To proclaim hydrogen a viable future fuel is to be a victim of fraud. There are only a few truly 'mad sciences'. Nuclear power is one of them. There will never be enough power to supply modern mechanized society's glutony and vile waste. Be thankful that some people are willing to buck the system and call a spade a spade.

It sounds like you have given up. Taking a ludite stance rules out even renewable energy sources. I have to wonder why (OR HOW) you are torturing yourself by reading this forum.

Take a guess which is more efficient: converting heat into hydrogen, then compressing/liquefying that hydrogen, powering a fuel cell or converting that heat into electricity, transporting it over the grid and charging/discharging a li-ion battery? The latter also has more existing infrastructure.

You guys aren't considering that there is applications where batteries just don't cut it - long-haul trucks (or for that matter long-haul rail; there are plenty of places where electrification of rail lines isn't practical), farm machinery, and the like.

As I understand it, the efficiency of hydrogen storage tanks goes up as the scale goes up, to the point where just running a combustion engine off hydrogen is practical if the hydrogen is cheap enough.

Furthermore, thermal energy from nuclear power stations is really cheap, so even if the process is less efficient than generating electricity and sending it over the grid, it may still be cheap enough for these more demanding applications.

@robert
Absolutely, for long range, you can use diesel as we do now, in PHEV(D) or Phev(h) vehicles.
Even if the storage scales, you still have to transport and distribute it.
It (H2) may well find niches, and these may expand as time goes on, but let's find one niche and start there.

Could you dissolve H2 in a liquid fuel to increase its power density ? (Do they do this already)

"what are the issues transporting hydrogen by pipeline?"

you can't use the same pipes used for natural gas because of embrittlement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_embrittlement

Thermal efficiency of coal power plant is slightly over 30%, for nuclear plant it is lower than 30%. There is huge amount of waste heat available, and if only ¼ of it will be used to produce hydrogen US can say goodbye to ME oil (to say at least).

Hydrogen gas is worst energy carrier and fuel possible, but it could be used to produce ammonia fertilizers, hydrocrack heavy crude, coal, oil shale, oil sand, biomass, refuse into liquid fuel, and thousand other industrial applications reducing HC fuel demand and even creating some.

Seems in Solar Thermal Power Plant, the heat produced during the day is saved to generate power at night.

Is there anyway, this waste heat in nuclear power plant be used for other applications like home heating.

Is it theoritically possible to store heat in a device to power vehicles ?.

The other problem being that the ONLY way you are going to get any range out of hydrogen is with cryogenic liquid freezing. (Getting it down to 20Kelvin, just barely above absolute zero. Aka -423°F)

This makes it considerably dirtier to drive a hydrogen sedan on this than it is to drive an 8 wheeler semi on diesel.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,448648,00.html

So no, hydrogen isn't going to be an option for "long haul".

Perhaps the best option for long haul is going to be a diesel-electric-hybrid. And keeping with that, freight trains have been diesel-electric-hybrids since the 1930s.

To make Hydrogen efficiently you must use heat to get part of the way to dissociating hydrogen to whatever it has been chemically attached. The temperatures described here as "low as 600 degrees" are beyond most standard boiler temperatures and the temperatures of the working heats of most current nuclear plants. Heat from Second and Third generation plants and the coming GEN III+ nuclear fission the operating temperatures are significantly lower, too low, to serve the needs of this hydrogen approach.

It is not only that you need large amounts of Heat; you need that Heat at high temperature for efficient hydrogen generation. The heat is available; the temperatures are NOT.

To operate nuclear fission as a source of heat for these thermo-chemical Hydrogen makers, or efficient electrolysis from water, requires the use of higher operating temperature GEN IV fast nuclear plants which don't exist, and are not slated even for design into the 2020s.

The genius of the present nuclear fission revival, is that the GEN III+ plant designs, operating as advanced, passive PWRs or BWRs, do not require these high temperatures. Nor the safety problems attendant with handling molten salts, or liquid metals such as liquid lead or dangerous liquid sodium, as do proposed fast breeder GEN IV plants would do.

While I heartily recommend the revival of ONE MORE GENERATION of fission nukes, I and many others would object about then going forward to invest billions of dollars to design a GEN IV generation of dangerous fast breeders. This ONE MORE GENERATION of fission nukes is acceptable for a single reason. The reason is to bridge the gap for the interim period between now and the coming clean Fusion era, starting in the 2030s.

The investment necessary for the GEN IV fission fast breeders would compete with the money needed for the first generation of Fusion power plants. We would chose to invest in clean inexhaustible Fusion technologies instead. Without a follow on generation of fission nukes, over time would allow the phase out of all fission nuclear plants at the end of the life expectancy of this ONE LAST GENERATION, in the 2060s.

Furthermore, the Yucca Mountain/Death Valley repository, has enough capacity to store ALL the high level waste from current and this ONE LAST GENERATION of Fission Nukes, with perhaps help from a few "actinide burners" to render the life expectancy of the high level waste to but a few hundred years rather than thousands of years.

The GEN III+ plants are up to three orders of magnitude safer than currently running safe Nuclear plants; and resemble them in using water as the medium of heat extraction and secondary steam generation. These new plants have been designed, and the investment for them has ALREADY been made. Tens of billions of R&D dollars have been made to design these GEN III+ generation. Together with the reform of the licensing and operating laws, the Utilities are buying them like hot cakes. Thirty two plants are seeking licenses for construction and operation of these new plants, up from ZERO in less than two years in the USA. This will double the percentage of nuclear power generation,provide the electricity for the electrified auto fleets, and allow the retirement of most of the oldest and dirtiest remaining coal power plants, reducing emissions even more. (Coincidently meeting all the requirements of Kyoto and Its follow on, and then some, by this single action alone.)

In summary this hydrogen economy is a cull de sac, which we should not seek. Electrification of Ground Transport is where economics and technology is taking us and this is the course we should follow and not fight it. Within a decade Petroleum demand will collapse by greater than 70% with the removal of much hydrocarbon demand for auto and light trucks.

With it, the worries about scarcity and availability and causes for war will diminish. At much lower demand, there are sufficient oil supplies for hundreds of years, to make medicines, lubricants and polymers, and for the needs of aviation and some residual other transport. Or they can be met by bio sources.

==It is not cost-effective nor practical to store electricity in vast quantity on a seasonal basis.==

So you're saying there's no more economical and reliable to store electricity than hydrogen?

And that forfeiting 1/2 of your electricity in making hydrogen, and then forfeiting another 3/4ths of that energy in hydrogen use, losing a net total of 12.5% of your original energy remaining is superior to everything else?

You almost made me think you were being serious.
Good joke :P

Stan Peterson

Very sensible notes, you missed one important technology, the PBMR (Pebble Bed Modular Reactor) which is supposed to operate 99 % of the time.

Can you give some update on it.

I fully agree with you that billion were invested in Gen-III+ Reactors and time to use it.

Just 2 more comments.
Its high time for countries like Russia, Saudi, Mexico to convert all their Oil fired power plants to other fuels, so that precious Crude Oil can be used for Transport.

We dont need a plugin hybrid vehicle that has 40 or 60 or 100 mile range. If you drive 10 miles / day on electricity for 300 days / year
then 10 miles * 300 days = 3000 miles / year which is 25 % of the driving range for a average vehicle.

So a Car/SUV with 10 mile range battery is good enough.
Similarly the Buses and Trucks which go 300 - 400 miles /day can have battery just for 100 mile range.

This will move reduce 1/4 of out Crude Oil needs with lesser investment in Batteries. Ofcourse nuclear electricity can help us power these vehicles.

Every energy-intensive human activity has its environmental downside, including solar, wind and hydro power. However, nuclear is especially pernicious in that there is no *operational* permanent repository for the radioactive waste it produces, anywhere in the world. The above article simply underscores who is really behind the push for the "hydrogen economy": the US nuclear lobby.

Moreover, the example of Iran shows just how small the difference between civilian and military applications of nuclear technology is. North Korea's president Kim Il Sung was personally in charge of kidnapping Japanese citizens and other forms of state terrorism while his father was still alive. Pakistan's ruler Zia ul-Haq was an Islamic fundamentalist who supported the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1980s, with massive financial support from the US and Saudi Arabia. Both North Korea and Pakistan have either weapons-grade nuclear material or actual weapons. Both have covertly traded restricted military technology with third parties such as Libya and Iran. And now Pakistan is on the verge of becoming a failed state in its own right.

Pebble bed reactors would dramatically reduce the risk of military applications. The flip side is their waste is extremely hard to reprocess. Primary uranium ore is already expensive and is expected to run out in a few short decades. Moreover, operations in Germany showed that the spherical pebbles can get wedged in the silo outflow. Clearing the blockage by force led to the destruction of a pellet and exposed staff to high levels of radiation.

Nuclear power is simply more trouble than it's worth, except in the form of geothermal power in selected locations (e.g. Iceland, New Zealand).