Submitted by chopchopped t3_y67tc9 in Futurology
And they said " it's too hard and impossible to produce hydrogen to supply for transportation and infrastructure."
-Elon musk maybe
Eh, PCEVs and BEVs wont compete for some time. They are both superior to ICEs and have their own pros/cons. It’s likely we will see a mix of both going forward.
You say for some time. But when that time comes hydrogen will be a leading factor. Electric vehicles are great but for logistics not so much.
It’s not the production that’s the problem, it’s the transportation. This solves nothing.
Respectfully, No. it’s matching supply and demand for greener H2. Thanks to steam methane reformation, H2 can be easily produced and packed into ammonia via the Haber-Bosch process for easy transportation. However this process uses methane as the feed stock and therefor a big carbon footprint. Using a strip of nuc power and electrolysis facilitates the same thing with almost no carbon footprint. Furthermore the waste hear from the reactor can improve the efficiency of the conversation.
I did not understand the last sentence. Can you elaborate, please?
Some forms of electrolysis (especially solid oxide) require heat that they can make themselves - but at the cost of reduced efficiency. If they can get the heat “free” somewhere else - such as near an industrial process or generator that gives off heat, the efficiency of the entire process can approach 100% - hence why they proposing collocating nuclear and electrolysis .
I just want to know if they built anything on six mile island and if they are building the next one on twelve mile island
They're going by squares, so the next one will be 81 mile island
Six Mile, Seven Mile, Hartwell, Gratiot
The next one will be sixty nine mile island followed by four hundred and twenty mile island.
I like the initiative to produce hydrogen for transportation and energy storage. But we should decarbonize the electrical baseload grid before using its assets to produce hydrogen with.
A nuclear power plant already has 0 carbon output. No reason we should stop it from doing this.
If we had more, we could decarbonize the grid easily and actually have a robust power grid. It's too bad the fear mongering campaigns have worked so well.
Sorry if I was not clear on what I wrote. I'm not speaking about nuclear power plants being carbon intensive, I say that if you still run carbon intensive powerplants (like coal or gas) alongside for your baseload electricity needs. Globally it comes back to the same as using your carbon intensive powerplants to produce hydrogen. You even add one additional poorly efficient factor in the mix compared to having your carbon intensive energy sources directly used for transportation (engines).
>A nuclear power plant already has 0 carbon output.
Not to be persnickety, Just helping create a better argument, but that's not entirely true there, It's neglible compared to other baseload supplies, but Backup SEGs, maintenance vehicles and such do make it >0. Be better argument to say near zero, or a similar caveat. If anything to block that grasping-at-straws argument from derailing a discussion.
It absolutely does make a cleaner watt, esp compared to Coal which will still be the worst in that aspect. Aside from emissions from the boilers, you have the trains bringing in the coal, all the equipment to mine it (though the conversion to electric is pretty cool, and late to the party imho). Another good point to bring up is how the US Navy has 83 Nuclear powered ships floating in the ocean, showing a properly maintained and serviced generator can, and will, be a very safe option. I mean not for the sailors, because of all the cancer that navy nukes get, but that's more due to everything around the reactors. And troops are disposable, Right every asshole who voted against the PACT Act?
Unfortunately we'll likely not see full decarbonization solely from generators due to the need for peaker plants that can fire up quickly to meet unexpected demands. Nuke for base load, Solar for daytime peak, Wind for evening peak, Hydro for grid incursions and any gaps that need filled quickly, and finally natural gas to back them all up. I do hope we can change that combination within my lifetime, but I'm pressing X for doubt on that reality appearing anytime soon.
With current technology, it’s doesn’t get much cleaner than the good old reliable atom ☢️
to be persnickety, they also they have employees that generate carbon and some such as security guards have guns that when discharged produce carbon, etc
>A nuclear power plant already has 0 carbon output.
>
>This is a lie the processes for mining and refining uranium ore and making reactor fuel all require extremely large amounts of energy. Nuclear power plants also are built with large amounts of metal and concrete, which require large amounts of energy to manufacture. Fossil fuels are used for mining and refining uranium ore, and fossil fuels are used when constructing the nuclear
power plant, so the emissions from burning those fuels should be
associated with the electricity that nuclear power plants generate.a lie
Useless comment. If you're going that far, then there isn't a source of power on earth that meets the green requirements.
Including solar, wind, batteries, etc all of which are more carbon intensive to manufacture at scale, especially factoring in mining and refining base materials, than nuclear power.
No, it is not useless, it is pointing out the obvious lie that the nuclear industry keeps promoting that nuclear fission is somehow "carbon free"
By your logic solar and wind are not carbon free
The plant can do both.
But not at the same time. Electricity used to produce hydrogen is not free energy, is electricity that won't end on the power greed. And as long as you have to supply the power grid with a carbon intensive energy source, if you use your nuclear power plant to produce hydrogen, in the end of the chain it comes back to the same than using your carbon intensive energy source to produce your hydrogen.
It's a good solution only if your electricity grid is already clean for baseload needs.
The waste heat from nuclear power generation has been used to manufacture hydrogen for years.
You could say this article is old and/or misleading, but in the internet age that’s kind of a given.
In any case, this is energy that is otherwise wasted or used for something else. It won’t affect the amount of electricity generated or used. The only thing consumed is water, which yeah will also be a problem in the coming years.
But then why not use it directly for district space heating/cooling while HVAC are running full blast all around ?
But I get your point, I thought they where using the electricity from the powerplant directly through an hydrolysis process.
Because there is probably not a significant local demand for that waste heat near the plant.
I don't know enough about it, but it sounds like hydrogen is being added to natural gas for home heating which appears to be an easy additive and seems to be gaining popularity.
Hydrogen can be produced from natural gas (blue hydrogen) or through hydrolysis (green hydrogen) if I recall correctly. Then can be either used in gaseous form (complex storage and transportation industry is not ready for that yet, although they are working on it) or in liquid form when mixed with amonnia.
Anyway, what I was starting is that, if you still need to run a gas powerplant alongside for baseload electricity production. All you're doing in your example is using electricity to produce hydrogen through a reaction (not 100% efficient) and using it mixed with gas for heating. Wouldn't it be more efficient to use the equivalent of gas needed to produce electricity in order to compensate the nuclear electricity required for hydrogen production directly for heating instead of adding an unnecessary step ? Surely, it's fantastic, but only once you don't need a carbon intensive (coal, gas,...) source for electricity production.
Not sure if this hydrogen being added to natural gas is being used for producing electricity or sent with gas to homes or both, but if sent to homes for heating then it's more efficient for it to be burned in the home than to be used to generate electricity then incur generation and transmission losses.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your comment so I’ll try best to explain it. I’m not an expert.
Hydrogen is not being added to natural gas.
Natural gas is broken down using a thermal process and you get hydrogen fuel. The process is called Methane Pyrolysis.
Then you can use the stored energy in hydrogen fuel like a liquid battery. For example Hydrogen fuel cars have a platinum plate that pulls the electrons from the liquid and use that to generate an electric current to power the electric motor.
Hydrogen consumes electricity, it makes no sense to mix it to produce electricity. But using gas (if on the same power grid theee is gas an nuclear, whatever you're using comes back to using the dirtier source to create electricity because you're creating the electricity demand this way for the to dirty source to start open) to generate hydrogen and then mix it with gas for heating makes no sense. You lose a lot of energy content along the way.
But what if it was produced through a renewable source like wind, solar, or hydro?
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)
Thanks for the comprehensive response!
Nuclear thermal electrolysis is over 85 percent efficient because your using that raw thermal heat to push the H20 molecules up the energy gradient then all you need is a very small amount of electrical current to break down the molecules into hydrogen and oxygen
Interesting because I have heard that electrolysis efficiency is poor, but it never occurred to me that it is entropically favored so should be better at higher temperature
Yep, the tipping point at which water spontaneously decomposes with only heat is 2500K, which is orange/white hot, or approximately the melting point of steel. If the gases can be efficiently separated, then the activation heat can be regenerated via a heat exchanger or turbine to convert that heat into electricity instead.
Freaking cool. With how efficient that is, would it make sense to them use the hydrogen produced on site to then power another generating station like a green hydrogen power plant? Thereby doubling the electricity produced?
OP has cracked the code to get upvotes about H2, just add nuclear in the title on this sub.
An “article” with no date and no byline.
Are you doubting that this is real? I live in this city and know for a fact that it is.
No, I don’t doubt electrons are being wasted on a fools errand. The physics don’t lie, but politicians do.
Check OPs post history, he is a H2 lobbyist.
It is just straight up pro-nuclear propaganda
Good. We need a lot more of that if we hope to beat climate change and still have reliable energy.
This thread is pretty much nothing but pro-nuke trolls spreading propaganda
So we just need to make a mini sun and we win right haha... But this is a good start for the future
That's fusion😊
George W. Bush was right all along!
https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/06/20030625-6.html
It baffles me that this idiot warmonger for oil would look for a future in hydrogen.
a lot of people figured it was a red herring, keep all the petroleum distribution in place, discourage green energy.
they never mentioned it again, sort of like his manned mission to mars the following year, or the switch grass biofuel a couple years later.
It was safe to be pro-hydrogen because there was no risk it was going anywhere in the next decade. Definitely a distraction.
Hydrogen is oils future. You need 4X methane (natural gas) to produce the equivalent H2.
Hopefully not for long anymore.
He always was.
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Finally, a step away from these batteries and towards actual clean energy!!
The following submission statement was provided by /u/chopchopped:
SS-In order to meet the increasing global demand for hydrogen, the U.S. DOE is looking for ways to scale-up hydrogen production, including nuclear. Nuclear power plants can produce hydrogen in a variety of methods, taking advantage of the constant thermal energy and electricity it provides. As Joe Dominguez, president and CEO of Constellation Energy, described, “Clean hydrogen is an essential tool in addressing the climate crisis, and in a few short months we will demonstrate to the world how essential carbon-free nuclear energy is to unlock its potential.”
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/y67tc9/nations_first_nuclearpowered_clean_hydrogen/isnqil6/
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Everyone is having very serious conversations about energy and environmental consequences and theres me sat in the comments section thinking "hopefully they don't let their safety officer nap at the controls and eat pink frosted donuts, that'll give them a bad reputation"🤦♂️
Kinda sounds like eating extra cheeseburgers to help provide energy for sticking to a weight loss plan.
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Lets see hydrogen loves to leak as Artemis has shown us. It also is extremely explosive. What could go wrong? I would suggest nuclear power for desalination.
Hydrogen: Pretending to solve problems so that nobody can Actually solve problems since 1991.
Hydrogen is a greenhouse gas and is impossible to contain. Best estimates are that from production to final use there would be a 10% loss in all hydrogen produced. Hydrogen could turn out to be our worst mistake.
What's the atmospheric lifetime of hydrogen?...
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Link fixed. Try again.
What this article doesn't take into account is what I brought up earlier, the atmospheric lifetime of hydrogen. Hydrogen lasts between 4 - 7 years in the atmosphere, while CO2 lasts between 300 - 1000 years. So while hydrogen may short term be worse pound for pound, CO2 is still far more of a threat. Furthermore, C02 is released as a byproduct of combustion as opposed to accidental leaks in the case of hydrogen, so the volume of CO2 being released into the atmosphere is far more than hydrogen even if hydrogen were to become widespread.
Nuclear fission is not clean or "carbon free" at all, this is pure propaganda.
In these poison factories produce some of the most dangerous toxins known to man which we will have to pay to guard and manage for timescales that are longer than there have been humans.
Solar, hydro, tidal and wind are the answer to producing hydrogen that is actually green. These dangerous antiques should have been retired decades ago, it is super irresponsible to keep these gigantic liabilities running.
Some of the newer salt reactors are actually pretty awesome, but I think everyone can agree that making nuclear energy to make h2 gas to create even less energy and dealing with the radioactive waste produced in the process is just plain stupid. I think we’d all be way more onboard if it was a solar farm, or wind turbines, but using hydrogen, a very reactive gas that requires tons of energy to make on a commercial level, is just idiotic when we have electric cars.
Nothing is carbon free. But nuclear is tied with wind as the cleanest source of energy. (source: IPCC table on page 7)
Only if you do not account for the enormous carbon footprint of guarding and managing the super dangerous nuclear waste these poison factories produce, for the next 20,000 years
No that is considered in the IPCC report on lifetime emissions. It’s not enormous. Don’t make up nonsense.
The IPCC assumes that after a couple of years that this super dangerous, difficult to manage radioactive waste just magically disappears into a hole somewhere with zero management or oversight, which is absolutely ludicrous.
The reality of it is that it is going to remain a huge, expensive, liability that needs to be constantly managed and guarded for many thousands of years to come, at the taxpayers expense.
>”just magically disappears into a hole somewhere with zero management or oversight”
It’s not magic, but that is pretty much how deep geological repositories work.
This is not a viable plan, it is vaporware that the nuclear industry uses as an excuse to irresponsibly keep making a super dangerous poison at the taxpayers expense. Even if it was actually built, (which would be super irresponsible) you can't just shove it into a hole and walk away, it will need to be guarded and managed a great expense to the future taxpayers.
It is actually built lol. Finland is finishing one right now. The US partially built one but uninformed people like yourself made sure it was canceled. We burn plenty of “clean coal” instead, great job.
The “hole” doesn’t need to be guarded. It would be really obvious if someone was trying to dig through a kilometer of bedrock.
Yeah, they built on in the USA too, but it is likely never going to be used because there are a number of flaws and obvious safety concerns.
Until it is actually implemented, it is nothing but vaporware.
Also, it's not like they are going to just chuck it in a hole and walk away if they ever actually decide to use it. That would be incredibly reckless and irresponsible. No it is going to need to be guarded and managed for many thousands of years, at the taxpayers expense.
They put an extremely small amount of resources into guarding the spent fuel. The inherent safety comes from engineering safe and secure facilities.
You are overstating this carbon footprint.
Except the waste products from nuclear don’t go away for eons. Anything that makes a place cancerland for 75,000 years isn’t exactly clean.
I would say “if we could deal with the waste” but we all know that’s never going to happen. If we can’t solve a problem in a year we tend to just say screw it and let people suffer. The problem is following that pattern means cancer and radiation poisoning for a lot of people who wouldn’t have that if we just built some wind farms and called it a day.
Long term storage for nuclear waste is deep geological repositories.
Geological repositories that nobody wants to host and that will eventually leak.
What incentives do you give any location that hosts these? Free cancer meds until 79000 AD? Lead underwear?
I’d be more worried about the cancer you will get from the fossil fuel particulates you are breathing right now. Billions of dollars have been spent researching deep geologic repositories, but no amount of research is enough to overcome ignorance.
It’s not a binary choice between nuclear and fossil fuels. They are both really bad ideas that make lots of money for the companies running it and the politicians that support them. They’re both horrible for the environment, just for different reasons. And they’re both industries run by corrupt assholes that have bs scientists playing down the harms and corrupt, bribe taking politicians. Both will literally kill you if you get in their way, too. As in assassinate you, shoot you, etc. So, no, I’m not buying any argument about how green nuclear is when Silkwood and Three Mile Island are both things that happened. Nobody killed whistleblowers over windmills as far as we know. Nobody has needed to trot out a politician to downplay a radiation release with a solar panel. This stuff happened. The only reason we’re talking about nuclear right now is because most of the folks alive when the scandals happened are so old their memories are shit. The folks who weren’t adults when that happened have no memory of this stuff and, therefore, have no idea how messed up the players in the nuclear industry are and how indifferent they are to actively or passively killing us all for a dollar.
BTW my issue with Three Mile Island isn’t necessarily that they had a meltdown. It’s that they lied about it and got President Carter to do a dog and pony show to give them cover. That’s enough reason for me to call bullshit on that industry.
EDIT: This is all related to a larger problem we Americans have: a lack of historical memory. We’re taught little about history until we get to college. The little we are taught is meant to make us feel good about being Americans. This means things that don’t make us look good are systematically avoided, downplayed, or spun. This includes how American industries and industrialists have actually behaved. As a result, we glorify people and industries that do not deserve the veneration and deference we give them.
Right now it isnt nuclear vs fossil fuels. Renewables are not yet ready to replace 100% of fossil fuels so nuclear is needed as well.
This is the worlds current energy mix.
This was published in 2019, unfortunately it went largely unnoticed: >”these two countries could have prevented 28,000 air pollution-induced deaths and 2400 MtCO2 emissions between 2011 and 2017. Germany can still prevent 16,000 deaths and 1100 MtCO2 emissions by 2035 by reducing coal instead of eliminating nuclear as planned. If the US and the rest of Europe follow Germany's example they could lose the chance to prevent over 200,000 deaths and 14,000 MtCO2 emissions by 2035.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421519303611
And by your logic we should also get rid of hydro, which makes up the majority of renewable energy. Because [insert conspiracy here] could do something bad like that one time.
Considering we’re actually building solar and wind right now and nuclear takes years to setup, it’s safe to say we can scale the mix of renewables faster than nuclear.
Hydro has a lot of issues, too. But those are moot since climate change may eventually make hydro hard to maintain.
Uh, they did bad things at least twice that we know of. And no state in the US is willing to build the geological containment facilities because they aren’t interested in making their groundwater radioactive. Heck, out here in Washington state we can’t even clean up a contaminated site without constant political fights. Why would anyone want the same issue? And it’s going to be an issue anywhere. Not hypothetically… it’s pretty much guaranteed.
So, no, it’s not between nuclear and fossil fuels. It’s where the money is for large companies that will get the contracts… but it’s not in the best interest of anyone that isn’t keen on getting leukemia.
>”It’s safe to say we can scale the mix of renewables faster than nuclear.”
Not to 100%, we dont have the grid storage. Nuclear provides base load which wind/solar do not. They are not in competition with each other, they are both needed to eliminate fossil fuels.
>”they aren’t interested in making their groundwater radioactive.”
Thats fake news, Yucca had plenty of research showing groundwater would not be impacted. But it’s easy to just make sh*t up since everyone is already irrationally scared of nuclear.
>”Heck, out here in Washington state we can’t even clean up a contaminated site without constant political fights. Why would anyone want the same issue? And it’s going to be an issue anywhere. Not hypothetically… it’s pretty much guaranteed.”
You realize nuclear weapons production done in the 1940s is completely unrated to nuclear energy today right?
Not to pick apart your argument or whatever but most nuclear byproducts will last far less time than humans have been around. Plutonium-239 is 24000 years though.
Just wanted to help people understand.
I’d like to add that we could reprocess the fuel like other first world countries if we were ever able to establish a repository.
Edit - words. 24000 year half-life.
What about all the dirty fule rods from the plant. That's not very clean at all.
It’s a lot easier to encase a few rods in concrete and put them in a concrete bunker for storage until we can develop the teck to get rid of them, than it is to try and capture all the CO2 we produce everyday. Or we can all just make fun and do nothing. From my last few days I think most Americans don’t care at all about trash, waste, and quite literally anything that is healthy. To each their own.
What about wind and solar?? It seems to me, it's not so safe waiting to explore the effect of long term storage (many thousands of years). In hopes we can find a safe way to dispose of very "hot" material.???
It's so much less of a risk than all the externalities of coal that it's not even in the same ballpark. It's not renewables versus nuclear but renewable AND nuclear. They pair well together.
I’m not against solar or wind. But with nuclear power you know how much electricity you will be getting 24/7. Also, with resources you must displace a ton of resources for both wind and solar.
Nuclear waste storage is a non-issue. I am impressed how well the oil and natural gas companies have made people hate nuclear when it is quite literally the best base-load, 0 carbon emission energy we can get.
Seriously, had anyone heard of the ash pits from coal? Way more concerned about that.
>Nuclear waste storage is a non-issue.
This is incredibly ignorant and just straight up wrong.
It is a non-issue. The vaults currently in service have had little to no issue containing the waste, simple as. This is indisputable, no matter how much you drink the BP/Shale kool-aid. Now, when you compare the relative effects of nuclear waste storage and ash pits and CO2 release from fossil fuels, you'd probably not comment on the topic again. Nuclear is the way forward.
>It is a non-issue. The vaults currently in service have had little to no issue containing the waste, simple as.
This is absolutely false, a Holtec cask is only good for about 100 years, which, in the context of super dangerous radioactive waste that will need to be managed and stored for tens of thousands of years is not even close to being a "non-issue".
Do we just keep making bigger and bigger casks like some sort of radioactive russian matyoshka doll to put the failing, now radioactive casks into?
You obviously either have no idea what you are talking about, or you are just straight up lying.
There is no viable plan to deal with this super dangerous waste.
Short answer is no. No we don’t. You can simply submerge the cask in water and put the fuel in a new one.
Not to mention all of the many contaminated sites scattered all over the globe related to the mining, refining, waste storage and fuel fabricating. Far too numerous to list.
It is green though
Hold up though. Let’s use the metric of “which energy source had killed the absolute least amount of people” and see where nuclear sits, oh that’s right.
But it sure is scary amright?
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There is currently no viable plan to deal with this waste, which will have to be managed and guarded for time scales that are longer than there have been humans, tens of thousands of years, at the taxpayers expense.
This is not true. There are plenty of viable plans. The easiest of which is reprocessing.
Reprocessing is not a solution, it is prohibitively expensive and compounds the waste problem tenfold and creates a whole lot of more very dangerous radioactive waste in ways that make it even more difficult to manage, while being a huge proliferation risk while only recycling a small portion of the waste.
Don't forget about the incredibly dirty business of mining, refining and producing the fuel. Super toxic poison, spread out over many, many sites.
chopchopped OP t1_isnqil6 wrote
SS-In order to meet the increasing global demand for hydrogen, the U.S. DOE is looking for ways to scale-up hydrogen production, including nuclear. Nuclear power plants can produce hydrogen in a variety of methods, taking advantage of the constant thermal energy and electricity it provides. As Joe Dominguez, president and CEO of Constellation Energy, described, “Clean hydrogen is an essential tool in addressing the climate crisis, and in a few short months we will demonstrate to the world how essential carbon-free nuclear energy is to unlock its potential.”