Hydrogen is already used in many industrial processes (~1e8 metric tons/year), including turbo-alternators, while there is not a single ready-to-be-built model of industrial breeder reactor.
Not only was a design ready to be built, it was built. Went online 39 years ago. Produced 1.2GWe at peak. Not only produced power on its own but reprocessed spent fuel from other nuclear reactors.
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.
Facts: Superphénix was a prototype. It didn't reach its goal (reaching the industrial stage). Not a single model of breeder reactor reached it. Mentioning its high availability rate neglects planned shutdowns (planning enough of them improves it). Its load factor in 1996 (just before its shutdown), more relevant, was 0.31, thus well below the minimum viable for an industrial reactor. Some people consider the project to be a success, but no expert or its operator has ever said so (they proclaimed their confidence in their ability to achieve industrial operation by an unspecified date), and its successor, named "ASTRID", launched 12 years later, which was supposed to design and build a reactor for €5 billion, spent more than €700 million on studies alone before being put on hold, so "it worked, but everything has to be redesigned...".
> Whether your grid has nuclear or renewables, it will also have natural gas capacity.
No, turbo-alternators 'burning' hydrogen do exist. And green hydrogen (produced by renewables) is cheaper than pink hydrogen (produced by a nuclear reactor) because the total cost of renewables' electricity is lower than nuclear's.
I don’t see the connection with my comment but hydrogen is irrelevant and contributes less than a rounding error to global electricity generation. The technical components for a hydrogen based energy market do exist but are simply unviable financially. Nuclear also struggles to compete on the basis of price in competitive markets but is a genuinely low-carbon source of electricity. You could argue (I personally would not) that the higher cost of nuclear can be justified on this basis but the fact that hydrogen is an extremely potent greenhouse gas and is prone to leakage means it doesn’t even have that going for it.
The connection is that "it will also have natural gas capacity" seems false to me as backup turbo-alternators can 'burn' hydrogen ( => no natural gas capacity).
> hydrogen
> contributes less than a rounding error to global electricity generation
True, however it doesn't imply that it will remain irrelevant.
> unviable financially
For the time being, and less and less. Bloomberg NEF predicts that green hydrogen will cost approximately 1.2€/kg in 2050. Carbon taxes or oil prices may also play a role as nearly all hydrogen is now produced thanks to some fossil fuel.
> nuclear
> is a genuinely low-carbon source of electricity
Green hydrogen could also be.
> prone to leakage
This is a major challenge for transportation-related usages, especially in small or not-intensively used vehicles. This isn't in the "gridpower backup" role, as mass and volume of storage isn't a major parameter.
I see what you meant now but still see little scope for hydrogen to have a role in the energy sector.
One reason for my skepticism is that I've been hearing optimistic predictions around hydrogen as an energy store for decades at this stage (I'm old) and for a long time believed them but here we are, with little to show for it. In fact, at historical scales, hydrogen's significance as an energy store today is less than it was in the 19th century. As a result, I've adopted "I'll believe it when I see it" approach so I just ignore hydrogen predictions - particularly ones 25 years into the future.
But the main reason is simple physics. It simply has NONE of the physical attributes you'd want in a gas to be used to store energy. It's like if you picked all the attributes you WOULDN'T want in such a gas.
Storage and transport are incredibly expensive and technically difficult. Everything it comes into contact with needs special materials to avoid embrittlement. It's prone to leakage.
It has dreadful energy density. The worst.
It has potent green house gas effects when leaked into the atmosphere.
It's dangerous and highly explosive and burns with such high intensity (and invisibly) that it requires specialist fire-fighting equipment.
Roundtrip efficiency (electricity to H to electricity) is abysmal - a fraction of that of batteries.
In summary, hydrogen as energy store makes no sense to me. And it's completely hypothetical. If we are going to talk about hypothetical approaches to storing energy in the form of a gas, then green methane makes a lot more sense. Not that I'd advocate for either but I see some potential for green methane but none for hydrogen given its physical attributes.
> I've been hearing optimistic predictions around hydrogen
Fair point, same here (I was born in 1967), however fossil fuels are so effective and adequate as energy sources, as long as we ignored/neglected their dubious effect on the climate, that there was no real attempt to explore other ways.
> Storage and transport are incredibly expensive and technically difficult
For the "gridpower backup" application there is no transport needed, and storage doesn't have to be compact nor mobile (those are a major challenge for hydrogen in transportation).
Granted, however we are used to store huge volumes of dangerous materials, some gaseous at ambiant pressure/temp (methane...), even into salt caverns, albeit when we began to do so (in the 1950's) it was quite a challenge.
> Roundtrip efficiency (electricity to H to electricity) is abysmal
Because, for now, those non-nuclear-capable states weren't interested in becoming nuclear-capable. On a standard PWR (the most common type of civilian industrial reactor) cooking military-grade plutonium is easy: charge it, let it start ('diverge') and then run, all as usual, then shut it down early.
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