Ammonia(hydrogen storage) from nuclear in the night?

Question

Nuclear power has the problem to be constant so what do you think of using it to produce ammonia in the night?

Would ammonia from nuclear be cheap?...

Answer 1

"Nuclear power has the problem to be constant"

No it doesn't, properly designed nuclear reactors can load follow just fine (and have been doing that).

The reason that nuclear reactors are run at full power as much as possible is due to that being the most economical way to operate them, there's nothing stopping you from using nuclear power for peak loads (control rod drive wear can be dealt with by them more often) and it has been done in France (which is about 80% or so nuclear meaning) as well as in naval reactors (which do not run at full power all the time).

In fact nuclear can respond quite a bit faster than many other power sources (certainly quicker than coal) as well as being predictable.

As for making ammonia, whilst ammonia is very useful to us and nuclear power plants could provide the process heat needed for its production (and probably will eventually) I doubt it is going to be the main product of the nuclear industry (or even close to it), especially if GM crops that can use nitrogen more efficiently become common.

If you want to run a nuclear power plant at full power at night when there is enough electricity demand for it to supply you'd probably be better off just making hydrogen or synthetic hydrocarbons for transport fuel or diverting the power to desalinisation.

Answer 2

Well, heavy industries run day and night so it is not really a problem to use the "base load" electricity which nuclear power plants provide even at night.

It only gets critical in countries like France where the share of nuclear generated power is something like 75%.

What is done then is that "middle load" and "peak load" is imported from neighboring countries during day time and part of the base load provided by nuclear plants is exported at night.

This is especially the case with Switzerland which purchases the excess power at night to pump water to higher hydro reservoirs and flows the water down during the day to produce power. The overall efficiency of storage through hydro reservoirs is 80% (which is really good)

By the way: An ammonia process running only 12h a day would not necessarily be economically viable.

Answer 3

It would save energy...

Answer 4

I am sure there is plenty of ways to level the electric power consumption. There seems to be a lack of will power and incentive