Although nuclear power is very clean and efficient, it still has its downsides: such as the fact that it is impossible to miniaturize enough to power individual transportation. This opinion article, published in the Nuclear News magazine, proposes using miniaturized hydrogen fuel systems powered by nuclear energy to establish carbon-neutral transportation networks in the future.  

The article begins by detailing the failures with current carbon-neutral transportation, such as the low implementation of electric vehicles and the current uneconomic expenses with large scale hydrogen production. Then, the article poses some “what if” framing questions to envision what things might make hydrogen production more cost-efficient, such as using existing gas pipelines and shrinking the size of hydrogen production plants. The article then presents a solution to these questions by describing a prototype hydrogen generator developed at PNNL, which takes less energy than current systems and is fueled from biogas waste products.  

Since this article was published in a magazine which requires a subscription, its audience is quite limited. While this means that the article is not likely to be read by members of the public who are not familiar with most aspects of nuclear energy, a limited audience also provides some benefits to the article’s message. First, since readers of the magazine are already onboard with the idea of nuclear, the article does not need to spend time explaining to readers the benefits of a nuclear-powered economy and is thus able to develop more space diving into the specific issue at hand. Similarly, since most readers come from a technical background, the article uses a technical and scientific vocabulary that allows the design ideas to be presented in more specificity but may have been hard to fully understand for a more general audience.  

The article’s overall purpose is to inform readers of the potential of hydrogen powered transportation and to persuade of its effectiveness. Since the readers of this article are likely to be involved in the clean energy field and be doing work in the field in the future, it serves the author to bring up the viability of this system such that it can receive more advocacy in the future. To persuade the audience of the merits of this system, the article incorporates both logos and ethos, by citing information from national labs and other reputable research organizations and synthesizing data from these sources. From my perspective, I found the rhetoric used in this article to be very effective at presenting this concept and it was interesting to hear about the technological solutions that are being innovated in fields adjacent to nuclear energy.  

Excerpt from the described article