Iceland has resolved to become the world’s first economy running entirely on hydrogen, instead of oil or natural gas. The President of the European Commission, the governing body of the European Union, says the EU will spend $2 billion ($1,870,000) to develop a hydrogen future. The US Department of Energy is giving millions of dollars to the automotive industry to develop a fuel cell for cars. President Bush, in his State of the Union address to the US Congress in January, called for “the first car driven by a child born today to be a hydrogen car that does not pollute the air.”

The question is –Where is all that hydrogen coming from? The only practical way to produce large volumes of emission-free hydrogen is from advanced nuclear reactors.

Hydrogen Today

The current world consumption of hydrogen is about 40 million tons a year, 11 million of which is used in the US. Most hydrogen today is produced by breaking down natural gas (methane). But in the steam reformation process, to produce that 11 million tons, 74 million tons of carbon dioxide is released to the atmosphere every year, worsening the greenhouse climate change problem. That’s seven tons of pollutants for each ton of hydrogen.

About a third of hydrogen today is used to make ammonia fertilizer for farms, a third is used in oil refining to make cleaner gasoline (a growing demand since the world’s oil refineries are having to use more heavy sour crude oil for the lack of light sweet crude), and a third used to make methanol, merchant gas and other products.

So the more hydrogen made from natural gas, the more we are just exchanging one problem (increasing dependence on oil, worsening urban air pollution, Middle East geopolitics) for another (climate change, increasing dependence on natural gas).

The fact is a hydrogen economy only makes sense if you have a non-emitting source of hydrogen. That means using renewable energy and nuclear.

Renewable Energy for Hydrogen Production

To generate the equivalent of a typical nuclear reactor (1,000 megawatts) would require 100 km2 or 40 square miles of photovoltaic solar panels, 3,000 windmill turbines at 1,000 kW each covering 40-70 square miles, 30,000 km2 or 12,000 square miles of forest for wood biomass, 60 million pigs or 800 million chickens for biogas. By comparison, a nuclear power unit requires about one square kilometer or a third of a square mile of land area. That is just the land area required.

It does not address the question of whether those renewable energy sources can be developed at a reasonable cost, nor the length of time required for development and construction.

The truth is the global task of reducing greenhouse gas at a reasonable cost is impossible without building new nuclear power plants. Nuclear is the only economical source of energy that does not emit carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas.

The good news is advanced reactors can do both – produce large volumes of hydrogen at low cost and do it without emitting any greenhouse gas or other air pollution (sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide or mercury).

The Future

Even without whole economies (Iceland, EU, USA) trying to switch from oil/gas to hydrogen, the market demand for hydrogen is already growing by 10 percent a year, and is forecast to double by 2010 and quadruple by 2017. That’s huge, and that’s mostly hydrogen demand to make cleaner gasoline and related liquid fuels, i.e., to sustain the status quo.

Advanced gas reactors will take 10 years to develop too, but the payoff is much bigger.

For example, they are cooled with helium, an inert, non-corrosive gas with significantly less contamination, unlike the water circulating in today’s light water reactors. Second, they can be built underground, making them terrorist hardened. They would be virtually meltdown proof because of their physics. When they get too hot, the chain reaction stops automatically and the decay heat dissipates into the ground around the plant. No emergency plan beyond the plant’s fence is needed.

But the most compelling advantage is that, like all nuclear energy plants, there are no air pollutants such as SO2, NOX, mercury or CO2. They also would reduce dependence on foreign oil and gas, reducing the world’s dependence on the unstable Middle East. And a hydrogen infrastructure would be a great “battery” for whatever solar and wind power exists by storing their energy whenever the sun shines or the wind blows.

Farfetched? Yes, a transition to a hydrogen economy would take years. The good news is advanced nuclear energy reactors lend themselves to an easy, gradual transition.

For example, today’s gasoline pumps could be replaced with electrolysis units, running on electricity and water and making hydrogen at the station to put in cars. Electrolysis units themselves have an efficiency approaching 80 percent but an overall system efficiency of 25-40 percent, compared to the 33-50 percent efficiency of today’s electric system. The implementation could be staged over time as the number of hydrogen cars grows.

Later advanced reactors which operate at 850-950¼C (1,562-1,742¼F), compared to today’s light water reactor operating at 315¼C (599¼F), are hot enough to split water into hydrogen and oxygen in a process called thermo-chemical splitting. Such reactors would reach 50 percent efficiency. For the first time, hydrogen would be created in very large volumes at low cost that could be piped to today’s gas filling stations.

The unique combination of nuclear energy and hydrogen can solve several issues at once – energy security and diversity, clean air, and reduced climate change.