Indonesia Considering a DANISH Nuclear Reactor to Run an Ammonia Plant.

[NNadir]

SMRs considered for Indonesian fertiliser (sic) plant

A collaboration between Danish and Indonesian companies will study the operational and regulatory conditions for constructing an ammonia production facility in Indonesia powered by Copenhagen Atomics' small and modular thorium molten salt reactors.

Four Danish companies - Copenhagen Atomics, Aalborg CSP, Alfa Laval and Topsoe - have signed a memorandum of understanding with Indonesian ammonia producer Pupuk Kalimantan Timur (PKT), together with Pertamina New & Renewable Energy to investigate building a facility in the city of Bontang on the eastern coast of the island of Borneo, in the province of East Kalimantan.

The facility - expected to open in 2028 - will produce 1 million tonnes of ultra-low emission ammonia annually, with an estimated investment of USD4 billion. This is sufficient to produce fertiliser for the production of food for 45 million people, about one-sixth of the Indonesian population. During the plant's 50-year lifetime, it will produce ammonia worth USD25 billion at today's prices...

The facility will produce hydrogen by electrolysis via an electricity intermediate, which is not really thermodynamically wonderful, but molten salt thorium reactors do not really support temperatures high enough for most thermochemical hydrogen production. At least the operation will be continuous, and of course, it will displace the dangerous fossil fuels that dominate hydrogen production despite all the fantasy bullshit that flies around here and elsewhere about a wasteful and destructive "hydrogen economy," which is basically yet another way that the wind/solar fantasy greenwashes dangerous fossil fuels, by making the stupid declaration that hydrogen is "green" because some day - a day that never actually comes - they'll be excess solar and wind energy. (Fifty years into this fantasy, solar and wind remain trivial forms of energy.)

Here at DU there is currently as of this writing, a thread devoted to a Florida Newspaper trying to inform the sane parts of the country that not all Floridians endorse the racist white supremacy fascism of Governor DeSatan.

Not all Danes, it would appear - and I've seen this recently in threads on LinkedIn - endorse the whitewashing of Danish offshore oil and gas drilling and mining by littering the North Sea and wrecking land areas with wind turbines, many of which, thousands actually, are already landfill, the rest likely to rot in the next several decades.

There are people in that country who realize that climate change is a serious business, and thus are entering into participation in the reviving nuclear industry.

This proposed design is not ideal - nor is it terrible - from my perspective, but the worst designed nuclear plant is superior to the best designed dangerous fossil fuel plant. It's not a bad design; it's just that it could be better.