Nuclear puts out a lot of heat. Retooling iron/steel foundries to use that heat directly (instead of converting it into electricity and back into heat) seems like the way to go.
Color me skeptical. Waste heat from a nuke plant is very low quality compared to the extremely high heat needing to make molten steel. We aren't taking about warming potato greenhouses here.
...low quality heat? Nuclear reactors produce nothing but heat. And it's all just heat, how you transfer it is very independent of the production process
This is very wrong. Different processes require different temperatures. Iron and steel making requires very high temperatures. Heat from nuclear reactors cannot be used for this directly, as nuclear reactors do not get that hot, because they would melt. They are kept much cooler, usually at under 500 C.
Current reactor designs cannot get that hot without melting. I bet we could design a molten salt reactor that could safely get there, especially if electricity production is not a design goal.
I seriously doubt that. What would you make the reactor of, so that it withstands temperatures that melt steel? How are you going to move that coolant around? There are hard physical limits here. In reality, nobody would bother, because you can just make electricity and use it to melt steel instead.
I wonder how you’d transfer the heat without exposing the steep to radiation. I assume that would be bad anyways. I wish I paid attention more in physics, would love to know how such a system could be built.
Today we avoid radiating electric generation equipment by running two steam loops through a heat exchanger; one that interacts with the hot reactor and a second that spins the generators. Perhaps you could do similar with molten salt loops? Might be tough finding a material that would work as an exchanger at the required temperatures though.
Just using electricity is probably cheaper and easier; large power plants are crazy efficient already.
Thorium-based reactors famously are constrained by the lack of such material which would withstand the contact with hot molten salt, especially somewhat radioactive.
Optimally, next to a source of water that can be split into hydrogen, ready to be used for the chemical process producing the pure iron. (Not the process in TFA.)
An array of SMRs (small modular reactors) located at the steel factory could be used – and would be sufficient – both for heating and producing the electricity without interruptions caused by fluctuating prices or blackouts.
