Buy time from the planet: TPU professor on how hydrogen "lights it up"

TOMSK, Mar 17 – RIA Tomsk. Affordable energy is a magic wand that can solve most problems of mankind: from hunger to global warming, believes Professor of Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU) Andrey Lider. Why the main candidate for the role of "savior" is hydrogen, and how it will help to fly to the stars - is in the material of RIA Tomsk.

Demonstrative blackout

The damage caused by February frosts in Texas (USA), which brought down the state power system, is estimated at 80-90 billion dollars. The hail storm hit the solar panels, the freezing rain hit the wind turbines (Texas is a leader in wind power generation in the US). And once again the debate about the unreliability of alternative energy has flared up...

The Head of the Department of Experimental Physics of the TPU School of Nuclear Science & Engineering, Professor, Doctor of Technical Sciences Andrey Lider believes that the most likely scenario for the next 10-15 years is a combination of different types of energies, from "green" to "gray":

"Solar and wind energy will not soon be able to take a share of more than 50% of the market, yet the climate plays a significant role in the use of renewable resources (and especially in cold countries such as ours). The most sustainable energy systems are based on different types of energy production, therefore, humanity will rely on the symbiosis of energy technologies - solar, wind, nuclear and fossil fuels.

In remote or seismically hazardous areas, in areas with extreme climatic conditions, they will most likely continue to use fossil fuels for a long time to come."

So far, the refusal of oil, gas, coal, at least on the "mainland" is alarmingly slow:

"We (in Siberia) may laugh, but the inhabitants of the islands of the Pacific Ocean and coastal states already measure with a ruler how much the water level in the World Ocean rises annually and when they will be flooded. Our duty to children is to leave a planet suitable for life, no matter how pretentious it may sound. In order to "buy" time, we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions, primarily carbon dioxide generated from burning fossil fuels.

In addition, if we develop new types of energy, we will be able to significantly change the technological order of the whole world. As long as we burn kerosene in rockets, we will not reach the stars... At the moment, the most likely alternative is hydrogen, despite the fact that there are still many unresolved problems with it."

“The research agenda of a world-class university should include topics that respond to global challenges. Today there are several of them - energy, ecology, digitalization. If you don’t tackle them, then you’re just a provincial university,” believes Andrey Lider.

Hope for a miracle

Back in school, Andrey Lider had a dream: to make energy available.

"I realized that energy is the great savior of humanity: access to cheap, safe energy can solve, if not all, then almost all problems. Energy provides clean water, food, heat, relieves from hard labor. If there is no cheap energy, the population of the Earth will get bogged down in wars, because all the recent wars in the Middle East, all the main political conflicts arose because of the redistribution of energy resources," he says.

In 1993, Lider entered the Faculty of Chemical Technology of TPU - one of the scientific directions of the university's electrochemists was chemical current sources.

“When I was in my third year, the head of the department of fundamental education, Ivan Petrovich Chernov, gathered a group that studied the interaction of hydrogen with metals. As an electrochemist, I was invited to a block related to the electrolysis of water - this is the "greenest" method of producing hydrogen. And the most expensive," he recalls.

The main thing that limits the development of hydrogen energy is just the high cost of producing "green" hydrogen. According to Lider, the transition to hydrogen technologies will most likely be a cheaper technology for producing hydrogen - from fossil fuels (coal and natural gas) with the subsequent utilization of carbon dioxide. Such technologies are also being developed at Tomsk Polytechnic.

However, the scientist believes, as soon as a "carbon tax" (on products with a carbon footprint) is introduced all over the world, the economics of production based on hydrogen energy will become more attractive:

"The world can switch to it in leaps and bounds - provided that there are technologies that will make its use convenient and safe. Society is afraid of the explosiveness of hydrogen. We have not yet created affordable technologies for storing it in a solid or based on liquid carriers."

His research team studies the interaction of hydrogen with metals - this is the direction which Lider began to study as a student, and eventually headed it. If in the beginning the polytechnics were concerned with the fundamental side of the issue, now on the basis of the obtained knowledge they create new materials - both those resistant to hydrogen and those that can act as its accumulators.

"Hydrogen storage materials are, first of all, a way to accumulate energy. To date, these works are being carried out by a large number of scientific groups, but no real breakthroughs have yet been made. People are moving from different directions, for example, by modeling a large number of candidate substances, compounds, and their compositions.

Our group is moving from the other side - we try to synthesize and research potential candidate materials. They have to work at room temperature, be safe and very cheap. It is desirable that they can be obtained from available materials so that they are easily recyclable. And it is quite wonderful if industrial waste or household waste is used as a raw material. We even try to study this together with our fellow chemists," says Lider.

The main candidate materials for storage are various complex hydrides that form stable compounds with hydrogen. TPU considers hydrides based on titanium and magnesium alloys, as well as on rare earths to be promising.

“We cannot say at what moment fortune will smile on scientist and he will receive the desired result. Only hard everyday work moves forward. Each next action is an insight from the previous one. You collect information, analyze, repeat experiments and on the synthesis of all this occurs a miracle - a scientific discovery. The regular work of scientists is a miracle," the agency's interlocutor smiles.

Hydrogen's best friend

Another important problem solved by polytechnics is the development of protective coatings that prevent the penetration of hydrogen into structural materials.

"We are developing coatings for zirconium cladding tubes of fuel elements of a nuclear reactor. The main task is to prevent a steam-zirconium reaction, which leads to the release of hydrogen, which, in turn, can lead both to the destruction of the cladding of the fuel elements and to an explosion," says Lider.

And he adds that it is the peaceful atom that is the "best friend" of hydrogen energy: "The easiest way to accumulate energy produced by a nuclear power plant is to obtain and store hydrogen, which can then be converted back into energy. No carbon dioxide emissions - real green energy!".

Scientists look for new knowledge, and engineers try to convert the resulting knowledge into technology. According to Lider, their team has always strived for the technology to find its end user, which is why, for example, one of their regular partners and customers is Rosatom.

Lider's dream of universal access to energy will be brought closer by thermonuclear fusion:

“I hope physicists will be able to present the world with thermonuclear fusion (which is also formally hydrogen energy - because the energy of the fusion of hydrogen nuclei is converted into an energy flow).

A thermonuclear reactor is currently under construction in France (in which TPU is also involved - our scientists and engineers have developed a tomograph for monitoring the elements of the first wall of the reactor). We will spend some chemical energy on getting hydrogen from water, and from the nuclear fusion reaction we will get excess of energy - an inexhaustible source anywhere! The Holy Grail we must all strive for."