Former President Donald Trump said he opposed green energy Tuesday because hydrogen cars "explode."
During a speech in Savannah, Georgia, Trump lashed out at the green energy industry.
"We have the product for gasoline-powered cars under our feet and Hybrids, and we want to have electric cars,...
Pretty sure the Hindenburg would have gone down the same even if it was filed with helium. Not that the hydrogen helped matters, just the initial problem wasn’t hydrogen’s fault.
No… No, that’s not true. Yes, hydrogen and helium are both lighter than air. But that’s pretty much where the similarities end. Hydrogen is unstable, which is why it can explosively combust when mixed with as little as 4% oxygen. Helium is stable, helium won’t burn. So if it had been filled with helium, it might have crashed. But it definitely wouldn’t have been a catastrophic fireball…
The Hindenburg’s skin was also highly flammable. Regardless of what gas it contained it would still have burned as fast.
The leaking hydrogen was just the initial fuel that the static arc ignited.
One the skin was burning it was over.
Downvotes for being correct, or at least, not entirely wrong. The exact cause may never be determined, but there are a lot of plausible theories that the fire did not start with hydrogen, but rather the outer coating.
If nothing else, hydrogen can’t burn without oxygen, and there’s very little oxygen inside the envelope. Something else has to leak first.
Thank you. After the deluge I did hit up Wikipedia. The skin was coated in flammable material as I remembered. It did say the skin being a major factor was controversial and that the burn patterns didn’t indicate that to be likely, which is fine. But just the blanket downvotes with no one addressing that is annoying. It stifles any conversation. Were I not a naturally curious person I wouldn’t have looked into it further. I’m sure plenty of the downvotes came from people that probably didn’t even know about the static discharge part and still don’t know because they just downvoted and moved on in their ignorance.
It wouldn’t have. However, kind of ironically if it was filled with helium, it would have never gone up. Helium doesn’t have the same amount of lifting power as hydrogen.