The Coming Uranium Crisis

tcd004 writes "MIT reports that the world is running out of fuel for our nuclear reactors due to production limitations and an aging infrastructure. Nuclear power has gained popularity as a carbon-free energy source in recent years, but Dr. Thomas Neff, a research affiliate at MIT's Center for International Studies, warned that fuel scarcity could drive up prices and kill the industry before it gets back on its feet. Passport has pulled together some interesting numbers: there are 440 reactors currently in operation and 82 new plants under construction. The demand for fuel has driven the price of uranium up more than 40% in the last few months — 900% over the last decade. You can follow the spot price for a pound of uranium. "

Comments

Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium...

[Mike Van Pelt]

Absolutely. According to my copy of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, "There is probably more available energy in the Earth's crust from thorium than from uranium and all fossil fuels put together." But even short of that:

1. The cost the uranium fuel is a relatively tiny part of the cost of nuclear power. Double, triple, quadruple the price, and it's not going to make a huge difference. There's a whole lot of energy in a little bit of uranium.

2. The "shortage" is, more than anything else, an artifact of failure to reprocess wastes. Fuel rods have to be replaced, not because all the U235 has been fissioned, but because neutron-absorbing fission products have built up and started getting in the way. Only part of the fissile isotopes in the fuel is fissioned before the fuel rod has to be removed.

   Reprocess, separate out the fission products, and put the remaining U238, U235, plutonium, and other actinides into new fuel rods, and available fuel expands by several times. This is before you even start thinking about breeder reactors.

3. Breeder reactors.

4. Back in the 1970s, the Japanese demonstrated a process to extract uranium from sea water using an ion exchange process, at a cost of about $200/pound in 1970 dollars. That could be considered a very long term ceiling on the price of uranium.

Re:Good to Know

[Shakrai]

I don't like nuclear power either (it's unsafe, unsustainable and expensive), but in today's world, it's not like we have lot of choices...

Really? Cuz I think anybody that knows about the subject could dispute all three of those statements. It's unsafe? Want to talk about how many people die in coal mining accidents? Hell, that still happens in the Western world. Thousands die in the developing world. Want to talk about global climate change caused by CO2? Nuclear accidents get more press because of the fear of anything "nuclear" but if you look at the complete life cycle of fossil fuels they aren't any better. In fact they are probably much worse.

Define unsustainable? Because the general opinion seems to be that using breeder technology we will have fuel sources for tens of thousands of years.

Expensive? Compared to what? Coal? Gas? How much will climate change wind up costing us?

reduce our consumption drastically

Why should I have to reduce my standard of living when we have technology (nuclear) that won't cause climate change? Everybody talks about reducing consumption but that isn't going to fly. You realize that two or three billion Chinese and Indians are doing their best to get up to a Western standard of living? If humanity doesn't embrace nuclear, what other option is there? More CO2? What kind of world do you want your children to grow up in?

and removing nuclear power from our energy panel is as stupid as arguing about nuclear wastes in a 1000 years when everything that we do today (like planning 26 new coal powerplants in Germany to replace nuclear powerplants!) lead us into *big* troubles in no more than 50 years...

Thank you!

Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium...

[Firethorn]

Lead(PB) is extremely common, used for all sorts of things from fishing weights, bullets, solder to radiation shielding.

Using a few tons of lead for radiation shielding isn't enough to impact the lead market in any meaningful way. Uranium is pretty much used solely in the nuclear industry, so a 50% increase in that will have a substantial effect.

But yeah, we've been living off of borrowed time for uranium for a while. We did a lot of exploration back during the WWII/early cold war period, found enough deposits to build enough bombs to blow up a good chunk of the earth, then pretty much quit because it wasn't economical to continue, we had enough stock for all demands for the next ~50 years or so.

Same story as oil, in other words. It's still going to take more than a 900% price increase to really start affecting nuclear power; The cost of the fuel is still considered 'insignificant'. It'd be like if gasoline for your car was one cent a gallon a decade ago and ten cents today. Paying somebody to refuel your car would still cost more than the fuel.

Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium...

[hcdejong]

In an age where people understand such development principles like Moore's Law, you would think that people would have a little more imagination when it comes to the future of resource exploration in the next century or so.

Wait, you think that Moore's Law applies to anything besides semiconductor production? Do you know how rare it is to see such a quantum leap in performance, let alone have an industry keep this up for 20-30 years? Uranium isn't going to drop out of the sky on its own accord, it'll have to be mined, and the mining industry is subject to the same economic realities as the rest of the world (with semiconductor production as the sole exception).

Re:Yeah

[Rei]

It depends on your reactor design. Plutonium != uranium.

This article is a bunch of pointless scare. There are huge known deposits of uranium, but a lackluster demand has kept them idle for years. Now there's a new uranium mining boom underway. When the deposits come online, the price will crash again (hopefully not so much as to drive most of the companies out of business, though).

Yes, uranium is far from the most plentiful or concentrated element in the crust. However, if you use breeder reactors (both uranium and thorium breeders), you're looking at hundreds of years worth. With seawater uranium extraction (more expensive, but an option), you could be looking at thousands of years.

The biggest fear that most people have with breeders is the production of material that could be used in bombs. However, you can "poison" plutonium (from uranium/plutonium) and U233 (from thorium breeders) with a proper reactor design to make it less reliable for bombs. I personally think people worry too much about "rogue states getting the bomb", anyways.