Japanese RED Hydrogen

According to the video, carbon free red hydrogen can be produced by a novel nuclear power plant design. Maybe that’s why Toyota is banking on hydrogen fuel cells instead of on batteries. Even if it works it will be at least a decade behind BEVs.

Japanese RED Hydrogen Breakthrough Will DESTROY Oil & Gas!

The Captain

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The video gets a few things wrong about nuclear power, but overall it shows how nuclear can be used to produce hydrogen. I had a few problems with the narrator constantly emphasizing Japan, as if Japan is the only country working on this.

China recently started up a 200 MW demonstration plant using this high temperature gas technology, although I believe the plant only produces electricity.

Here in the US, X-Energy is developing reactors using TRISO fuel, as described in the following thread from earlier this month.

X-energy also recently started work on a fuel plant in Tennessee.

Back to the YouTube video, I like the idea of the Iodine-Sulfur process for producing hydrogen. I can see it being more efficient than electrolysis.

I don’t know if hydrogen is going to become a big deal in the future, but if it needs to be made cleanly, then nuclear power is the best way to do it. Large scale chemical plants generally want to run 24 hours a day to be the most efficient. They don’t want to shut down if the sun isn’t shining or if the wind dies down.

  • Pete
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The Department of Energy is working with four US nuclear power plants to produce hydrogen in separate test projects. The four plants are: Nine Mile Point in New York, Davis-Besse in Ohio, Prairie Island in Minnesota, and Palo Verde in Arizona. The plants will use electrolysis, either low or high-temperature, as the technology.

  • Pete
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Monsanto developed Prism technology to recover hydrogen from waste streams. That implies that any process that produces hydrogen in an equilibrium (as in the case of ammonia) can be used to capture the hydrogen and drive the equilibrium.

I would expect water to dissociate to hydrogen and oxygen at very high temps. Trapping the hydrogen could drive the process. But the temps involved require special technologies. Someone must be working on it.

Electrolysis should work but people think there are more efficient ways to make hydrogen.

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Probably. On the other hand, could electrolysis be used as a way to use up (basically storing) excess electric production?

For example, rather than figure out how to vary the production coming out of a nuclear plant, run it at a constant rate, then when it’s producing more than the demand, send the excess to a hydrolysis plant. Or do the same for wind production. Rather than putting the brakes on unneeded windmills, let them run and use the excess to product hydrogen. (Charging batteries or pumping water up hill or heating salt beds are other ways to deal with excess power.)

We’re constantly stuck in the mode of figuring out how to create dispatchable power on the grid to deal with the difference between baseline production and current demand. Why not find uses for the excess power instead? You can then run more base load plants, which are typically less expensive to operate than peaker plants.

–Peter

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More developments on the idea of using nuclear power to produce hydrogen.

The NuScale small modular reactor design is furthest along in the NRC licensing process for these smaller SMR style plants. The 50 MWe reactor is close to getting final NRC design certification, with a later upgrade to a 77 MW version planned.

Since the NuScale SMR is a pressurized water reactor, operating at normal temperatures and pressures, and using standard UO2 fuel, the hydrogen production technology will most likely be electrolysis. The first link above mentions solid oxide electrolysis.

  • Pete
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