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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. "
... Uranium's not all that abundant, we've known that for years. But the breeder reactors they're building in India can convert thorium to fissile material as a byproduct of their operation. There's enough potential energy in the available thorium supply to run the planet for an awfully long time. Whether it's economical to do so at present is another matter, but for long-term security there's no better consumable.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Saw a news-segment on tv a couple of days ago. The reporter stated that Sweden might have anything from below one percent of the worlds uranium, up to almost 20 percent.
However, the villagers in a nearby village of one place where initial test-drills was supposed to start soon, was not happy. They were very worried both about loosing tourists and that it might have a bad effect on the reindeers.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
That's already being done, but there aren't all that many weapons; ten thousand warheads at 20kg each is about two thousand tonnes of fissile material (quite a lot is plutonium, to burn which you need a special mixed-oxide-burning reactor), whilst the known reserve of uranium is estimated at 3.6 million tons.
Exactly. Naturally occurring uranium is at most 0.7% U-235, which is the fissile material used in conventional power reactors. The other 99% is discarded as "depleted" uranium and used as high density slugs in weapons. So if the world could only get over its Puritanical aversion to breeder technology, the available supply of fissile material would instantly increase by a factor of 99, not even counting the thorium that can be transmuted into U-233 (as already noted by another poster).
Less is more.
I'm not sure where you went to school, or if you just slept through class, but it is *NOT* uranium, though it probably contains some. Even if it were, it's, as far as we are concerned, less accessible and mine-able than uranium would be on other planets. The core is nickel/iron mostly, and solid due to pressure. The layer above that is nickel-iron also (pretty sure, may have forgotten), but less pure, and liquid, as the temperature isn't as high.
Also, the problem the article mentions is not that the uranium is running out, it's that we aren't refining enough.
Although I would like to see some of the missing numbers from the article:
- How much uranium is refined per day (or year)
- What percent of uranium ore, by weight, is needed to produce fuel grade uranium
- What is the estimate of the available raw uranium in the areas we can reach
34486853790
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Yeah, the prices seem awfully low to me too. I'd guess that the cost of fuel is not a large portion of the cost of operating a reactor facility.
Gasoline is about 20 - 30% of the cost of running a car IIRC, so a 50% increase in cost is huge. If fuel costs are only 1% of the cost of running a reactor, a 900% increase increases production cost by less than 10 %, an I bet fuel costs are far less than 1% of the total.
Since 9/11, US nuclear plants have probably spent as much money on guns for the security personel as they have on fuel. (assertion based on no real numbers)
I metamoderate, therefore I am
If you want to keep your tinfoil hat on, you could argue that there are great similarities between the oil industry and the RIAA. Neither of them want new technology, regardless of what the public want or need.
Pining for the fjords
Breeder reactors reuse spent nuclear fuel. They only need small amounts of fuel to keep the reaction going. However, what about the waste? Compared to a conventional reactor, how much radioactive waste do they produce?
The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) would have used 99.5% of the fuel. The remaining 0.5% of the waste would have had the characteristic of decaying to ore-levels of radiation within 300 years. That's nearly a 100-fold decrease in the amount of nuclear waste we'd have to deal with, and orders of magnitude shorter time for protecting the waste. The waste is also attractive from a non-proliferation standpoint
Unfortunately, the Clinton Administration defunded the IFR project almost immediately after taking office and killed it properly two years into the first term. After all, how can you count on donations from the NONUKES lobby if safe, responsible fission power is available?
Bush hasn't restarted the project either, so there's plenty of blame to go around in Republicrat circles.
We should finish the research and build at least one of these reactors at the Yucca Mountain site. There we can burn all of the incoming waste fuel, and light up Las Vegas or something with the energy. If it were only for waste disposal it would be a good idea, but once the research is done we also have a system for solving Global Warming. China is even interested but they're going with Pebble Bed Reactors since the IFR work wasn't finished. I'd be happy for them to finish the work, but perhaps they don't have the qualified staff. I abhor those who think Global Warming is man-made and dangerous and refuse to embrace technology like IFR. Even the founder of Greenpeace is a 'shill' for the nuclear industry - he recognizes you have to make choices, and none of them are perfect, but such is life. The choice matrix is simple if we want to get this solved this century: man-made global warming, nuclear, or agrarian society. Pick one.
I understand Bill Richardson groks these issues. I wish he'd come out in full support of solving our energy problems instead of beating around the bush on it. I'd definitely vote for him if he did, and I'm not in the habit of voting Democrat. Oh, and it also solves our little geopolitical security problem, depowers the middle east despots, and bolsters our economy.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
1/ Find a country with lots of uranium.
Canada and Australia
To be more accurate - Australia and Canada have 80% of the world's uranium between them.
Australia has a little more than Canada.
Compare that with Saudi Oil, at 30% of world supply.
Australia is the Saudi Arabia of Uranium.
Even if you add in Thorium, which is more widely dispersed (usable with breeder reactors, see below) we are a major player, with > 25% of world Thorium.
As to usage:
0.7 percent of uranium is 235, versus 99.3% is U 238
To use in a conventional reactor you need about >4%, and often higher levels of U235
Therefore, the majority of uranium in the world cannot be used in conventional reactors as it has to be enriched (by extracting the U235) to a higher concentration.
If you were to change the world over to conventional reactors for its energy supply, it would run into serious shortages within 30 years or so. By using breeder reactors this would multiply out to well over 100 years of uranium supply. Add thorium into this equation and you are talking many hundreds of years of energy.
And as the price of electicity from a nuclear reactor is only about 10% Uranium, the rest relating to safety, reprocessing and so on costs, a big rise in uranium price isn't such a big issue. However, we must convert to breeder reactor technology or there will be extreme shortages fairly rapidly.
Just FYI,
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
50% of the world's Uranium comes from Canada and Australia.
Pfft. Canada has burned down the White House once before, we can do it again.
It's interesting that thorium was mentioned becuase that is a more plentiful fuel material. It is more difficult to handle than uranium and that has limited its use up to this point but there are serious efforts underway in India now that they can concentrate on a civilian nuclear industry.
People have been talking about the fuel scarcity for well over a decade (hence India's thorium work which started a decade or more ago), I have not read the article so I am commenting on the scarcity, the post above and not on anything new the article may have brought up.
Bismuth is hard to handle and scarce, and, from my own experiments with bismuth alloys years ago, it has horrible flow and wetting properties.
It's amazing what IS handled quite safely in industry - molten glass in multi-tonne quantities, flammable gases, toxic liquids. The trick is to find a technology that works, refine it, and stick to it. Before long people forget there was ever a problem. In my kitchen cupboard I have nearly pure formic acid, sodium hydroxide, chlorine based bleach. And that's just household cleaners.
Pining for the fjords