http://www.thedrive.com/tech/14431/are-hydrogen-cars-the-nex...
1 it would require building out entirely new infrastructure, running up against severe NIMBYism at this point. It's incredibly hard to even build new power lines right now. Try a highly combustible, very leaky gas.
2 it's far cheaper to just strip H2 from natural gas, which releases carbon (unless you capture it, increasing cost), so not carbon free unless you force using electrolysis from renewable power sources
3 Electrolysis efficiency is ~70%, fuel cell efficiency is ~60%, so round trip efficiency is <50%. Much more waste than a battery (~80%). You're both using essentially the same electricity to create the power, but hydrogen is wasting more of it, so will necessarily be more expensive
4 in vehicles, fuel cells end up charging the battery toi power the motor anyway, so the energy loss from the battery is a wash
The one thing they have is range and speed to refuel, but as batteries get cheaper and better that will be minimized before H2 gets big enough to take over.
There's lots of big companies with smart people who are still pushing for this so hopefully they know what they are doing (mostly in Japan it seems)
The nuclear waste problem seems to be not so severe in the age where everything is tracked every second; and it doesn't need to be solved completely - just raise the cost of (illegal) waste extraction to be considerably higher than getting it from alternative sources, and you're set.
I've been surprised by the development honestly. 15 years ago I assumed heavy industry and automotive would make the big decisions about what energy storage tech we go with and the rest of the economy would follow suit and start working with either hydrogen fuels cells, supercapacitors, kinetic storage, or chemical batteries based on the R&D they did.
Instead it's been consumer electronics that led the way and heavy industry is stuck with chemical batteries because that's what worked best on an MP3 player.