Can nuclear power plants provide a clean, low-cost way to produce copious amounts of hydrogen? And can hydrogen production offer a path to keep existing nuclear plants operating and provide an incentive to build new units?
Troubled nuclear giant Exelon, facing economic pressures on many of its nuclear fleet, and Norway-based Nel Hydrogen, with U.S. Department of Energy grant money, will look at on-site H2 production at the utility holding company’s two-unit, 3,000-MW Nine Mile Point nuclear plant in upstate New York. Power Engineering reports that the project has support from DOE’s nuclear-centric Argonne and Idaho national labs, and its National Renewable Energy lab in Colorado.
The project will focus on using power from the plant in an electrolyzer to break the strong hydrogen-oxygen bond in water to yield H2 without any emissions. While a well-known approach to split water, electrolysis has proven uneconomic for electric companies in previous examinations. Years ago, the Bonneville Power Administration in Portland, Ore., looked at using its cheap hydropower to make hydrogen but found it didn’t work economically.
Nel has a long history of producing electrolyzers in Norway, dating back to 1927. The company’s major focus today is production of hydrogen as a transportation fuel, which can be easily used by today’s internal combustion engines. It can also be burned in industrial applications. Nel will install a proton exchange membrane electrolyzer at Nine Mile Point, expected to start producing hydrogen in 2022, and tested for use in gas-fired turbines to generate power
Hydrogen is an attractive energy source, as it can be as versatile as natural gas in current technologies, with no greenhouse gas emissions. A 2020 paper from DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy said, “Hydrogen is an energy carrier that can be used to store massive amounts of energy for grid resilience and security and it is a critical feedstock for most of the chemicals industry.
“Today, we primarily use hydrogen for oil refining and ammonia production, but there is a growing demand for it in steel manufacturing and in transportation to power vehicles, upgrade biofuels, and even produce synthetic fuels that may use carbon dioxide as a feedstock.”
But 95% of the hydrogen produced in the U.S. today comes from natural gas, with concomitant carbon dioxide emissions, so it is often referred to as “gray hydrogen.” DOE noted, “A single 1,000 megawatt nuclear reactor could produce more than 200,000 tons of hydrogen each year. Ten nuclear reactors could produce about 2 million tonnes annually or one-fifth of the current hydrogen used in the United States.”
Some energy analysts have been hyping hydrogen for decades, DOE has a nearly 20-year-old program to research and promote hydrogen, and the potential nuclear-hydrogen connection.
But there is considerable, well-informed skepticism about the future of hydrogen. While the element is wildly inflammable, it has less energy density than methane, has safety and cost issues around widespread storage, and would present one of the same major problems for electric vehicles: the need to create an entirely new refueling infrastructure.
Here is Tom Baxter a senior lecturer in chemical engineering at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen on hydrogen: “It is not energy efficient: for every three units of energy provided by hydrogen you have to put one unit of energy in.”
–Kennedy Maize
(kenmaize@gmail.com