The US Department of Energy plans to put $1.4 million for studies on the economic feasibility of producing hydrogen at nuclear plants.
Hot on the heels of our recent comments on hydrogen power, and the academic who thinks it is an energy source, comes a press release from the Department of Energy in the USA announcing that it "intends to fund approximately $1.4 million (subject to negotiation) for two projects to partner with industry to study the economic feasibility of producing hydrogen at existing commercial nuclear power plants".
The two projects referred to are from Electric Transportation Applications (ETA) and GE Global Research.
ETA plans to get together with DOE's Idaho National Laboratory and Arizona Public Service "to perform a study looking at the economics of producing hydrogen at existing nuclear power plants using commercially available production technology".
GE Global Research proposes to work with National Renewable Energy Lab and the Entergy Corporation on "a feasibility study of hydrogen production using alkaline electrolysis powered by existing nuclear power plants".
The press release has a quite from the DOE's Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy, Dennis Spurgeon, who said "I believe the results of their studies will bring a good deal of new information to the question of how to use nuclear energy to efficiently produce hydrogen in this country." Unlike the academic who got us started on this caper, Spurgeon clearly does not believe that putting money into nuclear power will stifle work on hydrogen, or perhaps even on fuel cells to turn that "clean fuel" into useful electricity.
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