Nuclear energy for transportation: Paths through electricity, hydrogen and liquid fuels

Abstract

The transportation sector consumes about a quarter of final energy in Japan and worldwide, and presently most of the energy is supplied by petroleum. For global environment and resources, it is important to seek possibilities of replacing a substantial part of the transportation energy by nuclear energy. For supplying nuclear energy to the transportation sector, investigated are the paths through such ‘energy carriers’ as electricity, hydrogen and synthetic liquid fuels, to the means of transportation such as automobiles. These energy carriers can be produced from nuclear energy, by itself or synergistically with other primary energies like fossil fuels or biomass. In this paper, possibilities and impacts of these energy carriers to power transportation means are reviewed, and measures and tasks to supply these energy carriers from nuclear energy are examined. In converting the primary energies into the energy carriers, the synergistic process may be more advantageous than the individual process. Some of the exploratory processes to produce synthetic liquid fuels from fossil fuels and nuclear energy are presented.