Part 1 of 2 Parts
    Hydrogen gas has been promoted as a good replacement for gasoline to fuel vehicles. Some commercial nuclear power plants in the midwestern U.S. are considering the possibility and potential of the production of hydrogen on site to reduce costs and create a new revenue stream. There is a growing fuel cell industry in the region that could benefit from a growth in hydrogen production.
    The U.S. Department of Energy has issued grants to Energy Harbor and Exelon to use some of the electricity they generate at their nuclear power plants to utilize hydrolysis to separate oxygen and hydrogen from water. The hydrogen can then be used for various application which include fuel cells. These fuel cells produce electricity as they combine the hydrogen with oxygen to produce water.
    Energy Harbor will carry out their production of hydrogen at the Davis-Besse nuclear plant in Oak Harbor, Ohio. This pilot project will cost about ten million dollars. Alan Scheanwald is a mechanical engineer at Davis-Besse. He said that during the project Energy Harbor will collaborate with the Idaho National Laboratory, Xcel Energy and Arizona Public Service. Each of these plan to establish hydrogen pilot projects at their own nuclear power plants.
    Scheanwald was going to do a presentation on the pilot project at the Ohio Fuel Cell Coalitions 2020 symposium that was supposed to be held in late April. Unfortunately, the event has been rescheduled for October because of the coronavirus pandemic.
    Exelon has received a grant of the same size from the DoE to set up a pilot project to produce hydrogen by electrolysis at one of the nuclear power plants they own. Lacy Dean is a spokesperson for Exelon. The intended uses for hydrogen produced by Exelon will be different than the suggested uses mentioned for the Davis Besse project.
     Dean said, “Our goal is to provide an economic supply of carbon-free hydrogen for internal nuclear site use.” Hydrogen has very favorable heat transfer properties and the gas can be used to cool turbine generators as they run. Hydrogen gas can also prevent degradations of some of the nuclear reactor parts.
    The electrolysis technology used to separate hydrogen from water was first developed at the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. Modern techniques using a proton exchange membrane were developed in the 1960s.
    Electrolysis has generally been more costly than producing hydrogen fuel from natural gas. The net greenhouse gas emissions from that process are still significantly less per unit of electricity produced from the hydrogen fuel than would be produced by directly burning natural gas. However, generating hydrogen from natural gas does produce some carbon dioxide.
    If hydrogen is produced by nuclear reactors, the greenhouse gas emissions from natural gas conversion can be avoided. Of course, the use of wind or solar energy to produce hydrogen also dispense with greenhouse gas emissions during production. If hydrogen were to be generated by using electricity from the grid, electricity from many different sources may be used. In the Midwest, most of the grid electricity is from fossil fuels which do emit carbon dioxide.
     If the hydrogen production pilot projects succeed and are able to be scaled up, they could definitely improve the finances for nuclear power plants which are becoming less and less competitive. Scheanwald at Energy Harbor’s Davis Besse plant said, “I see this as something that allows us to continue operating that plant. It helps promote a product that we already make, and we take it to the next level and make another product with it.”
    At Davis-Besse, the next level for their involvement in hydrogen production could be to allow the plant to make more money from the small amount of electricity used to make hydrogen than it might have gotten feeding electricity to the grid at low-demand and low-profit times. This would be a minimal amount for the hydrogen produced by the pilot project which is about a one half of one percent of the output of the plant.
    Scheanwald said that Energy Harbor has had a lot of interest about their hydrogen pilot project from potential customers in their area. A future scaled-up project might eventually make use of a greater share of the plant’s output.
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