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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. "
But they have free Super Saver Shipping, so it balances out.
... 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.
The cost of Uranium is not the major cost of nuclear power, its the containment, disposal and safety that costs. If it goes up 400% big deal, even 40000%, so what. Plus fast breader reactors of course, but load of other /. users will mention that.
1/ Find a country with lots of uranium.
2/ Invade in the name of freedom.
3/ Profit!
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63
God help us. Could the world conceivably face a time in the future when we don't even have enough Uranium left to wipe out the human race? [shudders]
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Then we should concentrate on reactors with higher breeding ratios, as the exhaustion of mineable uranium can be slowed down significantly, and that is worth it despite the negative political implications of the ease of production of weapons-grade material in these reactors.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
And they said I was stupid to invest in all this uranium when it was cheap! Now, if I could just stop coughing up blood long enough to take some photos for eBay, I'll be set for life...
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
this will lead to renewed interest in breeder reactors. Recycling nuclear waste is a good thing.
Uranium prices have spiked in recent years, as TFA shows. However, comparing prices today with a decade or so back ignores the huge amount of uranium that hit the market after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A more honest comparison would go back several decades.
Another point to consider is that while current steam based nuclear power plants do burn uranium down to an unusable 'waste product', that waste is actually quite useful with reprocessing. So, while it is true that were the world only to burn low-level enriched uranium the world would run out quickly, it is not true that with a more modern burn-reclamation cycle that fuel shortages would persist.
Recycle the weapons then
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
But I think the point of fissile materials running out is set to be quite moot. Fusion reactor output has been increasing exponentially since its inception, and it should not be terribly long before it will be a viable alternative to fission power. Once we're set into fusion, it is basically impossible to run out of fuel. Fusion reactors run off of deuterium, which accounts for about 0.015% of all hydrogen. That is a crapload of deuterium! Consider that the oceans are 2/3 hydrogen (more or less) and heavy water is fairly easy to separate. (*actually, a tritium-deuterium reaction is more preferable for future reactors, but the tritium is refined from the deuterium--there is no natural abundance of tritium since it has a half life of ~17 years)
As a worst case scenario, we can always mine other planetary bodies. But despite the article's hype, don't expect us to run out of reactor fuel anytime this century.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
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
Err, that's an interesting thing to be taught; the core of the Earth is a sphere of liquid iron. Uranium isn't a siderophile (that is, it doesn't dissolve in liquid iron), so there won't be much uranium in the core (this also means there won't be much uranium in asteroids, in case space enthusiasts want to mention mining those for the uranium).
People have measured the uranium content of the inside of the Earth by looking for neutrinos of the right energy, which are produced during radioactive decay and fly straight through the Earth, and get that the quantity of uranium is enough to produce about 40 terawatts by radioactive decay. There is a crank theory that the core of the Earth has a fission reactor in it, but there's really very limited evidence for that.
From reading the summary it makes it sound like we are running out of natural supplies of uranium. This is not the case, and if we implement breeder or burner reactors, will not be the case for a very long time. The problem is that we don't have much uranium mining and processing capability in this country, since the outlook for future growth of nuclear power has been low the last couple decades for political reasons. So that would have to be ramped significantly as we build new plants, and MIT is worried that it is not happening at a fast enough rate, and may hamper further growth.
I think there is an assumption made, almost unconsciously, that if our other power sources fail we could always "fall back" on nuclear if we wanted to take the risk. It's interesting to see that large scale nuclear power could have similar infrastructure problems to renewables - invest a lot or don't end up viable.
This article focuses primarily on the economic questions of scale-up. I would be curious to know how much uranium is theoretically recoverable and how long it would last us. Perhaps there is so much of it that we could live off of it indefinitely (particularly with waste reprocessing) but I don't know the numbers.
What this article DOES demonstrate, even better than renewables, is the need to sustain and increase basic research into ALL energy problems and technologies. Solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, and various storage techniques like hydrogen will be needed; it's not a one solution fits all kind of equation. Nor will the solutions just "be there" when we need them, unless we pay attention and take steps to ensure that they are. Even nuclear cannot be taken for granted.
Also - in the long term human beings will consume all available power either by technological/standard of living increases, population increases, or both. There isn't going to be a solution which will be "enough" - we will ALWAYS find something to do with it. Just the scale-up going on right now is putting a healthy demand on resources of all sorts, and that's just the short term. In hundreds or thousands of years there will be some very fundamental problems that need solving, and I think we need to get started working on them sooner rather than later. These things don't happen magically, they take hard and long work.
Business is not to be expected to think long term, certainly not in the current environment. That should be the job of government research funding, and there needs to be a LOT more of it. Perhaps the difficulties of scaling up nuclear power will help to wake people up - it would be nice to do the research on new power technologies in something other than economic crisis mode.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
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
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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
All fusion bombs use a fission detonator.
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)
Really :D
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
Since the dawn of environmentalism, we've been told to use less, deal with less, expect less. It isn't true. We've never run out of anything important and we never will.
Oh, I see, so when the Newfoundland cod stock was wiped out for instance, a benevolent market force fairy came down from the sky and replaced all the fish population, and left a big sack of gold for every person living there too. It must be nice living in la-la land.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
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!
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
If the nuclear power plant replaces a fossil fuel burning power plant then it is heavily carbon-negative.
Folks, before you hop on a wishful bandwagon, how about making sure there is a wagon?
I tried finding numbers and didn't find anything great, but from what I did find, hundred megawatt scale reactors produce less than 50 tons of spent fuel, which is like 8000 kilowatt hours per pound(the actual number is likely much higher), which would make fuel that costs $80 a pound add $0.01 to the costs of the energy.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Uranium is not dangerous, and one pound of uranium is not very much as far as power reactors are concerned. For reference, the density of uranium metal is 18 g/cm^3, so 1 lb of uranium metal would only be 25 cm^3 in size.
A typical PWR generates around 3000 MWt, runs for ~500 full power days, and is loaded with around 70,000 kg of uranium metal. So that is [3000 MW*500 d*24 hr/d*3600 s/hr]/[70 000 kg] = 1,851,429 MJ/kg. For comparison, gasoline contains 47 MJ/kg. Keep in mind though that the uranium metal is not really consumed, it is only depleted until it builds up too much neutron-absorbing fission products, at which point it can be reprocessed and reused.
If uranium metal is $80 per lb, then it costs a mere 2 cents for 1 GJ of thermal power. Gasoline costs about $3/gallon and one gallon weighs about 6.2 lbs=$0.48/lb. So gas is about $22.51 for 1 GJ, which is more then 1000 times more expensive then uranium.
...does this mean Iran does have a legitimate reason to have a nuclear program after all? Depends on your definition of "nuclear program" (and "legitimate"). A "nuclear program" can be anything from straight fission power generators to weapons grade plutonium production. No one really cares about the former, while the latter some find worrisome.If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Actually, the immediate supply problem is coming as a result of some floods and reduced stockpiles. The stockpiles became large because of the conversion of weapons to fuel. This reduced mining activity. You can read more here http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/28/business/28urani um.html.
s -selling-solar.html
On the other hand, there is a limited suppy of ore which makes reliance on nuclear power to avoid further gloabl warming a poor proposition. Converting current power production to all nuclear runs out the recoverable fuel before the new plants end their design lifetimes so nuclear would be much more expensive than anticipated at a lower level of use.
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Get Real! Go solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
The US is sitting on thousands of tons of used Uranium fuel rods... notice I said "used" and not "spent". When the US finally accepts reprocessing as part of the fuel cycle, they'll have sufficient reserves for hundreds of years, not to mention that weapons grade plutonium from retired warheads can also be made in to a MOX fuel, and Lord knows you've got a zillion of those damn things.
Wrong. Most "fusion" weapons in fact get the majority of their energy from fission.
For fusion to work, you need a heavy casing to channel the X-rays that compress the fusion fuel. If you happen to make the casing out of uranium 238 instead of lead, you get a 2-3X boost in power because the fast neutrons from the fusion reaction can split unenriched uranium without needing a chain reaction, which yields significant extra energy. Since this fission-based power boost comes for "free" simply for using dirt cheap unenriched uranium instead of another metal for the casing, most weapons uses it.
If you have 25 pieces that are each 1cm^3 in size, the total size is NOT 25cm^3. (25cm^3 is huge!).
Yes the total 25 pieces 1cm^3 in size is 25cm^3, because that's what cm^3 means - number of 1 cm^3 pieces. Perhaps you were thinking of it as being (25 cm)^3? That would be huge, but that isn't what 25 cm^3 means. 25 cm^3 is the volume of an object that is 1cm x 1cm x 25cm. Not that big, but also much bigger than 0.18in^3.
The original density unit was given as g/cm^3. You were performing an unecessary cube root, and the result is you are off by a power of 3.
The enemies of Democracy are
For those with limited knowledge or attention spans, (or politicians)
We have 2 choices for every X number of years each Nuclear power plant runs:
(A) Store 10,000 pounds of Spent fuel for 25,000 years safely, taking into account rising sea levels, earthquakes, movement of the earths crust, etc.
(B) Store 15 pounds of Spent fuel for 300 years safely, protect/monitor/gaurd the "recycled" parts, because they could be used to make weapons.
Our government has chosen (A)
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Inching away
Not me. I'm at a full bore sprint.
I am a bomb technician. If you see me running, try to keep up.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I mean, we have an excellent working fusion reactor that outputs all the energy we need and has a five billion year perfect record of safety and reliability.
Start Running Better Polls
Integral Fast Reactor.
It can use any actinide, and has almost 90 times the efficiency of regular thermal reactors.
No, not true, unless you can mine the core. Good crust deposits are pretty rare. Uranium, being very dense, tends to sink in the planet. However, it doesn't take much uranium to provide a lot of power. We're looking at thousands of years if power consumption keeps on growing, tens of thousands at current rates, if seawater extraction is used.
:)
If we can't develop more cost effective, sustainable power sources during such a long time period, I'd say we have no right calling ourselves a sentient species.
How come things that happen to stupid people keep happening to me?
It's no wonder we're running out, when most of the reactors in service around the world are grossly inefficient anyhow, and were practically designed to generate nuclear waste products they can't use for fuel. The typical light-water nuclear reactor today only exploits about 1% or less of the energy it can get out a given amount of nuclear fuel. (Assuming it has a once-through fuel cycle, which is the most popular.) Other technologies, however (such as the Integral Fast Reactor, which Hazel O'Leary and John Kerry so kindly helped to kill in 1994) which feature closed fuel cycles could theoretically safely use up to 95% of the energy stored in their fuel, and could in practice even consume the fuel-waste of other reactors. Other alternative fuel cycles feature materials such as Thorium as their fuel of choice. (Even Americium - the stuff in your smoke detector - has been considered as a fuel source.)
This 'Uranium Crisis' isn't caused by the mere consumption of nuclear fuel, but rather the ridiculously wasteful manner by which we've chosen to consume it for over half a century now. Better technology is within our reach that could allow us to dramatically stretch our nuclear fuel supply, both at current and greatly heightened consumption levels. While this hardly means we should stop worrying (good ideas too often fall before bad people) it does offer a bit of hope for us until nuclear fusion power finally takes off some time toward the end of our lives, if it ever does.
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