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

Yeah

[voice_of_all_reason]

But they have free Super Saver Shipping, so it balances out.

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.

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...

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

[QMO]

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

Actually, that's not what they mean. They mean that people haven't invested in mining uranium lately. There is plenty of easy (for uranium) stuff in the US.

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

[paeanblack]

Yes, that's the problem. Unfortunately I don't see a way to solve it, do you? Plutonium is pretty awesome stuff, and I don't think manufacturing it at 500 places around the world is such a great idea. Nuclear proliferation isn't a technical problem, but it is a problem.

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. Once nuclear weapons no longer instill the greatest fears, the uranium industry can start operating without the detrimental extra-market forces.

That's what we call the "peace dividend" :-/

Unfair price comparison

[maynard]

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.

Re:Solution

[elrous0]

Don't worry, we're only coming to bring you democracy.

...wait, you do? Already, huh?

Well, in that case, we're just coming for an extended vacation.

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.