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The_bruce42 t1_isorzx8 wrote

Reply to comment by Spiderbanana in Nation’s First Nuclear-Powered Clean Hydrogen Production Announced. The Nine Mile Point Generating Station, the oldest operating U.S. nuclear power plant, will soon house the nation’s first nuclear-powered clean hydrogen production facility by chopchopped

But what if it was produced through a renewable source like wind, solar, or hydro?

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Spiderbanana t1_isph1jf wrote

Well, that's another question here. Note that nuclear isn't really polluting and so isn't the problem here, is the fact the energy demand you create on the grid is still supplied by dirty sources. While without this added demand then maybe you could have closed a carbon intensive powerplants instead.

Anyway, the problem here stays the same with hydroelectricity.

For wind and solar, it is a good idea, but still not if you use all their energy. See, a powergrid had two components; baseload, which is the current needed all day long, and variable load, which varies during the day/year. To overcome this, baseload centrales, with relatively stable electricity output, like nuclear and dams, are usually built to provide the need. Then you have multiple other electricity sources that are used partially for the baseload but also for the variable load. Like windturbines, solar, or gas powerstations.

The problem with solar and wind is that their production varies in time during the day and year. So you have to design your power supply chain for the worst case scenario. By doing so, and since you can't really modulate nuclear powerplants electricity output neither, most of the time you produce more then you consume. However this energy can't reasonably be stocked nowadays. (Well, you can always pump water up a dam, using it kind of like a battery).

Hydrogen powerplants, in this scenario, offer an opportunity to stock this excess energy by transforming it into hydrogen.

One point I didn't mention earlier, and which goes in favor of the nuclear hydrogen powerplants is that they increase massively the hydrogen production nationally. Reducing this it's price and creating availability. Boosting therefore up the interest into the technology for application that are hesitant due to availability and final costs being higher than for petroleum based applications. (They currently estimate that a subside of 3$/kg produced would be necessary to render hydrogen competitive (obviously, you could also tax carbon emissions to level the game instead)

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