Automotive intelligent catalyst that contributes to hydrogen safety for the decommissioning of Fukushima Daiichi
2022-01-0648
03/29/2022
- Event
- Content
- March 2011, the Tohoku-Pacific-Ocean Earthquake and subsequent Tsunami caused insufficient nuclear reactor cooling at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, resulting in a catastrophe of hydrogen explosion. The development of long-term safe storage technology for high-dose radioactive fuel debris collected by the decommissioning of nuclear power plants is an urgent issue. Inside the storage container, strong radiation from fuel debris decomposes water to generate hydrogen and oxygen. The research and development have been proceeding in order to secure safety by simply placing a catalyst in the container for oxidizing hydrogen and returning it to water. The catalyst is called a Passive Autocatalytic Recombination (PAR), and unlike catalysts for chemical plants, it is required to have robustness that can maintain its activity for more than 30 years in an environment where temperature, humidity, gas concentration, etc. cannot be controlled. Here, it was confirmed that “An Intelligent Catalyst” for automotive emissions control exhibits excellent performance even in such a harsh environment. The intelligent catalyst is the nanostructure designed perovskite catalyst that has the rejuvenating function instead of preventing aging. Its unique properties were published in “SAE Paper” and “Nature”(1, 2). Catalytically active precious metal is dissolved in a host perovskite lattice forming solid solutions, and released on the surface as metallic nano-particles according to the inherent redox fluctuation of exhaust. The function was actually applied to Pd, Rh and Pt, and adopted for super-ultra-low-emission-vehicles (SULEV) exceeding 6.5 million. Now, automotive technology is expected to contribute to the national issue of decommissioning safety. (250 words) The research carried out under the “Center of World Intelligence Project for Nuclear Science and Technology and Human Resource Development” by MEXT, Japan. References: 1. H. Tanaka, M. Uenishi, I. Tan, M. Kimura, Y. Nishihata, J. Mizuki, “An intelligent catalyst”, SAE Special Publications, 1573, p.1-8, (2001) [SAE Paper, 2001-01-1301 (2001), SAE 2001, 0-7680-1100-0, 110-4, p.986 (2002).] 2. Y. Nishihata, J. Mizuki, T. Akao, H. Tanaka, M. Uenishi, M. Kimura, T. Okamoto, N. Hamada, “Self-regeneration of a Pd-perovskite catalyst for automotive emissions control”, Nature, 418, p.164-167 (2002). SAE Awards: Environmental Excellence in Transportation (E2T) Awards 2003
- Citation
- Tanaka, H., Masaki, S., Aotani, T., Inagawa, K. et al., "Automotive intelligent catalyst that contributes to hydrogen safety for the decommissioning of Fukushima Daiichi," SAE Technical Paper 2022-01-0648, 2022, .