nuclear-news

Bavarian SMRs & Hydrogen Vans: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Michael Barnard https://cleantechnica.com/2025/04/01/bavarian-smrs-hydrogen-vans-what-could-possibly-go-wrong/

First Hydrogen Corp, a Canadian firm with more ambition than balance sheet, has now turned its sights on Germany — arguably the worst possible place to mix hydrogen hype with small modular nuclear reactors. The company, known mostly for a hydrogen van prototype and a team structure with more CEOs than engineers, is proposing a new strategy: use SMRs to produce hydrogen in Europe. Specifically, Germany.

The same Germany that just shut down its last nuclear plant, has strong anti-nuclear public
sentiment, and boasts some of the world’s most rigorous licensing hurdles for anything
remotely radioactive. As ideas go, this one isn’t just premature — it’s completely divorced from geopolitical, technological, and economic reality.

First Hydrogen’s European push is being channeled through its subsidiary, First Hydrogen
GmbH, an entity that appears to have been created to give the illusion of boots on the ground.
Back home, they’ve created First Nuclear Corp to drive this atomic angle, despite having no
nuclear licenses, no reactor designs, no partnerships with reactor vendors, and no market for
their product. The goal, supposedly, is to deploy SMRs to generate electricity that will then be
used to produce green hydrogen. This hydrogen would then presumably be used to fuel their
not-yet-commercial light commercial vehicles. Vehicles which, in independent UK trials,
consumed about 3.3 kilograms of hydrogen per 100 kilometers, making them far less efficient
than any battery-electric alternative, and certainly more expensive.

Let’s set aside for a moment the inconvenient truth that SMRs don’t exist yet in commercial
form. There are prototypes on paper, pilots under development, and timelines that stretch
comfortably into the late 2030s, assuming nothing goes wrong. But what’s really being
proposed here is to power a struggling hydrogen vehicle strategy with a non-existent nuclear
technology in a jurisdiction where nuclear projects are politically toxic and legally tangled. This is not a roadmap. It’s a Mad Libs of energy buzzwords.

Germany has made its stance on nuclear abundantly clear. After Fukushima, the country
committed to a complete nuclear phaseout, closing its last reactors in 2023. Public support for nuclear energy remains extremely low, and regulatory pathways for new nuclear builds are effectively blocked. That’s before we even get into the practicalities of siting, permitting,
insuring, and securing nuclear facilities in urban or semi-urban zones where hydrogen refueling infrastructure would plausibly be located. It’s like proposing to build a coal plant in the middle of Amsterdam to power electric scooters — technically possible, but politically suicidal and economically nonsensical.

But to understand why Germany is so allergic to nuclear, you have to understand the deeper
story of the Energiewende, Germany’s energy transition. It didn’t start in 2011 with Fukushima.
It started decades earlier, born out of a uniquely German mix of post-war anti-militarism,
environmental consciousness, and civic engagement. The anti-nuclear protests of the 1970s
weren’t fringe movements, they were formative. They helped shape political parties, most
notably the Greens, and built the cultural foundation for the country’s long-standing skepticism of nuclear energy. When Fukushima happened, it wasn’t a wake-up call for Germany, it was a confirmation of everything they already believed.

And here’s the thing: despite their nuclear exit, Germany has made enormous progress on
decarbonization. Their electricity mix now includes more than 50% from renewables,
dominated by wind and solar. They built the world’s largest solar industry (before China
undercut it), deployed tens of gigawatts of onshore and offshore wind, and invested heavily in grid infrastructure and storage. Per capita and against GDP, they emit far less CO₂ than most industrialized nations. Their carbon intensity of electricity has plummeted since the early 2000s, while industrial output remained robust. In short, Germany has done more of the hard work of decarbonization than most of its nuclear-hugging critics.

That doesn’t mean shutting down their nuclear plants was their best move. It wasn’t. Keeping
them online until their natural retirement age would have eased short-term energy price
spikes, especially during the Russian gas crunch. But the decision wasn’t made in a vacuum, and it wasn’t made by a government asleep at the wheel. It was the culmination of decades of cultural, environmental, and political alignment. If any country has earned the right to make that call, it’s the one that actually built a renewable-heavy grid and stuck with it through market ups and downs.

So for First Hydrogen to march into this context with a plan to pair nuclear technology Germany doesn’t want with hydrogen use cases it doesn’t need is more than tone-deaf, it’s
fundamentally incoherent. It misunderstands the culture, the policy, the economics, and the
actual energy system Germany has spent a generation building.

Then there’s the hydrogen problem itself. Hydrogen, for all its green branding, is an expensive
and inefficient energy carrier. Producing it via electrolysis requires vast amounts of electricity.
Storing it requires compression, liquefaction, or chemical conversion, all of which add cost and complexity. Transporting it is a logistical headache. Using it in vehicles loses 70 to 80% of the original energy. Add a nuclear reactor to the chain, and you’ve just stapled a megabucks solution to a kilobuck problem. It’s like powering your toaster with a jet engine. Sure, it works in
theory, but you’ll be out of money before the bread even gets warm.

And yet, if there’s one country where this kind of layered energy absurdity might get polite
applause instead of the deadpan stares it deserves, it’s Germany. Because while Germany has done many things right in its energy transition, it has also demonstrated a persistent, baffling irrationality when it comes to hydrogen.

This isn’t new. Michael Liebreich has been calling out the hydrogen hype for years. I’ve written
extensively about the groupthink — gruppendenken — that has gripped German energy policy circles, particularly in their obsession with hydrogen for end-use energy. Not for steelmaking or fertilizer — reasonable uses — but for heating buildings and driving cars and, now apparently, running vans on SMR-generated hydrogen. The evidence for this folly isn’t anecdotal, it’s in their modeling.

The dena-led  Leitstudie Aufbruch Klimaneutralität  (the German Energy Agency’s major
decarbonization pathway study) baked in hydrogen use at the end of every possible pipe. It
projected hydrogen-based heating, hydrogen transport, even hydrogen-based electricity
storage, despite the energy system losses stacking up like a Jenga tower made of burned
money. Similarly, the  Prognos/PKI modeling , used in federal advisory processes, leaned heavily on magical hydrogen imports and vast, unexplained electrolysis buildouts, seemingly
unbothered by grid realities or cost curves.

These weren’t fringe speculations, they were foundational documents. Germany’s hydrogen
enthusiasm has created a policy environment where ideas that should be non-starters get
traction simply because they have the word wasserstoff in them. In that context, First
Hydrogen’s pitch to bring SMR-powered hydrogen production to Germany starts to make a
twisted kind of sense — not in physics, not in finance, but in the cultural logic of a country that,
for all its engineering rigor, still sometimes falls hard for the techno-utopianism of
overcomplicated solutions. It’s a country that earned its way to energy credibility with wind,
solar, and storage, and then occasionally turns around and tries to put a hydrogen jetpack on it for no good reason. So yes, the plan is absurd, but absurdity has a strange way of finding an audience where the right buzzwords meet the right policymaking blind spots.

And yet, First Hydrogen keeps raising small sums of money and announcing ever more
grandiose plans. In 2024, it closed tranches of convertible debentures amounting to a few
hundred thousand Canadian dollars, not enough to buy a single electrolyzer system, let alone fund a nuclear project. That’s on top of the roughly $9 million it has raised since 2020 which is supposed to fund a 35 MW electrolysis plant and a hydrogen delivery van manufacturing facility in Quebec as well.

The same company that hasn’t brought a product to market is now pitching itself as a future
builder of Europe’s nuclear-hydrogen infrastructure. The gap between vision and resources is
so wide you could drive their hydrogen prototype van through it and still have room for a
busload of skeptical engineers.

Balraj Mann, the founder, chair and CEO of First Hydrogen, had 20 firms he had founded,
owned, and was CEO of many of them when I looked at them a year ago. Now he’s added some more, and possibly has increased his $480,000 per year salary — just from First Hydrogen — based on this new international expansion. It’s convenient that these hydrogen plays appear to be a long way from his investors, reducing the likelihood of due diligence types actually looking at the lack of evidence of any there there.

What makes this spectacle more concerning is not that it exists — there are always hype-
chasers in clean tech — but that it continues to attract press coverage, grants, and in many
cases, government support. It raises a deeper question: why are we so willing to entertain the
layering of unproven technologies under the banner of innovation?

Hydrogen for energy plays keep failing and the countries into the first and biggest,
like Norway and Australia, are abandoning the space because it doesn’t make economic sense.
SMRs are decades away from commercial competitiveness, if they ever get there (unlikely),
more a form of intentional delay by right wing parties that can no longer just deny climate
change than an energy alternative. Stacking one onto the other doesn’t multiply opportunity, it multiplies uncertainty. Hydrogen with SMRs is such a classic case of multiplying hype that I
called it out specifically in my article from a couple of years ago, Two Wrongs Don’t Make A
Right: Adventures In Multiplying Hype.

In the end, First Hydrogen’s German SMR plan isn’t a moonshot, it’s a distraction. The world needs scalable, affordable, low-carbon solutions now. We have them: solar, wind, batteries,
grid interconnection, efficiency. Instead of doubling down on fairy dust, maybe it’s time we
started demanding fewer buzzwords and more kilowatt-hours. Until then, we’ll keep getting
pitches like this — powerpoint fantasies fueled by venture fumes and public confusion.

April 3, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology | Leave a comment

The Volunteer “Data Hoarders” Resisting Trump’s Purge

Can librarians and guerrilla archivists save the country’s files from DOGE?

New Yorker, By Julian Lucas, 15 Mar 25

The deletions began shortly after Donald Trump took office. C.D.C. web pages on vaccines, H.I.V. prevention, and reproductive health went missing. Findings on bird-flu transmission vanished minutes after they appeared. The Census Bureau’s public repository went offline, then returned without certain directories of geographic information. The Department of Justice expunged the January 6th insurrection from its website, and whitehouse.gov took down an explainer page about the Constitution. On February 7th, Trump sacked the head of the National Archives and Records Administration, the agency that maintains the official texts of the nation’s laws, and whose motto is “the written word endures.”

More than a hundred and ten thousand government pages have gone dark in a purge that one scientist likened to a “digital book burning,” and which has proved as frightening in its imprecision as in its malice……………………………………………………………………………………. (Subscribers only)
 https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-data-hoarders-resisting-trumps-purge?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Science_031525&utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_medium=email&bxid=5be9d23d24c17c6adf3bf435&cndid=30183386&hasha=432fc0d0ad6543e820e2dfcd39f76c35&hashb=e1c24f6a6459c7d1d625eb2ea55d9dfbbb4633bf&hashc=ac5a1f5526e7292c73f49dfa8fb6d5d0cb87d8773cec3b9b03d38a4ce482d7c8&esrc=subscribe-page&mbid=CRMNYR012019&utm_term=TNY_Science_Tech

March 17, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology | Leave a comment

Book Review: How Our Digital Infatuation Undermines Discourse

In “Superbloom,” Nicholas Carr laments that we live in a state of uncontrollable sensory and communication overload.

By Elizabeth Svoboda, 03.14.2025,  https://undark.org/2025/03/14/book-review-superbloom/?utm_source=Undark%3A+News+%26+Updates&utm_campaign=ecc4df9cbe-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5cee408d66-185e4e09de-176033209
It was all Mother Nature’s fault, you could say. After winter rains in Lake Elsinore, California, reawakened countless dormant poppy seeds in early 2019, spring blossoms crowded in thickly enough to turn the hillsides bright orange — a fleeting “superbloom.” Recognizing an Instagrammable backdrop when she saw one, influencer Jaci Marie Smith reclined across the floral carpet in orange overalls and hit post. “You’ll never influence the world by trying to be like it,” her photo caption read.

In March, posts like Smith’s and #superbloom hashtags fueled a global frenzy. So many sightseers and influencers crowded into Lake Elsinore, snarling traffic and pulling up blooms by the handfuls, that officials declared a public safety emergency. As residents and others ripped into influencers for unleashing viral havoc on the small town, some took down their poppy posts, while others offered excuses and mea culpas. A meme that had begun in innocent enthusiasm curdled in an internet minute, setting people against each other and leaving a wake of real-world destruction.

We’re living in a perpetual digital superbloom, contends technology writer Nicholas Carr — a state of sensory and communication overload we can no longer control, one that’s sowing division and damage on a global scale. And like the poppy field that hypnotized Dorothy’s “Wizard of Oz” crew, this social media-fueled superbloom lures us in with enticements that are nearly impossible to resist. “Poppies are lush, vibrant, and entrancing,” Carr writes in “Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart.” “They’re also garish, invasive, and narcotic.”

This is familiar ground for Carr — at least, as familiar as any fast-morphing digital terrain can be. Carr’s stance as a techno-skeptic has been consistent for decades, though it’s evolved as digital communication modes have bloomed and receded. His 2010 book “The Shallows”, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, argued that the online world is distracting and prevents deeper engagement with texts, and he followed that up in 2014 with “The Glass Cage,” a reflection on how interacting with our computers changes us.

In “Superbloom,” Carr expands on a central theme of “The Glass Cage”: While we view our digital devices as helpers serving up knowledge and entertainment, they exact an unacknowledged toll in the process, altering how we think, act, and communicate. We are far different humans in an era of texting, posting, and like-seeking, Carr argues, than we were when limited to letters and phone calls — and not for the better.

He contends that when we communicate mostly in one-line messages and hot takes, the kind that titillate and propagate from one human node to the next, our capacity to engage more intently and thoughtfully withers. “What we sacrifice are depth and rigor,” he writes. Thus, “we rely on quick and often emotional judgments while eschewing slower, reflective ones.”

This is a fair point, if only true in some online contexts: Masters of the 140-character social media quip win plenty of fans elsewhere with their books and long essays. What’s more convincing is Carr’s analysis of why our instant access to one another online, which we often assume is an advantage, has led to more social breakdown rather than less. 

……………………………………in virtual space, “we’re all in one another’s business all the time,” Carr writes, later adding, “With an almost microscopic view of what everybody else is saying and doing — the screen turns us all into peeping Toms — we have no end of opportunities to take offense.”

……………….Carr’s vivid, jargon-free prose hits right in the solar plexus. “We’re not hostages with Stockholm syndrome,” he writes of our relationship with social media. “We’re being given what we want, in quantities so generous we can’t resist gorging ourselves.”

…………………However hard-hitting and sound its claims, “Superbloom” might feel too apocalyptic were it not for Carr’s closing plea to hold the line. He says it’s too late to change the online systems we’re embedded in — a judgment that seems a tad dour, given how rapidly those same systems have themselves changed over time. But he rightly notes that to peel away from a virtual world that’s more image than substance, users must deliberately resist its empty charms, much as the rebels of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” rejected the happiness drug soma.

……..  he calls for judicious online withdrawal rather than Luddite-style divestment, for staking out a position “not beyond the reach of the informational flow, but beyond the reach of its liquefying force.”

While digital pessimists can come across as Cassandra-like, their warnings have never been more resonant. For Carr, the rough online beast is no longer merely slouching in our direction. It’s already devouring us. “Superbloom” frames the choice ahead in the starkest possible terms: Do we consent to being swallowed, or find a way — however quixotic and improbable — to escape the maw?

Elizabeth Svoboda is a science writer in San Jose, California, and the author of “What Makes a Hero?: The Surprising Science of Selflessness.” She is working on a book about the science of setting a sustainable pace in an overclocked world.

March 15, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology | Leave a comment

Elon Musk Announces ‘Massive Cyberattack’ Causing X Outage

Thousands of people reported on March 10 that the social media platform was down for them.

Epoch Times, 3/10/2025By Jack Phillips

Tech billionaire Elon Musk on March 10 said that an outage affecting his social media platform, X, is being caused by a “massive cyberattack” that is ongoing.

On March 10, tens of thousands of reports were submitted to DownDetector saying users could not access the X app or website or they could not access posts.

In response, Musk wrote at midday: “There was (still is) a massive cyberattack against X. We get attacked every day, but this was done with a lot of resources.”

“Either a large, coordinated group and/or a country is involved,” the Tesla and SpaceX CEO wrote, adding that his company is “tracing” the attacks.

In a later interview with Fox News on the same day, Musk said that the attacks’ IP addresses in the X cyberattack were “linked to IP addresses originating in the Ukraine area.” The Epoch Times could not immediately authenticate Musk’s comment.

People on the platform first started reporting issues after 5 a.m. ET on March 10, according to DownDetector. After a brief period of time, the number of reports appeared to drop before picking back up again at about 11 a.m. ET……………………………………

More than 10,000 people in the United Kingdom also reported an X outage earlier on March 10, according to DownDetector’s website…………………..

The outage comes amid Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio having publicly sparred with Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski on March 9 after Musk said on X that the Ukraine war with Russia would be severely hampered if he were to turn off Starlink internet access in the Eastern European country.

On March 9, Musk, who is currently a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, wrote that Starlink has served as the “backbone of the Ukrainian army” and asserted that “their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.” He also said he wants peace for Ukraine and that he’s backed the country in its war effort by providing the internet service.

Sikorski responded to Musk by saying that Poland was paying for the internet service and claimed Musk was threatening Kyiv. The Trump administration and Ukraine’s leadership have been engaged in high-stakes talks about ending the conflict and a deal for continued support of Ukraine that also benefits the United States………. https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/elon-musk-announces-massive-cyberattack-causing-x-outage-5823029?utm_source=Aobreakingnoe&utm_medium=Aoemail&utm_campaign=Aobreaking-2025-03-11&utm_content=NL_Ao&src_src=Aobreakingnoe&src_cmp=Aobreaking-2025-03-11&cta_utm_source=Aobreakingnoecta&est=iIzbjUv5GHdVOivdisxCzrbEBMMMNm2pOhOa%2F2%2Bo%2B8Uc84LMJe%2BVuIounSiENahxKSKfQOBK8pkU

March 12, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | technology | Leave a comment