Or that by far the easiest way to produce massive amounts hydrogen without emitting carbon into the atmosphere is… wait for it… nuclear power.
No, that isn't the easiest way.
The easiest — not best, easiest — way to produce massive amounts of hydrogen is whatever your electrical power source is plus some low corrosion rods in a river.
If you want the cheapest, well, in most cases PV is the cheapest source of electricity — there's variance, sometimes it's wind.
Nuclear is so expensive that it's the same range of prices as PV plus batteries. And when you're using the electricity to make hydrogen, with the hydrogen as the storage system, batteries are redundant.
And no, hydrogen as the storage system doesn't make batteries redundant. Law of conservation of energy. You are talking about using electricity to split water molecules, presumably more electricity to compress and store the collected hydrogen, and then you have the losses associated with converting back to electricity in a fuel cell or conversion to mechanical energy through combustion.
A square meter of PV provides a theoretical maximum of ~1KW at 100%. Even the experimental perovskite cells only get 45% of that. 450W/m^2. Whereas nuclear is measured in gigawatts per reactor with multiple reactors per plant.
Then a storm hits. Far less sunlight. Then something like hail hits. Damage to panels. Then there's the issue of security if someone wanted to cripple the grid.
Nuclear is 24/7, rain or shine, wind or no, impervious to even hurricanes, and already has a robust security and logistics apparatus around it.
I have PV panels on my home. I love the idea of decentralized power. But the hydrogen economy is pretty theoretical at this point. Hard to store for any length of time, comparatively low combustion energy, low energy density overall, etc. It may happen, but "may" is a bad bet for long term national policy. I'd rather push more toward electrified high speed trains than hydrogen.
Needs storage*, what that storage is depends on other factors.
(* there's a "well technically" for just a grid, in that China makes enough aluminium they could build an actually useful global power grid with negligible resistance, but it doesn't matter in practice)
As it happens, I agree with one crucial part of your final paragraph — hydrogen is hard to store for any length of time (not sure you're right about comparatively low combustion energy but that doesn't matter, low energy density overall is accurate but I don't think matters).
I favour batteries for that because battery cars beat hydrogen cars, and the storage requirements for a power grid are smaller than the requirements for transport, so we can just use the big (and expanding) pile of existing factories to do this.
But hydrogen has other uses than power, and where it's an emergency extra storage system you don't necessarily need a huge efficiency. That said, because one of the main other uses of hydrogen is to make ammonia, I expect emergency backup power to be something which burns ammonia rather than hydrogen gas — not only is it much more stable and much easier to store, it's something you'd be stockpiling anyway because fertiliser isn't applied all year around anyway.
But you could do hydrogen, if you wanted. And some people probably will, because of this sort of thing.
> A square meter of PV provides a theoretical maximum of ~1KW at 100%. Even the experimental perovskite cells only get 45% of that. 450W/m^2. Whereas nuclear is measured in gigawatts per reactor with multiple reactors per plant.
This is completely irrelevant for countries that aren't tiny islands or independent cities.
Even then, and even with lower 20% efficient cells, and also adding in the capacity factor of 10% that's slightly worse than the current global average, Vatican City* has the capacity for 11.1 kW/capita: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=0.5km%5E2+*+1kW%2Fm%5E2...
They are of course not going to tile their architecture in PV — there's a reason I wrote "that aren't … independent cities" — but this is a sense of scale.
(* Number 7 on the Wikipedia "List of countries and dependencies by population density": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...)
> Then a storm hits. Far less sunlight.
That's what the storage is for
> Then something like hail hits. Damage to panels.
Panels are as strong as you want them to be for the weather you get locally. If you need bullet-proof (FSVO), you can put them behind a bullet-proof screen.
> Then there's the issue of security if someone wanted to cripple the grid.
The grid isn't the source; if you want to cripple a grid, doesn't matter if the source is nuclear, PV, coal, or hamster wheels.
> Nuclear is 24/7, rain or shine, wind or no, impervious to even hurricanes, and already has a robust security and logistics apparatus around it.
Really isn't 24/7, it's 70-80%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Worldwide_Nuclear_Power_C...
And mis-estimating the environmental risks is exactly what went wrong with Fukushima.
Decommissioned 28 years ago. Because it didn't work? No. Because it wasn't safe? No. Because it wasn't reliable? No, it had a 95% availability rate.
It was taken out of service due to political pressure and legal maneuvering, not technical reasons.
Also, even in a Fallout Future where everything is nuclear powered, hydrogen is still needed! Some 6% of today's global natural gas consumption goes to making hydrogen, and a good chunk of that is for ammonia synthesis, which is necessary to feed eight billion people.
https://www.swri.org/markets/energy-environment/power-genera...
could fit in the employee break room of the turbine house of an LWR and could make it competitive. It’s a big if though.
Why do you speak on topics you obviously know so little about? Where did you get this nonsense?
Fast neutron designs aren't without their challenges, but causing an atomic explosion is not on that list. Hydrogen explosions? Possible. Steam explosions? Possible.
Atomic explosions? Not even theoretically can you get enough U-235 to clump together to do that without cancelling known basic laws of physics.
To build a bomb, you need a purity of 90%+ U-235. Nuclear power plants have what? 2%? 3%? Might even go as high as 5%? Might as well expect a pack of bubble gum to spontaneously explode.
Sodium has its problems (burns in carbon dioxide!) but the chemistry is favorable for a meltdown because the most dangerous fission products are iodine and cesium. The former reacts with the sodium to make a salt that dissolves in the sodium, the second alloys with the sodium. Either way they stay put and don’t go into the environment.
