According to Interfax, Russian news agency’s article published on November 17, 2022, the Kola Nuclear Power Plant (NPP, Murmansk region) plans to commission a bench-top hydrogen production test facility in 2025, Kola NPP Director General Vasily Omelchuk said.
"We are in the design-investment stage of building a bench-top hydrogen production test facility," Omelchuk said at a strategic session dedicated to the implementation of Northern Sea Route infrastructure projects under sanctions pressure in Murmansk on Wednesday.
He said the facility would have a capacity of 200 tonnes of hydrogen per year.
"We have to learn how to build at this facility, master the technology of domestic production of hydrogen handling equipment and elaborate possible potential schemes to sell the hydrogen produced. In 2025, we will produce this hydrogen," he said.
In late August of this year, the head of the municipality of Polarnye Zori (the satellite town of the Kola NPP), Maxim Pukhov, said that the Kola NPP investment program through 2025 will amount to 4.8 billion rubles.
The investment program includes projects for the construction of a Data Processing Center, with a capacity of 1 MW, the launch of which is scheduled for 2023, and a project to create a bench test facility for hydrogen production, the timeframe for implementation of which has not been previously disclosed.
The head of hydrogen energy technologies in the Science and Innovations private facility of the Rosatom state corporation, Miron Borgulev, said at the Technoprom-2022 forum in Novosibirsk that projects to produce hydrogen at existing plants are planned at Kola NPP, where there is a surplus of electricity, with a test facility now being created, as well as at the Kursk NPP, where hydrogen can be used in metallurgy in a transition to a direct reduction of iron with hydrogen from electroreduction.
The Kola NPP is located 200 km south of Murmansk, on the shore of Lake Imandra. The plant is the largest energy enterprise on the Kola Peninsula, a supplier of electricity to the Murmansk region and Karelia and generates about 60% of the electricity of the Murmansk region. It operates four power units with VVER-type reactors of 440 MW each.
