One of the recurring drawbacks of hydrogen is the cost of producing it, i.e. obtaining it from water or any hydrocarbon, which requires a lot of energy.
What if we could obtain hydrogen in huge quantities and without harming the environment? The answer was not in sight: with dual-flux nuclear reactors.
This technology is very promising on paper, but has yet to prove its usefulness in the real world. Apparently, it’s all advantages. This design combines two circuits in a nuclear fission core, on the one hand we have a fissile fuel circuit, and on the other hand a rare coolant, liquid lead. This material becomes liquid at 327.4 ºC, and the core can reach 1,000 ºC, above the fission reactors currently in use.
The liquid lead is circulated to a heat exchanger, where water or carbon dioxide removes the heat and drives a turbine. The cooled lead is recirculated by a pump back to the core. In addition, it is a design with redundant safety measures. In the event of a cooling failure, a fuse returns the nuclear fuel to a reservoir, where the chain reaction ceases.
On the other hand, dual-flux nuclear reactors are designed to be buried, both to protect them from natural disasters and other surface threats such as terrorist attacks, missiles or bombing. The inventors of this technology, which is already patented, argue that it is the safest nuclear power plant design, and that the laws of nature themselves prevent any possible accidents.
Another interesting aspect of this technology is the extreme utilization of nuclear fuel. To begin with, the dual-stream reactor can operate with existing nuclear waste which, after being processed, recovers fissile material. After having served its useful life in the reactor, the radioactivity of the waste is relatively short-lived, about 300 years, neither thousands nor millions of years. It also works with natural uranium and thorium.
On the other hand, there is a surplus of nuclear fuel; there are some 250,000 tons of nuclear waste in storage at present. These factors combined result in stable, safe, predictable and very low environmental impact electricity production. Literally, nuclear waste – cesium, iodine, barium, strontium, ruthenium and rhodium – can be reused and its radioactivity and hazardousness drastically reduced for the future. Potentially, it is an inexhaustible source of energy.
Today, the German-Canadian company Dual Fluid Energy Inc. holds the patent. By the end of this decade, they hope to have a prototype of the DF300 dual-flux reactor, i.e. 300 megawatts of power. Commercial production could begin shortly thereafter. Each DF300 theoretically has the capacity to power 500,000 homes and its nuclear fuel only needs to be replaced every 25 years – the lifetime of a windmill or solar panels.
The efficiency of the DF300 reactor is 8 to 10 times higher compared to light water nuclear reactors or LWRs. The company has another, more powerful design planned, the DF1500, with an output of 1,500 MW. According to its creators, the dual-flux nuclear reactor is the most efficient power generation system invented by mankind. In short, hydrogen production will no longer have an efficiency problem.
Such advances, if successful, could contribute to this century’s green revolution in energy production. In addition to “traditional” wind, photovoltaic, tidal or hydropower, geothermal energy with Quaise Energy technology promises similar benefits, only with zero waste production. In the end, the success of either technology will depend primarily on the cost of each unit of energy produced.
