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

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

[meringuoid]

... 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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Uranium's not all that abundant, we've known that for years.

This article is just another resource scare article. Uranium is not like oil in that it only forms in the upper levels of the crust on the Earth. You can find Uranium anywhere in the solar system. When they say that uranium is becoming scarce they mean that it is becoming scare in the east to reach places of the top 0.5 km of the 6371 km radius Earth.

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.

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

[Tom Womack]

Breeder reactors can also convert U238 to fissile plutonium, which is if anything more useful, since we already have reactors designed for Pu239 and I don't believe any reactors have yet been designed for Th233.

The problem is that people paranoid about nuclear proliferation have successfully made it very politically difficult (it's not technically completely straightforward, you're running rather fiddly chemistry by remote-control in a very high radiation environment) to reprocess spent fuel to get the plutonium out for reuse.

So the current nuclear fuel cycle is the equivalent of running a basic oil refinery, taking out the small jet-fuel fraction from crude oil, and then pumping the remainder back into the ground in places deliberately chosen to make it hard to take it out again. Breeder reactors are the equivalent of those catalytic-cracking columns in refineries which can make something useful out of the heavier crude-oil fractions.

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

[kestasjk]

It's better; we've got so much uranium around we don't know what to do with it! The problem is we're using high uranium-235 fuel, leaving lots of u-238 around. We bury it underground, talk about throwing it into the earth's conveyor belt so it gets sucked under, etc.

Interesting thing is that in the same breeder reactors as the GGP posted about you can use u-238 as a fissile fuel; it's a slightly more expensive process which is why we don't use it.

We have somewhere in the range of 10,000 to 4 billion years of energy via breeder reactors (and they're currently in production; it's not science fiction, it's just a bit more expensive).
Saying we're running out of uranium is like saying we're running out of rock. We've got so much of it around we're trying to get rid of it!

I'd say this is anti-nuclear pro-drum-circle sensationalist garbage.

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

[Glock27]

We can solve the problem by designing bigger and better weapons. A century ago, nitroglycerin manufacturing was once an international political issue. Today, we really couldn't care less if some country wants to play with dynamite.

The element of 'realpolitik' involved is that when a technology becomes so available it can't be controlled, the big powers just give up and move on to other problems.

However, there is a qualitative difference between WMDs and earlier weapons. WMDs can easily erase a city, fairly easily erase a country, and realistically could erase all life from the planet. So, there is a great concern about them regardless of ease of manufacture.

The bald fact is that both biological and chemical WMDs can be manufactured in very scary quantities in small labs now. Some of the recent developments with bioweapons make me personally more concerned with them than nuclear weapons. It is also possible that someone will finally figure out a practical method of laser uranium enrichment that'll eliminate all those pesky centrifuge cascades.

What is my point? That WMD manufacture is entering or has already entered a similar phase to dynamite in terms of ease of production. I feel we still need to cripple Iran's nuclear program, but we also need to start a determined and intelligent civil defense effort so when the inevitable WMD attacks occur we survive with minimal losses.

Will our species survive long enough to get off this rock? Stay tuned...

Re:Hopefully...

[TigerNut]

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).

Untrue - only for PUREX

[Flying pig]

As has been pointed out repeatedly in the literature, there is a promising route to build sodium cooled breeder reactors whose byproducts do not yield themselves to the production of plutonium, but do lend themselves to electrolytic refining rather than the PUREX route that has been used to support weapons manufacture. It has further been proposed that these reactors actually be used to consume existing high level waste, reducing disposal cost and easing the supply problems. (Unfortunately I can't point to any obvious links, as my information is in dead tree format, but I'm sure they are out there.) The problem seems to be that the advanced countries that have the capability of building such reactors don't have the political will, partly owing to "environmentalists" who seem actually just to be technically ignorant luddites. In fact most of these technologies have been around for years without commercialisation, but now it will take a long time to build reactors - of course it benefits the families of several politicians in the current US administration that oil prices stay high. The sudden push for pork barrel biofuel projects could be associated with the fact that the product utilises the current oil industry infrastructure rather than the boring old electricity supply industry infrastructure. And it does not commit to spending some serious money on scientific and engineering research which could, in the long term, reduce the value of shares in, say, Exxon, very considerably.

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.

99.5% - Integral Fast Reactor (IFR)

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Re:Solution

[HungSoLow]

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.