The usual way to deal with that problem is to coat the inside of the pipe. I don’t know that those coatings are known but its an obvious research topic. There may also be special alloys that resist embrittlement.
Hydrogen does get moved in pipes in various plants. They do know what it takes.
I firmly believe green hydrogen will be a major and essential part of our energy system with use in transportation, energy storage, and dispatchable energy. The DOE is investing $7Billion on hydrogen tech with the goal of reducing production costs to competitive levels. A major focus will be to test the commercial feasibility of using waste heat from nuclear plants to power hydrogen production, with four projects going online in the next two years.
This potentially means 24/7 hydrogen production at low cost. I own stock in Bloom Energy who is involved in one of the projects. It makes a high temperature electrolyzer that has already been shown to be more efficient at producing hydrogen than other technology.
> Operating continuously and providing high-quality steam input, nuclear plants are well positioned to utilize electrolyzers to efficiently produce substantial quantities of clean hydrogen with minimal disruption to ongoing operations. Global demand for hydrogen and its emerging applications are projected to increase tenfold or more by 2050, surpassing the current infrastructure for producing and delivering hydrogen. As hydrogen usage expands from traditional industrial uses to the fuel of a clean future, the need to produce it in larger quantities and from low- and zero-carbon sources is clear.
Careful. The link you supplied says the projects will use electrolysis to produce the hydrogen. They will use electricity to split water, not waste heat. One of the projects will reportedly use high temperature electrolysis, but that isn’t exactly waste heat, which is low temperature (around 100 F, depending on the plant).
That said, nuclear is a good way to produce hydrogen. Nuclear can cleanly make the gas 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, if needed. Using the intermittent renewables, but only when they might be curtailed (as syke6 suggests) greatly limits how much H2 could be produced.
From 2019, France is moving into the nuclear/hydrogen production industry.
Nuclear may prove to be a good way to produce hydrogen, but not for that reason. The energy balance says it is much more efficient to use the electricity directly. You don’t want your nuclear plant generating hydrogen 24/7 which you then burn to make electricity. You’ll go bankrupt.
But the 24/7 can be an advantage. Peak power rates are multiples of night time rates. Nuclear plants make lots of power at night when rates are low. If you use those low night time rates to make hydrogen and then burn the hydrogen at peak hours to make electricity, the economics become a lot more favorable.
Sorry, the waste heat reference was based on another source. From Bloom Energy document.
Producing hydrogen from nuclear power: Solid oxide electrolyzers can have an approximately 31% efficiency advantage over PEM and alkaline when paired with a source of waste heat which can be used to offset some of the electricity demand. Nuclear energy is a good example of a source of low cost power and waste heat. Currently ~22% of nuclear power plants in the US are unprofitable. However, installing an electrolyzer onsite with a nuclear plant creates a new revenue stream by enabling the operator to sell power when wholesale electricity prices are high and hydrogen when electricity prices are low. This can improve plant profitability and secure their role in the energy transition. This application is gaining momentum, with Bloom partnering with Idaho National Labs to test our high temperature electrolyzer with waste heat utilization.
https://resources.bloomenergy.com/hubfs/BE21_22%20Hydrogen-white-paper_D.pdf
As I understand it the waste heat is used to make steam that makes the electrolyzer significantly more efficient. The described National Labs testing was successful.
Nuclear power is not competitive with wind/solar. But wind/solar is intermittent. The plan is to generate grid electricity when renewable supply is low and hydrogen when renewables are high. This allows nuclear to produce profitable energy 24/7 and reduces the need to overbuild wind/solar to account for less than optimal weather periods.
Right. That’s what I just said.
Except for the part about “…burning the hydrogen at peak hours to make electricity.” Times when the price of electricity is high is when you want to sell nuclear-generated electricity directly to the grid, not via an intermediate like hydrogen.
You must sell both to the grid when prices are high, that’s the only way it can work.
Here’s the basic problem: It takes Y amount of kW to break the chemical bonds in what ever your starting material is. You can make incremental improvements to the process, but you can’t use less than Y without violating the laws of physics. Let’s say you can do it with 80% efficiency, which is probably generous. Now you have hydrogen, and burn it in a nice combined cycle plant to make electricity, which is about 50% efficient. So you have at most 40% of your original energy left. So you are DOA unless you can sell the electricity made from hydrogen at least 2.5 times the amount you paid for it and probably a lot more than that once you figure in all the capital costs.
On paper that’s possible. Peak power rates are a lot higher than nightly rates. So there is a theoretical pathway if you use green hydrogen from nuclear to provide peak power. As I mentioned before, if you have dispatchable green power, that means you need much less wind and solar, so there is a possible savings there as well. But replacing carbon-based peak power is what allows the whole thing to work.
From the link above:
Waste heat from nuclear power plants, however, is more attractive since they are also a source of low marginal cost electricity (as low as $20/MWh) Additionally, nuclear waste heat is close to the ideal temperature for solid oxide electrolysis (>600°C), is abundant in its availability, and comes from plants that are often close to hydrogen demand.
They have some strange ideas about how nuclear power plants operate. 600°C is 1112°F. Today’s nuclear power plants operate with main steam temperature of around 540 F. That is the highest temperature steam in the plant. Nowhere close to 1000 F. Water/steam with that kind of enthalpy is not “waste heat” anyway. The real waste heat that comes out of the main condenser after the steam has passed through the turbines is somewhere around 120 F. The water used to cool the main condenser is maybe around 80 to 90 F at the outlet, depending on the plant. The climate and time of year are also variables that determine the ultimate heat sink conditions.
There might be some strange, yet to be built Brayton cycle concept that will attach a high temperature gas reactor as the heat source, where the exhaust of the turbine is hot. But if the exhaust has that much enthalpy, they will likely hook up a boiler and separate Rankine cycle steam circuit to get more power out of the plant. That is how a combined cycle natural gas plant operates, and why they are so efficient.
Sorry if this is long, but the whole concept of 600°C “waste heat” is ludicrous.
You seem to be assuming that the only use of hydrogen is to provide electricity to the grid. In actuality the demand for hydrogen is anticipated to soar for non-grid usage such as in home/business heating (replacing natural gas) and transportation. In other words, there is a non-grid hydrogen market that provides an alternative to the grid.
The current carbon-free grid system is a mix of renewables and nuclear. When the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, virtually free electricity floods the grid, dropping the price of electricity. The power from nuclear is sold at a loss at this time. This occurs frequently enough that nuclear is currently is not commercially competitive with natural gas plants that can also provide power when renewables are low and have the advantage of being easy to shut down when not needed.
Hydrogen production from nuclear (pink hydrogen) is a potential game changer. Now one can keep nuclear on 24/7 at peak production, providing electricity to the grid when prices are favorable and shifting to hydrogen production when not. The hydrogen can then be sold on the non-grid hydrogen market for other use or even stored for grid electricity during the dark winter months (although such seasonal storage is not projected until 2050).
If cheap green hydrogen becomes readily available then Toyota specifically, and Japan in general, may end up being right in their drive to create a hydrogen transportation economy. But even if fuel cell cars can’t compete with BEVs, hydrogen will likely end up being the best solution for carbon-free aviation and maritime transport as well as heavy duty industrial transport.
Um, didn’t you write this? You were specifically talking about the grid:
Apologies for thinking when you were talking about the grid I assumed you were actually talking about the grid. I didn’t realize you had a secret point you were making. I’ll try to keep my ESP engaged in the future.
Yikes, didn’t mean to upset anybody. I was only emphasizing the point because the financial justification for pink hydrogen being made by Bloom Energy (as described in their literature) is to sell the hydrogen directly to industrial users, not plow it back into the grid.
To further get into the weeds, the DOE goal is to reduce the cost of green hydrogen to $1/kg, which would make it cost competitive with “grey” hydrogen produced from fossil fuels. Currently, hydrogen from renewables costs $5/kg. The Bloom high temp electrolyzer was demonstrated at the Idaho National Laboratories to achieve a production of 1kg hydrogen using about 38kWh of electricity (with steam under simulated nuclear plant conditions). Based on those numbers, when the price of electricity drops below about $0.025/kWh nuclear plants can switch to profitably produce hydrogen. Bloom Energy estimates that this price point is reached as much as 50% of the time in some areas.
In their spec sheet for the electrolyzer, Bloom Energy states an efficiency of 40kWh/kg hydrogen if steam is used at temps >150C, which comes out to $1/kg at the above strike price. So there is good data that pink hydrogen from existing reactors can compete with grey hydrogen, at least using Bloom tech. If next generation high temperature reactors are deployed then presumably the efficiency of hydrogen production will also improve.
https://www.bloomenergy.com/wp-content/uploads/Data-Sheet_Bloom-Electrolyzer-10-MW_UPDATED-6.24.22.pdf
Nikola and Plug Power hydrogen fueled trucks
Nikola announcing plans for 60 green hydrogen refueling stations.
The company plans to liquidate its assets after entering Chapter 11 in Delaware on Wednesday. In court documents, it listed assets between $500 million and $1 billion, and liabilities between $1 billion and $10 billion.
The filing caps a struggle by the maker of electric and hydrogen-powered semi trucks get a handle on dwindling cash, slow sales and a collapsing stock price…
Nikola’s shares plunged 54% as of 8 a.m. Wednesday before regular trading in New York. The stock lost 97% of its value over the past 12 months through Tuesday.
DB2