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

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

Last Updated on: 1st April 2025, 05:39 pm

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.