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Originally Posted by Big Windy
I totally hear where you are coming from. I agree that it is a scary idea to put such destructive potential in the hands of an idiot.
What bothers me is that if this technology can't go in tunnels, it shouldn't be allowed on the road at all. To me, it seems like they really aren't really sure how safe it is, so they just make ad hoc decisions about where it can and can't go. If it can't go in a tunnel, they should make a law saying that it can't go in an underground parking garage. This opens up a slippery slope for what should and shouldn't be allowed. We are a long long time from actually seeing these things en masse on the roads (probably not even in our lifetime), but it seems that politicians are setting it up now to make things very restrictive to progress in the future.
The article didn't say, but I'm curious what a fine for driving your hydrogen car in the tunnel would be.
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I think the lawmakers are just being overly cautious and in this case I think it's correct. *If* an incident were to happen in an enclosed space such as the tunnel the Hydrogen gas would build rapidly to concentrations that would support combustion. Add in other factors like additional pressure and other unknown internal variables and it becomes a nightmare to predict how the gas would behave.
I suppose the safety devices mitigate a majority of those concerns but the "what if's" are still for the most part largely unknown. What happens if the car is rear-ended and the system is compromised? Would you want to be in that tunnel and find out? I'd rather take my chances in a nice wide open space if nothing else than for the fact that if it did explode the concussive force would be able to radiate outward more evenly than being trapped by re-enforced concrete walls.
I don't think this is a viable long term solution, but in the interim the engineers need time to properly assess the situation and come up with countermeasures in case the unthinkable happens. The current vents in the tunnels need to be retrofitted to support not only relatively heavy CO2 and CO exhausts but lighter and highly flammable H2 exhausts.
And as far as why tunnels and not parking garages...
If the Lincoln tunnel was blown to pieces it would affect millions of people whereas if a simple parking (or several even) structure was nuked the damage would be locally isolated.