High-Temperature Reactors for Green Hydrogen
- December 13, 2021
- Posted by: OptimizeIAS Team
- Category: DPN Topics
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High-Temperature Reactors for Green Hydrogen
Subject – Environment
Context –
Concept –
- High temperature nuclear reactors (HTRs) represent a novel way to produce hydrogen at large scale with high efficiency and less carbon footprint.
- High Temperature Reactor (HTR) technology has been developed from the late 1940s in US and Germany.
- The present Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR), operating at >7500 C, has over the years, evolved into a new reactor concept, designed to be a very efficient and safe system.
- It is a helium-gas cooled, graphite-moderated, thermal neutron spectrum reactor, which can provide electricity and process heat for wide-ranging applications, including hydrogen production.
- Hydrogen production through fossil fuels entails CO2 emissions. Therefore splitting of water to produce hydrogen is a better alternative.
- There are several methods to extract hydrogen from water and two of the highly used processes are
- High Temperature Electrolysis (HTE) and
- Thermo-chemical cycles.
Both these processes require very high temperatures, which can be provided by the VHTRs.
Indian HTR
- Indian HTR development programme has two elements:
- a 100 kW (thermal), 1,000 degrees C portable ‘compact high-temperature reactor’ (CHTR) for technology demonstration;
- a 600 MW (thermal), 1,000 degrees C ‘Indian high-temperature reactor hydrogen’, or IHTR-H.
- These two reactors would be powered by ‘TRISO-coated particle’ fuel. TRISO — ‘tristructural isotropic’ — comprises uranium, carbon and oxygen, all of which India can make.
- The IHTR-H is designed to produce about 7,000 kg of hydrogen, 18 MWhr (thermal) of energy per hour and 9 million litres of water a day.