Tens of dollars a year? Damn they'll surely go bankrupt soon

I don't know the rules in the US, but here in Europe it's illegal to drive with still THC in your system. So could be weeks technically

Saw an hilarious one today (in French) where someone asked GPT the difference between cow eggs and chicken eggs.

Isn't the Airforce already an "out of shape" unit ?

Jesus Professor of Celtic at the University of Oxford.

That's all a title

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)

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 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

You forgot the part where same grandson circumnavigated the globe in a solar aircraft (well, technically be didn't since he didn't flew all the stages, but the airplane did)