A hydrogen storage demonstrator in which hydrogen is absorbed on a depleted uranium ‘bed’ has been awarded £7.7 million (US$9.3 million) funding.
The HyDUS (Hydrogen in Depleted Uranium Storage) initiative, led by EDF UK, is aimed to investigate the potential of the technology for longer term energy storage and to enable improvements in energy storage density.
When stored, the hydrogen is in a stable but reversible ‘metal hydride’ form and can be released when needed for use.
The depleted uranium material is available from recycling and has been used in other applications such as counterbalance weights on aircraft.
Have you read?
The future of hydrogen as an energy storage solution
Equinor and SSE advance UK hydrogen storage project
The metal hydride storage technology is currently used for storing tritium and deuterium in the fusion energy sector.
“This will be a world first technology demonstrator which is a beautiful and exciting translation of a well proven fusion-fuel hydrogen isotope storage technology that the UK Atomic Energy Authority has used for several decades at a small scale,” explains Professor Tom Scott from the University of Bristol’s School of Physics, one of the architects of the HyDUS technology and a member of the project consortium.
“The hydride compounds that we’re using can chemically store hydrogen at ambient pressure and temperature but remarkably they do this at twice the density of liquid hydrogen. The material can also quickly give-up the stored hydrogen simply by heating it, which makes it a wonderfully reversible hydrogen storage technology.”
Others in the project consortium include the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and the nuclear fuel enrichment provider Urenco.
The demonstrator will be developed as part of the Longer Duration Energy Storage demonstrator programme at the UKAEA’s Culham campus near Oxford.
Patrick Dupeyrat, EDF R&D Director, says the novel form of long duration energy storage technology that will be demonstrated in HyDUS has excellent synergies with the nuclear supply chain and EDF’s power stations, especially within a future low carbon electricity system where flexibility using hydrogen will play a significant role.
“I’m really excited to witness the demonstration phase of this exciting technology and the collaboration across our key partners.”
The funding is from the Net Zero Innovation Portfolio of UK Government’s Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
