Nuclear Production of Hydrogen, Fourth Information Exchange ...

CHANGING THE WORLD WITH HYDROGEN AND NUCLEAR: FROM PAST SUCCESSES TO SHAPING THE FUTURE
Perspectives of carbon taxes will be among the prime incentives for hydrogen and heat using
industries to participate in public/private partnerships created to build prototypes and demonstrate
clean hydrogen production technologies. Oil companies, petrochemical and steel industries are among
the most exposed to additional costs imposed by carbon taxes to their current activities, as well as to
future activities such as the production of synthetic fuels from coal, biomass or other hydrocarbon
feedstock.
The path forward: International demonstrations towards industrialisation
What are the future prospects in the world?
Primary energy needs in the world (~10 Gtoe) are currently met at 7% with nuclear electricity, 38%
with oil, 25% with gas, 25% with coal, 3% with thermal renewable energies and 2% with renewable
electricity. In this context, the production of synthetic fuel from biomass and hydrogen with electricity
and heat from renewable and nuclear energies could efficiently decrease the overwhelming share of
fossil fuels (> 85% today). Fast growing energy needs and awareness of climate change will then foster
the further deployment of nuclear energy and renewable energies, as well as their applications to
non-electricity energy products such as hydrogen and synthetic fuels.
In spite of the emergency of the transition required to a carbon-free energy system, learnings
from the past history of hydrogen and nuclear energy give several reasons to be optimistic:
• The imagination of scientists and engineers to address problems of the society have always
been sharp.
• The same is true for the taste of some private companies to take up challenges and participate
in “first of a kind” endeavours.
• International co-operation offers best prospects for investigating thoroughly the wide range of
options and implementing in time, and where it is appropriate, those that are technically and
economically viable.
Indeed progress is no individual undertaking but a collective adventure. Many laboratories
gathered at this NEA exchange meeting actively co-operate to developing carbon-free energy sources
(nuclear, solar, geothermal…) as well as advanced water-splitting processes to cleanly produce
hydrogen with the former energy sources. International collaboration to such advanced hydrogen
production technologies is very timely and contributions of R&D organisations and industry to this
mission across the world are mandatory. Key milestones along the path forward will include
demonstrations of nuclear hydrogen production with the I-S thermochemical process at the HTTR in
Japan around 2015, and other demonstrations at pre-industrial level in the NGNP in the United States
in the 2020s. Additional demonstrations may come from other prototypes such as the PBMR in
South Africa and the HTR-PM in China that aim at producing electricity in a first stage.
How to best federate national plans into a consistent international technology roadmap? How to
prompt expressions of needs for hydrogen from nuclear energy? How to balance research means
between hydrogen production and hydrogen utilisation technologies? Those are a few questions that
were asked at the MIT-CEA-École Polytechnique Symposium on Nuclear Hydrogen Production that
I have organised in early January this year and that this NEA exchange meeting may help answering.
A new generation of scientists for our dreams come true
Last, but not least, there is an urgent need to train a new generation of nuclear scientists and
engineers to take over from current nuclear workers for operating existing nuclear power plants and
fulfilling our dreams and their dreams as well about future missions of hydrogen and nuclear power
in a world-wide sustainable energy system.
30 NUCLEAR PRODUCTION OF HYDROGEN – © OECD/NEA 2010