Arizona Nuclear Plant to Produce Hydrogen to Power Dangerous Natural Gas Plants.

[NNadir]

The article is here, in Power Magazine: Power-to-Power Hydrogen Demonstration Involving Largest U.S. Nuclear Plant Gets Federal Funding

I want to be perfectly clear about something, however, the proposed system is a thermodynamic nightmare and wastes energy. However the Palo Alto Nuclear Plant is cooled by wastewater, and to the extent that the wastewater to hydrogen to water works, again, wasting energy in a region where there is little energy to waste, it will recover absolutely clean water, nothing in it except hydrogen, oxygen, and perhaps very minor amounts of air pollutants condensing with the steam.

An excerpt:

Palo Verde Generating Station, a 4-GW nuclear power plant in Arizona, is gearing up to produce hydrogen from a low-temperature electrolysis (LTE) system, and that hydrogen will then be used to fuel a natural gas–fired power plant owned by Arizona Public Service (APS). The innovative power-to-power demonstration led by PNW Hydrogen is set to receive $20 million in federal funding, including $12 million from the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies Office (HFTO) and $8 million from DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy (NE).

The funding formally kicks off the demonstration, which will involve multiple stakeholders in research, academia, industry, and state-level government. On a federal level, that includes Idaho National Laboratory (INL), the Idaho Falls-sited laboratory that is becoming a central hot spot for nuclear integration research and development, as well as the National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL), and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The Electric Power Research Institute, along with Arizona State University, and the University of California, Irvine will also collaborate on the project. These entities have been vocally supportive of the DOE’s June 7–launched Energy Earthshots Initiative, which aims to reduce the cost of clean hydrogen by 80% to $1 per kilogram (kg) over the next 10 years.

The project’s private partners will involve OxEon, a company that specializes in solid oxide fuel cells, and Siemens Energy, a gas turbine manufacturer that is heavily invested in decarbonized gas power and wants to produce heavy-duty gas turbines that are capable of combusting 100% hydrogen in volume by 2030. Siemens Energy, notably, is also a key stakeholder in HYFLEXPOWER, a European Union-backed four-year project to demonstrate a fully integrated power-to-hydrogen-to-power project at industrial scale and in a real-world power plant application.

Also notably involved is the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), a public power entity that in May 2021 outlined plans to convert four Los Angeles–area gas-fired power plants to run on hydrogen under the HyDeal LA project in coordination with the Green Hydrogen Coalition. That coalition, which comprises power companies, pipeline manufacturers, and financial firms, is currently working to put the necessary infrastructure in place...

Electricity is a thermodynamically degraded form of energy.

The Palo Alto Nuclear Plant's three reactors are pressurized water reactors that came on line in 1986, and thus were based on 1970's technology. Although they produce the cleanest energy in the American Southwest, they have low thermodynamic efficiency, probably around 33%. The failure of so called "renewable energy" to demonstrate a shred of reliability means that the American Southwest, notably California, is dependent on the combustion of dangerous natural gas, the waste of which is dumped directly into the planetary atmosphere, where it is killing the planet at an increasing rate.

Rather than make hydrogen, it would be far more desirable to ship excess electricity to that gas dependent state, California. California's electricity profile, depending on when the wind is blowing and if there is water in the reservoirs, seldom fall below 300g CO2/kwh. The best CO2 per kwh on California thus produces about 1200% as much carbon dioxide as does the Palo Alto Nuclear Plant, which is roughly 25 g CO2/kwh as reported in most scientific publications. California's carbon performance will degrade further when the Diablo Canyon plant is shut by appeals to fear and ignorance. Therefore there really isn't any room to waste Palo Alto electricity on hydrogen.

A more modern approach, utilizing the high temperatures realized in operable nuclear fuels, would be to build a heat network using nuclear heat which would include a thermochemical cycle in its path, with an overall plant efficiency, were one to include the energy required for desalination, approaching 80%.

[TexasTowelie]

1. What could go wrong?

I'm not an engineer, but I know that the conversion of energy from one platform to another is a process that isn't 100% efficient.

[hunter]

2. "decarbonized gas power..."

In the long term I expect Arizona will be exporting electricity to the California coast to run desalinization plants, trading this desalinized water for California's share of Colorado River water.

Rather than some kind of bizarre and extremely inefficient system of hydrogen powered gas peaking plants, desalinized water could be pumped uphill to California reservoirs whenever there is a surplus of electrical power, further increasing the amount of Colorado River water available to Arizona.

Hydrogen generated by nuclear power will be useful for chemical synthesis. For example, Norway, which currently makes large amounts of ammonia based fertilizers for export using natural gas, is exploring the use of "green" hydrogen as an alternative to natural gas.

https://www.projecthegra.com/

[krispos42]

3. So they need lots of hydrogen to burn to develop a new type of turbine

It looks like their plan is to have the nuclear plants run at 100% output 24/7 and, during periods of low demand, shift excess power from the grid to making and storing hydrogen. Then during periods of high demand, the gas-burning plant burns the hydrogen to supplement the nuke plant. Instead of natural gas.

Am I reading this right?

It doesn't sound totally crazy. Sounds like something we could also be doing with wind and solar. If they can get the hydrogen and its related storage cheap enough, of course.

[hunter]

4. The efficiencies are appalling...

... and only make sense to those who wish to preserve existing business models at any cost.

Imagine a future without gas pipelines and gas power plants... now imagine gas pipelines and power plants are a substantial part of your business.

[NNadir]

5. Nuclear Plants always operate at close to 100% capacity utilization. They are the most reliable...

...form of electrical energy, whereas the solar and wind solar is the most unreliable form of energy, largely because production is random and not connected to demand. It is always the case that solar is only marginally available at the normal peak demand in most places, between 5:30 and 7:00 in the afternoon and early evening. (The electric car fantasy is going to make that matter even worse.) One can see this graphically at the CAISO website giving the electricity information for the State of California. To see how dire the situation can get, one should check this out during the work week, particularly in heat waves. Many days the CAISO site looked terrifying this summer.

However, in contempt of future generations, indifference to climate change solar and wind energy have become enormously popular, despite their extremely poor energy to mass ratio, the reliance on vast networks of copper wires to connect the unreliable systems, and the requirement that redundant systems are required to do what one system alone could do.

Because of this, the government, bowing to the popular mentality, has chosen to make hydrogen. They needn't do it at the Palo Alto Nuclear Plant. They could use electricity from the plant in Mexico to do this. The grid, despite what "green companies" like to represent, does not sort electrons. The statement that the hydrogen comes from nuclear power is to a large extent marketing, marketing for a good cause, nuclear energy, but marketing all the same.

It is extremely wasteful to make hydrogen using clean nuclear energy with the caveat that if dirty water, or seawater, are electrolyzed, some of the lost energy is recovered in the form of desalination/decontamination.

It is true that the mechanism by which solar and wind drive high electricity prices is to reduce the capacity utilization of dangerous natural gas plants by making electricity worthless during those times energy is being generated and not utilized thus reducing return of fixed costs. Batteries, which are also redundant systems also raise costs, as well as increasing the already poor environmental profile of solar and wind. Neither solar, nor wind, nor batteries are sustainable, because they require vast amounts of mining, often of relatively rare elements. (The CIGS solar cells are the worst in this regard, but others are not much better. It will be a vast tragedy if lead perovskite solar cells go commercial. There will be hell to pay if this happens, with the most tragedy falling on the impoverished people of the world while the wealthy pat themselves on their backs for being "green."

Hydrogen is effectively a battery. It is a form of stored energy. The storage of energy, especially electrical energy, is wasteful by one of the most important laws in physics, the second law of thermodynamics. Calling hydrogen "green," even though one sees this so represented with appalling consistency, is nonsense.

Nuclear energy could in theory - a theory I often discuss with my son who plans to pursue nuclear engineering - generate hydrogen as part of a drive to increase energy efficiency. It would do this as part of a heat network of integrating Brayton cycles, thermochemical hydrogen infrastructure, supercritical water, supercritical carbon dioxide and finally Rankine cycles, even Stirling devices or thermoelectric devices. (I wrote about the latter in this space recently.) This would reduce the environmental cost of cooling water, and maximize energy efficiency so as to make energy available to those who lack it or cannot afford it. In this case hydrogen might be considered "green" since it will represent the recovery of energy that would have otherwise been rejected to the surroundings, maximizing the "exergy" obtained from nuclear fission.

Current nuclear power plants however do not, for the most part, have this capability. The materials science of the 1970's was not advanced enough to realize this capability, and most nuclear power plants are simple inefficient Rankine devices, although interestingly, the first commercial nuclear power plant in the Western World, Calder Hall, was designed with thoughts in this direction, heat networks. However, again, the material science of the time was not up to the task, and although Calder Hall operated for better than half a century, saving lives from air pollution while using primitive technology, it did not operate at the design efficiency.