This proposal requires imaginary materials straight out of comic book super-science. The proposed tantalum-hafnium-carbide material does have a very high melting point, but it will be destroyed by the molten uranium and its chemically diverse fission products.
If one were inclined to try to run "combustion in reverse" on a grand scale, to turn CO2 back into carbon and oxygen, the Bosch reaction seems a far more practical way to get there.
It runs at hundreds instead of thousands of degrees. The iron catalyst is cheap and abundant. The only required inputs are carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Since the reaction is thermodynamically spontaneous, the input gases can be produced from the cheapest available clean electricity (intermittent or otherwise) and stored in tank buffers.
CO2-to-graphite via the Bosch process would still be a project of breathtaking scale that would cost trillions of dollars. So it won't happen. But building a proof-of-concept would be affordable and straightforward, which is more than I can say for this nuclear-thermal decomposition proposal.
both pebble-bed reactors, where the first is some sort of superfund site, and the second tried to release some dust directly after chernobyl but got cought doing so.
OTOH China really seems to sample a bit of every tech it get
For a moment I wondered if the article was suggesting actually piping air through the reactor core - the accident at the Windscale plant in the UK demonstrating why that's maybe not such a great idea.
If one were inclined to try to run "combustion in reverse" on a grand scale, to turn CO2 back into carbon and oxygen, the Bosch reaction seems a far more practical way to get there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch_reaction
It runs at hundreds instead of thousands of degrees. The iron catalyst is cheap and abundant. The only required inputs are carbon dioxide and hydrogen. Since the reaction is thermodynamically spontaneous, the input gases can be produced from the cheapest available clean electricity (intermittent or otherwise) and stored in tank buffers.
CO2-to-graphite via the Bosch process would still be a project of breathtaking scale that would cost trillions of dollars. So it won't happen. But building a proof-of-concept would be affordable and straightforward, which is more than I can say for this nuclear-thermal decomposition proposal.