Hunterston B nuclear power station closes after 46 years

[NNadir]

11. Regrettably the best sources for details is the scientific literature but...

...although I don't get my information elsewhere, here is one recent news item about plans to do exactly this in Poland:

Chemical giant looks to nuclear heat to decarbonise

If you search on Google using the terms "thermochemical cycle" and nuclear, you will see a number of links; some link to scientific papers and others have varying degrees of technical language.

I have been extremely fortunate to have excellent access to the scientific literature, and thus don't often use the popular literature, and thus cannot reliably relate good sources.

The most famous thermochemical cycle is the "sulfur iodine" cycle for producing hydrogen. The link is to the Wikipedia page. With hydrogen and carbon monoxide or carbon dioxide one can make basically any chemical now obtained from petroleum using "Fischer-Tropsch" chemistry. If however, we don't want to replace the petrochemicals we use with better alternatives we can make other superior chemicals. For example, it would be wise to replace all applications of gasoline, diesel fuel, liquified petroleum gas, propane and dangerous natural gas with DME.

The sulfur iodine cycle has the advantage of being amenable to continuous flow processes, which are always environmentally superior to batch processes, but it does require high temperatures and the ability to withstand corrosive reagents. Modern advances in materials science now suggest to me that this is a very viable cycle. I understand that the Chinese are piloting it or plan to pilot on one of their new high temperature nuclear reactors. There are many other thermochemical cycles. I believe I've written here in the past a number of times on cerium based carbon dioxide splitting cycles. If you have time to waste you can scroll through my journal here.

There are many other thermochemical cycles, as well as Brayton type cycles that can be accomplished with heat. A favorite of mine is what I call "the reverse Allam cycle." You won't find that discussed anywhere, I believe, but you never know...

Metal refining is available from the FFC process, which should make titanium a cheap metal, but can also be adopted for many other metals, up to and including iron and steel. Metal carbides can also be made with heat.

The largest and most important chemical reaction that can be accomplished with nuclear heat, and is now conducted using the heat of dangerous natural gas or dangerous coal is the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia, which now consumes about 1-3% of the world energy supply. This reaction is essential if we want to have any chance of feeding 8 billion people.

I certainly have many hundreds, if not thousands of technical scientific papers which I've downloaded over the years on chemical processes that may be adapted to nuclear heat; ironically many of these same reactions have been proposed for the useless and unsustainable thermal solar industry, about which there has been tons of prattling over half a century for no result. For the record, I am a chemist.

I often read solar thermal papers because all of the chemistry in them is better adapted to nuclear energy. I often muse that the authors of these paper put "solar thermal" in the text in order to get grants. There is no evidence that these "solar thermal" plants would be viable on a grand scale because of their extreme land requirements. The few solar thermal plants that have been built have all proved to be economic disasters, and end up depending on the use of dangerous natural gas.

You can either take my word for it or not, but I have convinced myself that nuclear driven chemistry is the best and most efficient way to use nuclear energy. The heat rejection involved in many of these reactions can capture additional exergy as electricity when needed and when economically justified. (We are going to see a lot of rolling blackouts in the next ten or twenty years because we've codified stupidity, popular thinking, and greed in an awful mess.) If I were asked to design a nuclear plant, I'd divert the energy to electrical generation only at the times its price is at a premium, which it will be often, as we saw in Texas last winter, at least until we can rebuild a sensibly managed electric grid.

Nuclear power plants can supplant coal and gas as baseload plants, and historically all nuclear plants have been designed for precisely that purpose, but in light of the way that half a century of wishful thinking, fear and ignorance have prevailed to make life precarious, it may not be wise to build nuclear plants just to generate electricity. We may wish to utilize their capability to generate high temperatures in a thermodynamically wise way using heat networks for process heat, extracting exergy in the form of electricity as a side product.