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Bellona Nuclear Digest. November-December 2024
A survey of events in the field of nuclear and radiation safety relating to Russia and Ukraine.
News
“Hydrogen-readiness” is seemingly omnipresent in today’s energy discourse. Gas boilers for home heating, the fossil gas transmission and distribution network, LNG terminals or DRI steel plants – what they all have in common is that they increasingly claim to be “hydrogen-ready”. The term even made it into the EU taxonomy by certifying investments in gas-fired power plants as green, provided they are “hydrogen-ready”. But what exactly does “hydrogen-ready” mean and what impact does this promise have on the green transformation?
Even if some of these claims and policies might be backed by the idea of switching to hydrogen in the (usually undefined) long term, they are almost never linked to binding obligations to do so. While this would suffice to show that “hydrogen-ready” is merely an empty buzzword with no strings attached, we identified at least seven reasons why “hydrogen-ready” is a myth that needs to be debunked.
Overall, we warn against betting on “hydrogen-ready” applications to eventually actually run on clean hydrogen. Instead, we should turn more decisively to expanding decarbonisation options, such as direct electrification, which are not only more efficient but also already available in many cases. Hydrogen should be treated as what it actually is: a very valuable yet inefficient energy vector and scarce resource. Therefore, it should only be used in those sectors where there are no alternative decarbonisation pathways. To enable this, a fit-for-purpose infrastructure should be built to deliver hydrogen to no-regret end uses, rather than banking on converting the entire current gas grid into a hydrogen-ready asset.
Read our explainer:
7 Reasons Why ‘Hydrogen-Ready’ is a Myth
A survey of events in the field of nuclear and radiation safety relating to Russia and Ukraine.
A military drone with a high-explosive warhead struck the former Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine overnight, damaging a protective shelter that prevents radiation leaks at the plant’s destroyed fourth reactor unit, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine said on Friday.
Russia has officially withdrawn from an international environmental agreement that brought to bear billions of dollars from EU nations and the United States on addressing the nuclear legacy of the Soviet Union.
This article by Angelina Davydova, editor of Bellona’s Ecology & Rights magazine, first appeared in The Moscow Times. The oil spill in ...