"We need to have an eye 20 or 30 years out, and the reason we're in crisis mode now is because nobody had that view," Duncan Hawthorne said in an interview.
"If we don't do some pilot projects, it will never be ready. You've got to be prepared to pay a sum of money to pursue options."
Bruce Power announced this week it has become a member of the Canadian Hydrogen Association, making it the first electricity generator in the country to join the group.
Hawthorne, who will sit on the association's board, said it "makes sense intellectually" to produce clean hydrogen through an electrolysis process using nuclear power during off-peak times.
"When you look at off-peak periods in the spring and fall, and even during a 24-hour period during overnight hours, you see a lot of surplus power. I've always believed there's some logic to, at those times, storing that electricity in some way," he said.
"If we do see performance improvements continue in nuclear plants, if we bring more of them online, then there could be a situation where you have more baseload (power) than you need during these low-demand periods."
He said concerns over climate change, rising oil prices and security around oil supply continue to draw attention to hydrogen as an emission-free fuel for vehicles. This week, the transit authority in Berlin, Germany, announced plans to purchase up to 250 hydrogen-powered buses — or 20 per cent of its fleet — by 2009, citing the rising cost of diesel fuel and environmental benefits.
Hydrogen, added Hawthorne, could also be used in large fuel cells to supply electricity at power-transmission bottlenecks around the province, possibly eliminating the need to spend billions of dollars on upgrades to transmission infrastructure.
The nuclear industry's embrace of the so-called hydrogen economy is nothing new. For years it has been promoting nuclear power as the only way of producing enough emission-free hydrogen to make mass-market fuel- cell cars and large-scale energy storage a reality.
Critics say it's just a ploy.
Jose Etcheverry, climate-change policy analyst at the David Suzuki Foundation, said the nuclear industry is clinging to the notion of the hydrogen economy in an attempt to strengthen the case for nuclear power.
"To me it's just another indication of how desperate the nuclear lobby is as it looks for every possible angle to drum up a business case," Etcheverry said. "This is an old paradigm. Nuclear power remains the most expensive option, and there remains the unresolved problem of nuclear waste."
He said the growing flow of private capital into renewable energy technologies — including wind, solar, biomass and biofuels — is a sign of where the market is heading. These technologies, as part of a system of distributed electricity generation, would be a more cost-effective way of moving toward a hydrogen economy, he added.
"The fact is the private sector will not invest in nuclear," Etcheverry said.
Hawthorne said his interest in the potential of hydrogen for a number of uses, including on-site use at Bruce Power, is not a public relations stunt.
"I'm not a gimmick guy. I don't have time to play around," he said. "If I'm in it, it's because I think there's some opportunity there.
"I know people don't like us and will continue to see something bad in everything we do. But I just need to do what's right for the business and ultimately be judged on that."
The Ontario government announced last month that it will spend upward of $40 billion refurbishing the province's aging nuclear reactors and adding another 1,000 megawatts of new nuclear capacity as part a 20-year supply plan.
Nuclear proponents say the added capacity won't be enough and that the government will ultimately have to place a larger order. Critics of the technology say the government should be weaning itself off nuclear completely.
