Currently, hydrogen canisters are used as ammo for fusion weapons and a few other pieces of highly advanced technology.
As elemental hydrogen isn’t particularly difficult to acquire IRL, there have been several proposals for means of crafting hydrogen, which have been vetoed by Kevin for balance reasons.
Why not then rename the existing Hydrogen ammuntion to deuterium? Deuterium is a very rare isotope of hydrogen which is used in real-world nuclear reactors, as well as featuring prominently in most theoretical fusion reactor designs. It fits in perfectly with it’s established uses ingame (well, CVD machines notwithstanding), and explains why you can’t simply acquire more of it just by cracking water.
Well, the wikipedia page for deuterium just happens to have a picture of deuterium plasma:
Anything can become a plasma if you dump enough energy into it, and deuterium is apparently fantastic for initiating nuclear fusion reactions.
Also, take note of this line:
“It is notable that although most stars, including the Sun, generate energy over most of their lives by fusing hydrogen into heavier elements, such fusion of light hydrogen (protium) has never been successful in the conditions attainable on Earth. Thus, all artificial fusion, including the hydrogen fusion that occurs in so-called hydrogen bombs, requires heavy hydrogen (either tritium or deuterium, or both) in order for the process to work.”
I’m sorry but disagree on the hydrogen-is-easy part.
To my knowlege, it is quite hard to store and transport hydrogen in meaningful quantities.
Sure, you can crack water, then what? Gaseous hydrogen has a pretty bad volume/energy ratio. Looking here i see that hydrogen has 12.7MJ/L, while methane has 40.0 MJ/L. So in gas form it is 4 times worse than methane (oil is slightly worse than methane, but close)
Also, gaseous hydrogen is so small and energetic that it escapes from any regular container, which makes it unfeasible for storage in a simple tank.
So you need to keep it compressed in special vessels or in liquid form.
Here are the common options for storage (1,2,3)
It is apparent that none of these can be reached by a survivor without very specialized equipment and specific knowledge.
And so, imo no need to touch hydrogen, save for rebalancing the power contained in a 10-vol cannister.
EDIT
If hydrogen were easy, you’d see it been subbed in to solve the problem with renewable energy storage. Use power to crack water and use the hydrogen when needed to generate power. Not applicable because of costs and insufficient tech to lower those.
To be honest, I haven’t actually looked into that part much myself, and was basing my statement off the proposals others have made in the past. Either way, I wasn’t proposing that crafting hydrogen should be possible. The hydrogen isotope being used in fusion weapons would in all likelyhood be deuterium either way, as cataclysm’s magitech elements notwithstanding, fusing light hydrogen is well beyond the scope of modern science. It’s admittedly debatable whether relabeling it is worth the time invested in doing so, but if nothing else it would end this recurring argument for good, and frankly, it has a more sci-fi sound to it
