for civil nuclear.

I didn't actually know this. That makes it possibly viable to maybe have some nuclear in the mix. But using it for peaking is still patently absurd, and banking your country's energy security on a bottle neck of one corporation is still an amazing way to make that corporation very rich and everyone else poor.

> There are breeder reactors, you don't need to mine or buy much U-235. You can literally easily create a repository with thorium/uranium for the next 100 years. Not to mention the existing fuel.

So now we're up to air cooled breeder reactors with 3x surplus capacity. What does that cost, $500/MWh plus massive publicly funded security costs?

> Now you are just trolling. But I guess if you don't have actual argument.

No. That's what portable energy means. Not a synonym for power lines. High density disconnected sources like H2 and fuels. Current generation batteries only have limited applicability for trucking, flight, and shipping. Upcoming techs don't improve energy density as cost and abundance whilst maintaining enough density for passenger cars are the primary focus. Green fuels solve this but only work with energy that costs a tiny fraction of the cost of nuclear such as wind and solar. Hydrogen has potential here if metal hydrides can be made cheaply and without exotic materials (and synergises well with nuclear because e->H2->e is more efficient than other fuels so you don't need surplus capacity for peaking). You can also move hundreds of gigawatts through a pipeline if needs be, so fuels have relevance in a world where wires are struggling to meet primary energy demand at reasonable cost.

> You should really learn about high temperature reactors.

TEGs as a first stage are slightly more promising than the same old brayton cycle at ~600 degrees, but they only improve efficiency marginally and you still need either masses of water, a huge massively expensive cooling stack (which still raises average temperature), or more area and cost than a solar farm to dump your 40-60% waste heat. They're also yet to prove cost efficient compared to solar as operating at 1000-2000 degrees is pretty hard on anything. "High temperature" gas based heat exchangers are still less efficient and much more expensive than gas burning turbines which are starting to struggle to be cost competitive with solar.

Let it die. Nuclear has always been an option with massive negative tradeoffs in terms of how it shifts balance of power and has only been viable by mandating that the public insure them for free (like footing a trillion dollar bill for cleaning up fukushima which alone would have been enough to turn off every fossil fuel plant in the country any time there was sun or wind). Now we don't even have to consider those factors because they're also economically stupid on every level.

The other advantage of hydrogen is that a driver can go get one and swap it quickly; no need for a dedicated parking space with electrical service added.

Well lately Japan is talking about pushing for more nuclear power, but it's only been very recent. This hydrogen crap has been going on for quite some time, mainly pushed by Toyota I think. There's a few hydrogen fueling stations here in Tokyo that looked like they were constructed a few years ago, and then never used at all. It's really weird.

Honda as well, and other large industry.

> You might be able to use less in town but swapping 5 or 6 canisters every day sounds less pleasant than simply unplugging your EV at the start of the day and plugging it back in later.

Japan is thankfully one of the more resistant countries against the 'need moar bigger car for running over pedestrians' insanity infesting the rest of the world and has a long distance train network. 6kWh (2 canisters) is plenty for a LEV and even in a kei car you'd typically have maybe 5 or 6.