Hydrogen will be produced from nuclear power at four demonstration projects in the US, according to the Department of Energy (DoE).

The four pilots will receive “support” from the DoE’s Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy and the Office of Nuclear Energy, but the US government has not provided details of what this means in practice.

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So-called “pink” H2 has not yet been commercially produced at scale anywhere in the world, but there are two potential advantages to making hydrogen from nuclear power via electrolysers, compared to variable wind and solar.

The first is that nuclear reactors can power electrolysers around the clock, rather than only when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. So a 1GW nuclear plant should be able to produce five times as much hydrogen annually as a 1GW solar farm — up to 150,000 tonnes a year, according to the DoE.

The second is that high-temperature waste heat from the nuclear facility can be used to improve the efficiency of solid-oxide electrolysers, meaning that significantly higher amounts of H2 can be produced with the same amount of electricity.

“Traditional and advanced nuclear reactors are well-suited to provide this constant heat and electricity needed to produce clean hydrogen, which could open new markets for nuclear power plants,” said the DoE in a statement.

The recently passed Inflation Reduction Act means that nuclear hydrogen would be eligible for tax credits of up to $3/kg — potentially making it an attractive proposition for reactor operators.

And up to $8bn has been made available under last year’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act for six to ten regional clean hydrogen production hubs across the country, with at least one of them to use nuclear power.

However, there are two potential disadvantages of using nuclear power for hydrogen production: first, it tends to be very expensive compared to wind or solar; and second, it is already needed to help decarbonise the electricity grid, so diverting nuclear output to hydrogen production could be self-defeating in the fight against climate change.

Despite, the DoE pointing out the advantage of using waste heat for hydrogen production, only one of the four demonstration projects will use high-temperature electrolysis, with the other three using low-temperature electrolysers (alkaline or PEM).

The first US pink hydrogen project will be at the Nine Mile Point nuclear power station in New York state, which will use low-temperature electrolysers to produce H2 that will be used as at the plant as a reactor coolant. The facility’s owner, Constellation Energy, aims to begin producing hydrogen by the end of this year, having received a $5.8m award from the DoE last year.

The second project, also using low-temperature electrolysis, will be at the Davis-Besse nuclear power station in Ohio, although operator Energy Harbor has not yet decided how the pink hydrogen would be used.

The only high-temperature electrolysis project, at the Prairie Island facility in Minnesota, will produce H2 from Bloom Energy’s solid-oxide electrolysers from early 2024, with a view to scaling up the process in the future.

Bloom Energy recently announced the inauguration of a 1GW production line, giving it a total annual capacity of 2GW — the largest in the world.

The fourth project, at the Palo Verde nuclear plant in Arizona — which “could start producing hydrogen in 2024” — will use its H2 to produce electricity at time of high demand, or to make chemicals or other fuels.

The DoE has not revealed what it means by “support”, nor any details of the quantities of hydrogen that would be produced at any of the demonstration projects.

To Hydrogen Insight’s knowledge, there has only been one commercial sale of pink hydrogen to date , with very small quantities being sold by Swedish operator OKG to industrial gases giant Linde from the Oskarshamn 3 power station in southeast Sweden.