Humanity's hope of decarbonizing a fifth of the global electricity grid by burning hydrogen in gas turbines has encountered a quiet but formidable adversary: the metal itself. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials have found that hydrogen degrades the nickel-base superalloys at the heart of these machines at least twice as severely as previously understood, through a mechanism that converts embedded carbides into methane gas, building internal pressure that fractures the material from within. The discovery, published in Nature Materials in 2026, does not close the d