Here is something that I have asked myself "Is it possible to...

Here is something that I have asked myself "Is it possible to burn Co2 emissions from a coal fired power station in a nuclear reactor?"

Could you use an SMR to burn Co2, one that is co located with an existing coal fired power station?

Worth looking at I reckon?

seems like someone else has asked this question too?
http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2019/06/thermal-decomposition-of-co2-with.html

Nuclear power can come to the rescue.

Thermal decomposition
A typical nuclear reactor is over 40 years old. It has a multitude of uranium fuel rods that are packed together in a large pressure vessel and their heat is used to boil water into a steam at about 600K. A huge installation of turbines, generators and coolers must draw water from a nearby source to convert that heated steam into electricity. If the reactor fails, it fails spectacularly.


A 4^th generation or newer reactor would use fuel held in self-contained, hermetically sealed graphite/ceramic ‘pebbles’. It reaches much higher temperatures – over 1000K – by using molten salts instead of steam. This allows it to be both more compact and more efficient than before. If the cooling is cut off or the reactor is breached, there is no chance of a meltdown or leak of radioactive material.
While the question of why we are not building as many of the new and improved nuclear reactors as possible is straightforward and easy to answer, it is not the topic of this post. Instead, we are concerning ourselves with the technology that allows for the reactor to run at higher temperatures.

What is the point of these extreme temperatures for helping with climate change?

CO2 can be broken up into carbon and oxygen. It is an energy-consuming process that is accomplished naturally by plants using enzymes or artificially in certain catalysts. Neither is a good option for our purposes, as they are slow and expensive methods.

We want to thermally decompose CO2. At a high enough temperature, CO2 simply turns into a plasma where carbon and oxygen ions dissociate freely. Efficiency is massively increased, as every joule added to the plasma goes into breaking up chemical bonds and any further heating just makes the reaction faster.

Thermal decomposition has already been studied as an option for producing hydrogen from water. Oxygen is reluctant to let go of its hydrogen atoms due to its electronegativity, meaning that a lot of electrical power is required, but the task becomes much easier to do at temperatures of over 2500K.