The First Clean Hydrogen from a US Nuclear Plant - Now What?

Is the hydrogen hype real for nuclear?

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Chapters
00:00 Nuclear Hydrogen
01:09 Current Hydrogen Uses and Production
03:50 Nuclear Production of Hydrogen
07:20 Storing and Transportation
09:41 Future and Policy

[gregorymalchuk]

I think that the thermochemical production of hydrogen from high temperature nuclear reactors providing heat to drive the sulfur-iodine process is more promising.

[bxoit]

Kirk Sorensen recommends combining the H with C from CO2 to make gasoline and diesel, carbon-neutral. Advantages: re-uses current infrastructure of engines that burn those fuels (including e. g. road-maintenance equipment, log skidders, etc. etc.); no embrittlement and no seeping out that H2 is prone to.

[Nill]

Great report. Had not heard H2 generation was ongoing at a long existing U.S. nuclear plant.

[ghaznavid]

A comparison between electrolysis hydrogen and Sabatier reaction methane as a storage method for excess energy would be really interesting.

[anydaynow]

Fission plants could also be used to power turquoise H2 production, where CNG and RNG can be used to produce H2 for fuel and ultra pure carbon black for batteries so graphite doesn't need to be mined and refined which is a very toxic and energy intensive process.

[scottkolaya]

After double-checking with lots of zeros the 1, 000-megawatt reactor producing 150, 000 tons of hydrogen, that's an average of 64.3kWh/kg which is a reasonable number to use for electrolysis. That's of course not counting if you have to liquefy it, which adds another 12kWh/kg. 76kWh (since most stations store H2 as liquid now) gets you 300 miles in most BEVs and 1kg gets you 65 miles in a Toyota Mirai FCEV or 57 miles in a Hyundai Nexo FCEV.

[dakshbadal]

This is a brilliant video. Please keep posting more of these.

[the_sideshifter]

From what i know 4th gen nuclear plants could be able to simply heat water up to 1000C which splits it into hydrogen and oxygen (yes, this is also what causes the explosions in a malfunctioning reactor), which should result in an extremely efficient H2 production.

[anydaynow]

This is the best way to create load following fission plants where they shed load into H2 creating banks. H2 can be used by by the fission plants for O2 scavenging and the excess can be sold on the open market.

[jimk]

I think that atomic hydrogen has tons of potential - as soon as we figure out how to get more of the atomic part online…

[thamiordragonheart]

I see one big problem with hydrogen as fuel is just that it's not very efficient round trip. electricity to gas to electricity round trip is only about 40% efficient at best, whereas modern batteries are around 90% efficient and even something like cryogenic air energy storage is 60% efficient and good for long-duration geography-independent storage.

[herzogsbuick]

When you said Nine Mile was making 560kgs a day, I was surprised -- because I had no frame of reference :-) So, I did some calculations and it seems that if its hydrogen were to be consumed as fuel, the plant is only about 60% efficient. To wit:

33, 000kWh in 1kg hydrogen
1.25MWh used by plant
560kg produced per day
23.3kg produced per hour
770kWh energy available from the hydrogen produced per hour

61.6% overall efficiency (770kWh generated divided by 1.25MWh in)

My uniting isn't very cromulent but I think my result is right. Corrections welcome!

[nekomakhea]

it would make more sense to produce hydrocarbons like ethanol or diesel, so that existing vehicles could use non-petroleum fuels without modification. Making fertilizer without being dependent on petroleum imports is the most useful part of pink hydrogen, not transportation that would require expensive vehicle modifications to be used.

[jwestney]

I dream that we will make abundant H2 using high temp heat from small molten salt reactors. Simple. Cheap. Clean. I wish success to the people working on this. 🤞

[tickbirdtrader]

😀Thanks for the informative video. Yes I think that the nuclear / hydrogen / ammonia combination is a winner.

[jm]

Inherently sale pebble bed nuclear reactors can easily operate ar temps high enough to disassociate water. An additional advantage is that they operate at relatively low pressure.

[elrolo]

Is the low grid demand at night time a big opportunity to use nuclear reactor energy to produce hydrogen?

[firefox]

I've only been watching your videos now for about a day, and this one was the most interesting because of all the potential applications and ways this can help reduce GHG emissions.

[Michael_Brock]

Hydrogen coupled with nuclear power or renewable power could be used to store surplus energy during summer days. Then fuel cells could release that energy back at night and during the winter. As well as fueling a lot of industry and transportation.

[Etheoma]

Ah na this isn't what I was thinking it was, I was thinking they were using hydrogen that is generated in the operation of the reactor via radiation breaking the chemical bonds between the hydrogen and oxygen, because that would basically be 100% efficient because the "waste heat" or what you generally run a nuclear reactor to generate can be used to generate electricity.