Adventures In Failed Know-how: Small Modular Reactors & Hydrogen Buses Entry

In what is popping into an ongoing sequence of amuse bouche articles between my full course meals on issues like iron projections by 2100 and supercritical CO2 hype, I’ve been having enjoyable highlighting hydrogen-for-energy failures. This week is a tapas bar meal stuffed with them. And there’s a bonus facet dish of small modular nuclear reactors too.

My most up-to-date entry was simply this week, once I wrote concerning the Maersk APM Terminals examine the place the group was compelled but once more to dig by the numbers and show that hydrogen autos could be much more costly to purchase and much more costly to function than battery electrical autos. That examine wasn’t only a examine by somebody like me, that examine was performed by the group which owns and operates about 8% of the main business cargo terminals on this planet, below the auspices of their director of world decarbonization, Sahar Rashidbeigi, who I’ll have the pleasure of chatting with once more subsequent week.

Chart of whole price of possession comparisons between present diesel and options of battery electrical and hydrogen for port floor autos.

With 8% of the ports, that implies that they personal and function one thing like 8,000–10,000 container dealing with autos, cranes, and gantries. The untethered ones burn diesel, and APM’s minimize of that’s within the million tons of greenhouse gases a yr, only for transferring containers.

They’re large enough to maneuver the dial on port decarbonization by themselves, and they’re large and influential sufficient to maneuver all ports.

Nice information, and particularly nice as a result of they didn’t fall into a standard lure and take lots of governmental cash to run a hydrogen trial which failed.

Not like the commune of Pau in France. For North Individuals, commune is simply the French model of township, so don’t get all squicky about what they’re getting as much as. They aren’t all communists, hippies, Breatharians, or free love practitioners — though, in any group of 70,000 there are seemingly a few of the above, maybe a bit extra so in France, however maybe not. It’s only a city with about 70,000 residents.

In 2019, they stated to themselves:

“Hey, let’s not trouble to take a look at trials and research on hydrogen gasoline cell buses all over the world that failed miserably each time! What could be the enjoyable in that! As a substitute, let’s hear to those good individuals claiming hydrogen is the reply to all of our issues, purchase a bunch of first-of-a-kind hydrogen buses, and hope the nationwide authorities offers us sufficient cash to gasoline them!”

They favored, apparently, to assert that they have been pioneering hydrogen buses, which is nonsense. Hydrogen gasoline cell bus trials have been undertaken because the 2000s and have all the time failed. Even ones in Whistler, BC, the place Ballard executives wish to ski and dine because it’s simply up the freeway from their Vancouver-area campus, couldn’t be made to work and have been deserted.

What occurred with the commune stuffed with hydrogen buses? Effectively, they have been a whole ache to maintain working, they have been extremely costly to run, and nationwide hydrogen subsidies have been drying up. They’d managed to get two-thirds of the very excessive capital price of €15 million lined by the EU and France, however the 80% inexperienced hydrogen was very costly and the nation’s and area’s purse strings have been being drawn closed.

Why have been they a ache to maintain working? Effectively, hydrogen gasoline cell autos are vastly extra advanced than both diesel or battery electrical ones. They’ve all the identical stuff as battery electrical autos, together with batteries. Additionally they have ultra-high-tech, ultra-high-pressure hydrogen tanks. They’ve plenty of thermal administration tools, as hydrogen will get very chilly when compressed and very popular when decompressed — the alternative of regular gases as a result of hydrogen — and compression ranges are very excessive, so temperature variances are very excessive. One can weld elements collectively chilly and soften issues sizzling. Additionally they have gasoline cells, that are type of like one-way batteries that flip hydrogen into water and electrical energy. They’ve lots of mechanical, electrical, and digital elements which monitor and management all that complexity.

Mainly, each hydrogen gasoline cell automobile is a Rube Goldberg machine, and so they have lots of failure modes. Appears as if Pau’s transit individuals discovered all of them over 4 years.

And so, the commune pulled the plug. Err … plugged in electrical buses. They’ve deserted the trial that they by no means ought to have began. They deserted the trial that merely elevating their parochial rural heads a bit and gazing past their commune’s borders at different trials would have stopped lifeless in its tracks.

They may have seemed so far as China, which in any case is only some Google clicks away for this sort of factor, and seen that there are maybe 600,000 electrical buses on the roads of the nation and no gasoline cell buses.

That is similar to what the close by German state of Decrease Saxony did in comparison with its sibling state of Baden-Württemberg. Decrease Saxony determined it actually wanted to see for itself if hydrogen trains have been a silly thought and purchased a bunch, then deserted them when the plain actuality sunk in. Baden-Württemberg merely put collectively a easy spreadsheet, validated the assumptions, and stated, “Nein danke, wassersstof, you might be thrice as costly as batteries and overhead wires.”

Which a type of German states wasted lots of money and time, as Pau did? Which one did the slightest of research up entrance and requested an honest spreadsheet jockey to run up just a little price comparability?

Just lately, Boston Consulting Group and Oxford International Tasks produced a little bit of a paper on methods to do power-to-x tasks higher. Essentially the most fascinating elements for me have been the charts that made it clear that nearly no hydrogen tasks have been attending to closing funding determination, by no means thoughts into operation. About 12% of the proposed crops made it into operation, however they have been the tiniest ones, represented 0.2% of the proposed volumes.

The paper’s prescriptions type of missed the purpose, because the framing was mistaken. The authors assumed that hydrogen for power could be aggressive, and it received’t be. That’s why solely 0.2% by kilotons made it by to operation. The remaining have been uncompetitive with issues like batteries, grid ties, biofuels, and warmth pumps. Clearly. Numerous delusion in hydrogen proposal land, and that delusion feeds the affirmation biases of hydrogen for power followers.

Sufficient with hydrogen-for-energy failures. Let’s pivot to nuclear power failures, particularly the additionally inflated bubble of small modular reactors. As I stated a few years in the past:

“Small modular reactors received’t obtain economies of producing scale, received’t be sooner to assemble, forego effectivity of vertical scaling, received’t be cheaper, aren’t appropriate for distant or brownfield coal websites, nonetheless face very giant safety prices, will nonetheless be expensive and sluggish to decommission, and nonetheless require legal responsibility insurance coverage caps. They don’t clear up any of the issues that they purport to whereas deliberately selecting to be much less environment friendly than they could possibly be. They’ve existed because the Nineteen Fifties and so they aren’t any higher now than they have been then.”

However nonetheless, within the courageous US state of Utah — whose motto is “Trade” however whose high financial sectors have been monetary exercise and commerce, transportation, and utilities in 2021 — they determined they needed to have a few of that good quaint nuclear electrical energy. That is regardless of not having any nuclear energy crops of any measurement or form within the state and having plenty of wind, photo voltaic, and hydro technology in addition to much more useful resource to take advantage of in its large open, sparsely populated areas.

A bunch of communes … errr, townships … and the Division of Power determined that constructing a promise of SMRs on the DOE’s Idaho Nationwide Laboratory analysis facility could be an ideal thought. Sure, on the finish of this, Utah nonetheless wouldn’t have had any nuclear reactors, as they might have been within the neighboring state.

What’s that? A “promise of SMRs”? That’s the collective noun for a set of small nuclear reactors I’ve simply coined. I’m positive the SMR crowd received’t discover it humorous, however I believe it’s applicable.

As I famous just a few months in the past, the Wright’s Regulation wishful pondering of plummeting SMR prices with manufacturing plenty of them doesn’t stand as much as the slightest scrutiny. In an absurdly greatest case state of affairs, they nonetheless would have been dearer than present wind and photo voltaic in 2040 after hundreds of them have been constructed. The prices have been going up and the variety of Utah townships remaining dedicated to the trouble was happening.

The US DOE had already assured near $1.4 billion and given the agency $600–900 million of it. Frankly, I used to be stunned NuScale hadn’t managed to blow greater than a billion of presidency cash but.

And now NuScale and the Utah townships that have been going to purchase its electrical energy have parted methods. The electrical energy was going to be too costly and the townships undoubtedly had stopped believing the clear lies about schedule and funds. So the effort has been dissolved, and a decade of time and some huge cash that might have been spent constructing wind, photo voltaic, transmission, and storage is behind Utah.

That is only the start of the cancellations for small modular reactors globally. They don’t make fiscal sense, so that they received’t be constructed. It’s fairly simple.

Utah, by the best way, can also be residence to a different full nonsense-burger of a DOE-funded challenge. There’s a coal plant that feeds transmission to LA that unsurprisingly goes to be closed. There’s a city of three,000 individuals there that shall be with out its main supply of soot-stained salaries and pin cash. In consequence, Utah and a bunch of people that most likely ought to know higher put collectively a deal the place they might construct a pure gasoline pipeline and a bunch extra transmission to the city, a bunch of “hydrogen prepared” pure gasoline technology items, a bunch of wind and photo voltaic and photo voltaic farms within the surrounding area, then electrolyze water to make inexperienced hydrogen and put it in salt caverns below the city.

Then, in any case of this large infrastructure buildout centered on a city with no future, they might reuse the transmission over the mountains to LA. Yeah, that’s infrastructure reuse within the USA lately. The DOE, naturally, gave them $504 million in assured loans for this small city preservation graft, a challenge that may finish very badly.

Small modular nuclear reactor and hydrogen-for-energy proposals and trials are all zombie proposals sucking time, effort, and willpower away from the mandatory decarbonization of our financial system. This little roundup is simply an appetizer course for the absurd feast of riches to come back with canceled tasks and crashing desires. Many nest eggs have been counted earlier than they have been hatched. Now they are going to be crushed.