"Could help replace energy lost" from a southern California nuclear plant? Ehhh . . . It would take quite a lot of fuel cells to replace the output of that one plant. There are several orders of magnitude in the difference in outputs of a nuclear plant (typically over 1000 mw) and a fuel cell.
Instead of thinking about fuel cells as the best thing since sliced bread, it is more realistic to think about the conditions under which a fuel cell would be competitive. For example:
1. A high rise apartment complex in an area (such as New York City) where hurricanes, tropical storms, heavy tides, extreme snowstorms could cause a power failure to the elevators, making it impossible for many, if not most tenants to reach or leave their units.
2. Backup power supplies for critical industrial processes, such as manufacture of wafers used in DRAM and NAND flash memory. A sudden power failure could destroy or render unusable millions of dollars worth of wafers.
3. Locations where there is a plentiful, renewable source of hydrogen, eliminating the need to extract hydrogen from methane or other carbon based fuels. In this connection, there was a recent scientific paper that demonstrated how certain experimental solar cells can separate hydrogen from water. This process may be years away from commercialization, but it shows that one of the key problems with fuel cells – finding a source of hydrogen – can be overcome.
As I said before, we're looking at years in the future, not today or this year.
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