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: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.