I don’t have any bookmarked, but I did a quick search and found this one from 2023, which looks at the available data and circumstances to argue that the lab leak hypothesis is stronger than the wet market one. I’m not aware of any evidence that has been published that definitively proves or disproves either.

People seem to have a stronger aversion to the lab leak hypothesis, which I don’t understand. To me it seems like the simplest, most benign explanation. However, it does open up the possibility of sabotage. Maybe that’s the issue.

That seems like a reasonable challenge to the lab leak hypothesis, but I have to defer to my wife on it. She has a relevant background in microbiology, medicinal chemistry, and pharmacology and says that something about the structure of the viruses suggests convincingly that at least one of the COVID variants was of man-made origin. She’s also been working in labs for almost twenty years and has seen too many accidents and near-misses. As a lay person, that explanation makes enough sense to me to find the lab leak hypothesis plausible. Also, I’m not going to disagree with a well-published scientist who is also my wife.

At least the lab leak hypothesis isn’t as sinophobic as the “wet market” one.

I really don’t think it’s that hard to believe that some postdoc in Wuhan screwed up and let it loose accidentally.

I don’t know why, but I’m just kind of associating it with surgery or an injury or some sort of body horror scene.

Those are fair considerations. However, I think in the context of a massive cargo ship, a penalty on energy density might be worth it to avoid the risks associated with ammonia releases. Of course, a nuclear reactor powered ship would run on the highest energy density fuel and is arguably safer to operate than a ship that runs on ammonia.

Hydrogen is definetly harder to store than ammonia and it takes a lot of energy to compress or liquify it.

It takes a lot of energy to convert hydrogen to ammonia and whatever challenges there are to handling and storing hydrogen, ammonia has its own. At least a hydrogen release isn’t a toxic, polluting event.

And I certainly don’t want commercial nuclear ships, because companies will just create “independent” companies that will “mysteriously” go bankrupt once a ship reaches end of life and needs to be decontaminated.

So the taxpayer would have to pay for the decomissioning costs.

Yes. Let’s just get ahead of the game and nationalize shipping.

Hydrogen will leak through a latex balloon, but it is not going to leak through the steel wall of a pressure vessel. The leak risk occurs at the various fitting connections in a hydrogen system, which is overcome by using the proper fittings.

That is an interesting article, but the authors are clear that they don’t know what to expect for hydrogen leakage in a developed hydrogen economy. Sure, hydrogen might be a greenhouse gas, but you can’t really compare it to carbon dioxide because that’s a waste product that we actively dispose of to the atmosphere. You can’t really compare it to methane either because it’s naturally abundant and the LEL is much higher. Relatively leaky valves and fittings are unfortunately acceptable in natural gas service. In other words, hydrogen leakage is barely tolerable, so we have no choice but to employ technology and techniques to prevent it.

It does not leak like crazy. I know because I have experience engineering and operating high pressure electrolysis, storage, and fueling systems for hydrogen. Even when it does leak, what’s nice about hydrogen is that it’s not toxic to humans or pollutive to the environment, unlike ammonia or fossil fuels. Hydrogen leaks are easily mitigated with proven detection and ventilation techniques.

The serious issues in the articles you linked are essentially red tape and public perception, which have to be surmountable if we’re taking global warming seriously.

Lol absolutely not!

Some important corrections

Corrections to what? Does the article get any of these points wrong?

• The article says nothing about opening the doors from the inside; if you are ever in that situation, cybertrucks have a manual release under the rubber mat of the “map pocket” in the doors (source)

That’s an irresponsible, deadly, anti-human design feature, but thanks for the tip I guess.

UPDATE: the battery fire obviously didn’t help, but according to new reporting it turns out that the Cybertruck really did trap the victims inside.

Why run ammonia when you can just run liquid hydrogen? Why run liquid hydrogen when you can just run a nuclear reactor?

I read this article by Yanis Varoufakis that provides well reasoned explanation and criticism of Trump’s plan: https://unherd.com/2025/02/why-trumps-tariffs-are-a-masterplan/

Somehow, the possibility that a plan exists is reassuring.

Got one!

If you can afford the down payment, it really makes a lot more sense to buy your home than rent it.

But, the next thing for me is acknowledging the terrible physics quandary of storing huge amounts of energy in a readily accessible form, without any chance of it releasing in an unintended manner.

Electric car makers are under a lot of pressure to provide more and more range, which has lead to them cramming such strong batteries in.

Even a garage door spring can murder you horribly if it fails. However, it’s a manageable risk that works well for the application. I think lithium batteries are a significant risk and badly suited to the application of long range personal vehicles. Personal BEVs should just have small batteries intended for overnight charging from residential power connections.

It beats having a landlord.