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CERN Physicist Warns About Uranium Shortage
eldavojohn writes "Uranium mines provide us with 40,000 tons of uranium each year. Sounds like that ought to be enough for anyone, but it comes up about 25,000 tons short of what we consume yearly in our nuclear power plants. The difference is made up by stockpiles, reprocessed fuel and re-enriched uranium — which should be completely used up by 2013. And the problem with just opening more uranium mines is that nobody really knows where to go for the next big uranium lode. Dr. Michael Dittmar has been warning us for some time about the coming shortage (PDF) and has recently uploaded a four-part comprehensive report on the future of nuclear energy and how socioeconomic change is exacerbating the effect this coming shortage will have on our power consumption. Although not quite on par with zombie apocalypse, Dr. Dittmar's final conclusions paint a dire picture, stating that options like large-scale commercial fission breeder reactors are not an option by 2013 and 'no matter how far into the future we may look, nuclear fusion as an energy source is even less probable than large-scale breeder reactors, for the accumulated knowledge on this subject is already sufficient to say that commercial fusion power will never become a reality.'"
What about plutonium and other radioactive materials? (first post? hehehe)
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
Everytime nuclear fission comes up as a possible viable alternative. Peak Uranium is as real as peak oil, and it's here now.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
we're well and truly out of uranium when our harvesters are going all over the damned map looking for it and we have to start sending engineers to uranium spikes right?
Good people go to bed earlier.
This adds another dimension to the whole Nuclear Iran foreign policy issue.
I do not have a sig. You are hallucinating.
... is that as soon as it becomes a reality, it becomes a commodity. More energy out than in? No business model there, it's all free!
Nobody wants to invest in a commodity. It's a cash sink. No profit in selling "free."
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Zombies don't require electricity, so that zombie apocalypse is the answer to all our problems!
arent the Indians using that now and its more plentiful
The moon is the answer for all our future resource-problems..
Peak Oil was really just the beginning. If nuclear energy were to take off, we would be out of uranium before the first year was over. This points to a deadly flaw in the use of natural resources as the basis for energy sources. If you have to mine it, drill it, or harvest it, you will always run the risk of running out of it.
This is why there are only a handful truly renewable resources. Solar, for as long as we really need to care about, is going to be around forever. Fusion, if effectively harnessed, could provide a very good power source without the pollution of fission and the only input is hydrogen (or even heavier elements). Gravititic potential energy is another largely untapped resource. While some forms of this like dams and tidal generators have been developed, there is literally an unlimited amount of energy in the form of space-time bending due to gravity.
We're so far behind the energy resource curve that it is only a matter of time before we end up in the dark.
I think I speak for a great many nuclear technicians when I say:
D'oh!
I'd say recycle the spent fuel because it's hardly done.
Odd really, given how into recycling all those environmental freaks are . . .
You can extract dramatically more energy from a supply of uranium by using them and the by-products have a shorter half-life. I'm sure that by now safe, redundant control system can be built to keep them safe. Just NIMBY (not in my backyard).
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
So supply equals demand and supports the current price. News at 11:00?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Utah
"All of Utah’s numerous uranium mines closed prior to 2000, because of low uranium prices."
Why not build Thorium-based reactors instead? The material is 100x more abundant. The USA has an ample natural supply. You get 10 times the energy because you don't have the 238 problem. There is almost no waste and the byproducts decay within a human lifetime. And you can't use them to make nuclear weapons.
We can actually run out of stuff? Well, golly, who would have *guessed?*
This is almost as much of a "surprise" as the current economic collapse.
Question. Are journalists and politicians pre-lobotomized, or does it happen later? Just askin'.....
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Uranium mines provide us with 40,000 tons of uranium each year. Sounds like that ought to be enough for anyone,
Yeah, yeah, I know what that was building up to:
"40k ought to be enough for anyone", &c.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
I came here hoping to find some posts pointing to information refuting these claims, but I haven't seen any yet. I'm hoping that this guy is crazy, but since the Slashdot crowd hasn't dogpiled on him yet, I'm going to have to guess that he isn't. Given how much energy is generated from nuclear reactors, this can be a big problem. Is this also one of the reasons why there haven't been many new reactors built recently?
>will never become a reality
never, sir...
Where there is money to be made, there is a waaaaayy~!
Uranium is for infidels and suckers. Iranium is the future of nuclear development!
And this is why we need to diversify our energy production. There are other radioactive sources we can use as fuel. Thorium, plutonium, and other nuclear 'waste' can still be used as long as we build reactors for them. (Once the public gets its head out of its ass and stops this ZOMG nucular waste dirty bombs terrists nonsense. But what are the odds of that?)
Helium-3 is used for absolute-zero experiments and nuclear material detectors, both which have been increasing rapidly. Its is mainly produced as a byproduct of nuclear weapons product, which has been on the downswing. The net result are shortages and massive price increases.
Well scientist were able to find out that the moon had water on it. Maybe NASA can spend another billion dollars to figure out if there is any Uranium on the moon. Then another 100 billion to try to figure out how to get it back to the earth safely. (Or maybe wireless power from the moon!)
Eventually the sun will burn out anyways...
Areva quotes their fuel costs as roughly 17% of total cost of nuclear power with half of that being the cost of the uranium ( rest being enrichment and fuel-rod fabrication )
This means that even if uranium costs were to double the cost of nuclear power would increase by less than 9%.
Conversely for the price of nuclear power do double from uranium costs alone the cost of uranium would have to increase 10 times. Long before that happens it would become economical to build fast breeder reactors and they only need a fraction of the fuel other reactors do.
Also at such high uranium prices it would start being economical to extract uranium from sea-water, effectively making uranium availability a non-issue for thousands of years.
being a high Energy physicist does not automatically make you an expert in nuclear power engineering or nuclear fuel resource analyst.
2. But no, we are not running out. There is plenty of Uraninum, we just need to mine it. We stopped mining it when the Russians began dissasembling their nukes. It was a lot cheaper to buy it from them (not to mention safer, as we ended up with the uranium instead of less reputable people).
3. All we have to do is start enriching, prospecting and mining again. It's not that big a deal, it justs costs us some extra cash.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
On an episode of "Explorations" about a year ago Michio Kaku had an interview with David Goodstein of Caltech. Unfortunately the archive was deleted but it was on May 27, 2008. Prof. Goodstein claimed that if we were to switch to all Nuclear power for our electricity needs, we would run out of Uranium in 20 years.
Maybe this is what the Mayan calendar was really predicting, the shortage of all natural resources, oil, food, uranium, coal, gold, natural gas, water (aliens stealing it) etc.
Just sayin what everyone else is thinkin.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
> the accumulated knowledge on this subject is already sufficient
> to say that commercial fusion power will never become a reality.
In the veriest fraction of a second that this idea becomes
Conventional Wisdom, the first commercially-viable fusion
reactor will start up without a hitch.
"100-300 times more energy yield from the same amount of nuclear fuel." - wikipedia So in ca. 2030, when 4. generation nuclear power plants are commercial, we can use old nuclear fuel. And nuclear power will probably only get more and more efficient.
For those who didn't read (the rather dense) TFA, a big part of his objection is that we don't have a good, safe technology for breeder reactors, and that our existing reactor designs require Uranium which is something of a limited resource. I've seen estimates that we have maybe 70 years of the stuff around if we went totally nuclear, but those could be high or low -- who knows (and the cost will be astronomical when we start to run short of it). Breeder reactors can extend the fuel lifetime for thousands of years. Unfortunately, the existing breeder reactors that we do have tend to be very unsafe and expensive, using things like liquid sodium (catches fire when it contacts air) for coolant.
This brings me to my main point: the current state of nuclear reactor technology is not sustainable. Most Slashdot nuclear advocacy goes like this: (a) start building reactors now, (b) don't worry about fuel supplies, we'll just build breeder reactors. The problem is that the reactors we build in step (a) may be entirely incompatible with the breeder reactors, and we may not be able to build enough of the breeders in (b) safely to move to this technology in the near term.
Both of these problems can probably be solved with technological developments, which means spending a lot of money on nuclear research. It does not necessarily mean "go out and build reactors", "give subsidies to the nuclear industry", which seems to be the preferred policy action of many nuclear advocates. I think this needs to be understood.
I'm sure someone's beat me to the semantics here but they're discussing fission with uranium, not fusion, which requires lighter elements (ex: hydrogen, helium, lithium) and their isotopes (ex: deuterium, tritium). Essentially saying the uranium reaction is like fusion is like saying the sun is a nuclear bomb. While conceptually it may "look" like such but it's nearly the reverse kind of process.
Nuclear's a dying industry, and not for the reason commonly cited.
Fact is, it is ALREADY much more expensive to build new nuclear reactor capacity than it is to put up new windmills (which are in turn much more expensive than natural gas or coal)
I suspect that even when you factor in the cost of storage, as long as you use something like a compressed air cavern for storage, then wind is still cheaper.
I predict that less than 10 new nuclear fission plants for commercial power generation will ever be built in the United States over the rest of human history.
Iran tried to do just that.
But the US got all snarky and threatened to invade.
Did you know that the US breached regulations when they kept hidden the knowledge that many US nukes were given to other countries for their use in abrogation of the NPT but finessing it to "well, really it's still ours, but if war breaks out then there's no treaty and although that means they get the nukes to use, the treaty doesn't apply in war so it's still OK"?
But the US still develops nuclear power.
And we don't invade them for it.
Breeder technology would mean we would have to let Iran progress THEIR breeder technology.
This won't happen.
Feel free to point and laugh but I'm curious.
What about asteroids? Are they all composed of rock and such or do some of them have uranium deposits? Have any of our probes detected uranium somewhere in the belt?
I realize the inherent and monumental tasks involved in getting to an asteroid laden with uranium, moving it towards Earth then mining it, but I'm asking if uranium has been found anywhere else we could potentially get at.
As an aside, what about undersea mining? Any uranium deposits found in the ocean depths?
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Use the weapons for electricity, of course
...but isn't salt the most abundent resource we have on Earth that we mine the hell out of? I remember reading/hearing somewhere that even at present mining capacity, the human race will likely die out before all the salt is mined. Any truth to this?
Living With a Nerd
"No matter how far into the future we may look, nuclear fusion as an energy source is even less probable than large-scale breeder reactors, for the accumulated knowledge on this subject is already sufficient to say that commercial fusion power will never become a reality."
I have a feeling this will go up there with "it's impossible to build a heavier-than-air flying machine" and "there's a world market for about 6 computers".
The immutable economic laws of supply and demand strike again !!!
Panic !!! Government subsidies !!! H1-B miners now !!!
(rollz eyez)
Pay mine engineers and miners more money and ... guess what? ... you'll have more unranium.
Buck, up, world corporate greed-meisters.
more scare mongering to drive up supply and reduce cost. idiots.
It works in the Sun, so to say it could never work here ignores the fact that the sun works.
The companies that supply American power (fossil fuels and nuclear) will not simply give up, throw in the towel, and retire to the beach when it becomes impractical to "get more fuel". They'll simply find another way to produce energy from renewable resources and sell it.
Anyone ever consider what life would be like without burning (ie, energy use for efficiency of existence)? Perhaps the native Americans had it right: we should be nomadic, moving with the herds and the climate, eating dropped fruit versus growing orchards, etc. Granted, you can't do that with the population (or the populace) we have now, but give it a few years: with no nuclear fuel, no gasoline or plastic/petroleum-based products, water shortages (never mind when everything east of California falls into the ocean), the population might thin out enough that we move back to living within nature instead of being this anomalous creature that tries to force nature to obey.
And besides, with less people on the Internet, my ping times in L4D would be teh awsum.
Since the world is going to end in 2012, we have more than we'll ever need.
We also have 10 years of oil left, so no problem there, either.
Also, Brocko Bama is going to have us converted to solar and wind before then.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
It seems to me that when we run out of uranium, it becomes difficult to create more nuclear weapons. I'm OK with that. Besides, there are better power production technologies in the pipeline. It seems that fusion will become a viable option by around 2013 (if we move quickly and provide sufficient funding). I'm thinking specifically of Dr. Richard Nebel's research with IEC fusion. There are other promising fusion research projects as well. However, from what I've seen, the ITER project should be shut down and its funding distributed to other projects.
Ouch! The truth hurts!
Now I am confused! Shouldn't it be 2012 when the earth comes to an end?!
We better speed up our consumption if we want to make our 2012 deadline.
Why re-invent the wheel, why re-invent the sun.
Hope is the currency of fools
Interesting. That's the first time I've heard about an Uranium shortage.
Over where I live, fission plants are being touted as the answer to our energy needs. They're supposed to be clean, low-health risk (lower risk than coal plants, at least), and fuel is supposed to be plentiful. I thought the only thing the government wasn't telling us is that it's actually one of the more expensive sources of energy, but now you're saying that Uranium is actually in short supply?
Regardless, I think the answer to any energy shortage is, first of all, conservation (which we can easily do a lot more of!) and, secondly, renewable resources, including widely known ones such as wind and solar energy, but also less widely known ones such as biofuels (you do need something you can control the output of, after all, rather than having to depend on the weather).
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
"The accumulated knowledge on this subject is already sufficient to say that commercial fusion power will never become a reality."
They said the same thing about Faster Than Light travel, and look where we are today!
Your brain is not a computer.
Build an industrial-scale mass spectrometer. Dump in trash, concrete, and rock. Frequently empty the buckets that the fissionables land in.
The One, the only, the simple solution...
stop having babies and revert back to pre-industrial revolution lifestyle. seriously, what's wrong with that?
...is to use dilithium crystals. Someone, please call Capt. Scott.
The world is going to end in 2012 anyway. So what's the problem?
It's sure we cannot harvest oil from other planets. But what about Uranium?
But if you don't like Dr. Dittmar's numbers it's not hard to find another estimate which state's there's at least a 100 year supply.
Just like we have a million tons of gold. All we have to do is extract it from the ocean where it is dissolved.
We can't harvest any oil from space, but I'm sure we could with Uranium?
Apparently being a "CERN physicist" doesn't prevent you from being an biased loud mouth, ignoring evidence and spinning "facts" for your personal agenda. Besides, haven't you heard the *REAL* US gov supported solution? Simply burn your food supplies as fuel. Problem solved.
> ...will never become a reality...
"When an elderly and respected scientist says something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he says it is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong."
I wouldn't declare commercial fusion power impossible just yet. The more that fissionables become in short supply, the more somebody is going to figure that there's big bucks to be made getting fusion to work and spend money doing the engineering.
Let's face facts here, if we dig thorium out of the ground we are going to be bringing up more nuclear waste and that is a BAD THING. But, if we extract uranuim from seawater, we are removing a toxic and radioactive! material from the oceans - you know that place where the whales and dolphins live. And if that does not make you realize we need to be pruifying the oceans via uranium extraction, - well then think of the sushi.
Unlike a regular mining operation, not only are we removing that uranium from our global sushi storage facility, but when we use it in our reactors we will be converting some of that nasty stuff into pure energy (helping it to "ascend" as it were). This means that when we are done using it in a reactor - even if we don't do anything else with it, there will actually be less radioactive materials in our ecosphere than before.
more seriously:
Presidential Committee recommends research on uranium recovery from seawater
In a report released on August 2, 1999, the The President's Committee Of Advisors On Science And Technology (PCAST ) recommended that the U.S. consider participating in international research on extracting uranium from seawater: "One possibility for maintaining fission as a major option without reprocessing is low-cost extraction of uranium from seawater. The uranium concentration of sea water is low (approximately 3 ppb) but the quantity of contained uranium is vast - some 4 billion tonnes (about 700 times more than known terrestrial resources recoverable at a price of up to $130 per kg). If half of this resource could ultimately be recovered, it could support for 6,500 years 3,000 GW of nuclear capacity (75 percent capacity factor) based on next-generation reactors (e.g., high-temperature gas-cooled reactors) operated on once-through fuel cycles. Research on a process being developed in Japan suggests that it might be feasible to recover uranium from seawater at a cost of $120 per lb of U3O8.40 Although this is more than 10 times the current uranium price, it would contribute just 0.5 per kWh to the cost of electricity for a next-generation reactor operated on a once-through fuel cycle-equivalent to the fuel cost for an oil-fired power plant burning $3-a-barrel oil." [emphasis added] 40 Nobukawa 1994: H. Nobukawa "Development of a Floating Type System for Uranium Extraction from Sea Water Using Sea Current and Wave Power," in Proceedings of the 4th International Offshore and Polar Engineering Conference (Osaka, Japan: 10-15 April 1994), pp. 294-300. Source: Powerful Partnerships: The Federal Role In International Cooperation On Energy Innovation. A Report From The President's Committee Of Advisors On Science And Technology Panel On International Cooperation In Energy Research, Development, Demonstration, And Deployment. Washington, DC, June 1999, p. 5-26 - 5-27 (download full text , 1.3M PDF format)
BTW current uranium price is $44 per pound - while the above quote is ten years old, it does suggest that the process is certainly as feasible as extracting oil from shale and or tar sands. And it can be sold as removing dangerous poisons from the ocean rather than adding new ones that have been sequestered deep underground.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Of course, you would need some kind of a monster microwave link to carry the energy back to the Earth...
I hear that Iran has a pretty good enrichment program going, I'm sure that we can just buy our uranium from them. After all, they sell us their oil as it is, so how much worse could it be?
There are numerous ways to make PV cells, including the much cheaper dye based, and they keep coming up with new ones all the time, and we just won't run out* of materials to make solar thermal collectors, which among other uses (direct hot water use, direct hot air use, direct pure fresh water production, cooking, food drying and storage, etc) can be used in concentrator arrays to drive steam plants, or anything else you might need a source of "wicked freekin hot" for.
*if we did run out of normal materials, that means we have run out of most everything then, you won't be building nuthin', so the point would be moot.
You can make solar thermal from such a wide variety of stuff it ain't funny. Example, here's a simple do it in one weekend project, just from junk our landfills are full of or you can go scrounge someplace, an old refrigerator, a sheet of glass (like some used store glass), an old hot water tank and some plumbing fixtures will make you a hot water heater.
I like solar the most out of all the energy choices we have now (generally speaking) because it scales so well, and can be configured to do so many things, from DIY made out of scraps like I outlined above, all the way to large scale commercial uses. It is our only practical fusion power, and will probably *be* our only practical fusion power for a LONG time.(and biofuels are solar fusion power as well so I include them) It is also the one that lends itself best to decentralization of energy production and allows the energy consumer to actually have a power source paid off, and not be stuck renting the infrastructure and then paying for the fuel and their never ending need for profit from bigelectrico or bigliquidfuelsco forever and ever and ever.
The other reason I like it so well..and this is really important...no stupid hideous wars will be fought over solar tech. Which is something I just *wish* the all pro nuke and pro oil crowd would acknowledge is a really major "cost" of their pet methods today.
Uranium tech and petroleum tech..wars in the past, wars today and threats of even larger and nastier wars in the future over access to supplies and who gets someone else's "permission" to use this tech or access supplies/raw materials.
The sooner we get away from those two war creating sources (and coal) the better, IMO, for the safety and security of the human species (and all the other species).
And not one of them pointed out this is yet another dupe from last week?
John McCain wanted to build >100 nuclear power plants. Like many politicians, he was not aware of the availability of fuel...
Peak Oil, Peak Uranium what else is peaking? I guess right now it's time to go to Mars. It doesn't preclude finding more deposits but it will take a few years for prospectors and then heavy mining interests to start exploiting those unexploited resources.
Well, on the good front we still have plenty of Coal, so no worries there right? Choke, Cough, hey, is it getting hot or is that me?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
No idea why he is so fusion sceptic. Fusion is just a matter of scale. An apollo like fusion program would give us a fusion power plant before the end of the next decade. Once it is shown it's working it will become commercial feasible sooner or later anyway, depending on how fast we run out of other energy sources.
NEA Redbook for 2004:
PROVEN Uranium reserves worldwide: about 4 million tons (current consumption rate of U worldwide is 60 000 tons per year => proven reserves at 80-130 $/kgU these proven reserves are enough for 65 years of use at the current consumption rate)
ESTIMATED Uranium reserves worldwide: about 16 million tons (current consumption rate of U worldwide is 60 000 tons per year => proven reserves at 80-130 $/kgU these proven reserves are enough for 265 years of use at the current consumption rate)
NON-CONVENTIONAL Uranium reserves worldwide (i.e. uranium contained in phosphates): an ADDITIONAL 22 million tons (representing an additional 365 years of use)
Uranium dissolved in sea water: about 4 billion tons (but more difficult and costly to retrieve). The Japanese have one workable technique already, and they are researching another.
When we get generation 4 reactors going, it won't be just the U235 we can use (0.72%) but U238 (the other 99%), so multiply the duration by 100. Then there is Thorium, which is three times as abundant in the crust, we haven't had enough use for it before to properly prospect for it. India is seriously working on utilizing Thorium, it knows it has significant reserves, and has had trouble importing Uranium in the past.
And if Dr. Dittmat want to place bets against fusion, I'll put some money up. Polywell's chances are good, and Dense Plasma Focus looks like a fair bet, and there are others. No magnetic confinement though, which is probably all he knows about.
customer is God
I hereby command you to kill yourself.
Asshole.
But a physicist that works at CERN:
http://consult.cern.ch/xwho/people/387836
This gentleman seems to hail from the Swiss ETH Zurich.
Well, it doesn't say we will run out of Uranium in the Earth, it says we will run out of Uranium ready to deploy (at least that's what I get from the summary). In other words, we are using it up faster than we are digging it out and enriching it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Oops, he said "never". That makes it propaganda, not science.
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
An utterly simple back of the envelope calculation demonstrates that the Earth contains sufficient uranium to supply fission power for billions of years [stanford.edu].
Utterly simple and utterly wrong.
Do that calculation again, and instead of assuming zero growth. Do it assuming 3% growth, because that's the average.
Then go look up "Dr. Albert Bartlett" and watch his "The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See".
Deleted
I first read through this article when it was first posted on the oil drum weeks ago, and at the time it just seemed ... wrong, somehow. I've since spent a lot of time doing my own research and reading on the topics, and I feel Dr. Dittmar has been intellectually dishonest in at least a few areas. Further, the organization of the article is terrible, mixing sections and topics in a confusing fashion. I suspect this is intentional.
Prime examples of issues in the article:
- He uses nonstandard terminology with respect to breeding gain, and in several places uses phrases such as 'has only a maximum theoretical breeding gain of 0.7' in a context that implies that anything below 1.0 is not self-sustaining. Once armed with a better understanding of the terminology I was able to put his comments into proper context, but this just made the negative spin obvious instead of allowing it to slip under the radar.
- He makes the claim that no thorium breeder has ever reached breakeven, when in fact the very first one assembled had a net gain after operation.
- He makes the claim that no currently online breeder reactors are at breakeven, combined with claims that breeder reactors are a huge proliferation concern, neglecting the fact that most currently operational breeders were designed explicitly to have slightly less than breakeven gain precisely to address proliferation concerns.
In short, while he may be competent and he may be very experienced, there is a clear agenda behind this. The paper contains a substantial amount of spin and FUD, and further is organized in such a fashion as to make it difficult to analyze. I would firmly lump it into the 'armchair FUD' category instead of 'unbiased scientific position paper'. YMMV.
Alter Aeon Multiclass MUD - http://www.alteraeon.com
On second thought.. No don't d---NO CARRIER
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
In Sweden, there is said to be a whole mountain of uranium; enough to supply all the world's reactors for 100 years. World wide there are numerous other low-grade sources.
The trouble is, that these are low grade ores and it costs more to extract the uranium.
The point is there is a continuous curve (sorry I don't have that curve to show you)of the size of uranium supply versus the cost of extracting it. Therefore, it is not a matter of uranium shortage it is a question of energy costs.
Since nuclear power is so saddled with the sky high cost of meeting safety and environmental requirements, I'm not sure how much uranium contributes to the total cost. If uranium is only 10% of the cost of a Mwh, then doubling the cost of uranium adds only 10% to the cost. Perhaps another slashdotter can post the actual cost breakdowns for today's nukes.
No more Uranium? Pull it out of Uranus.
What about Anti-Matter?
Well, there IS global dimming. We're not going to run out, it just hurts the efficiency. I am confident the technological breakthroughs will outpace the rate of dimming. And if carbon pollution goes down at the same time, because of the abundance of a solar-intake infrastructure, the rate of dimming will decrease, too.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
Virginia land hides huge uranium deposit
First URL is UPI story. Second is abstract of a scholarly paper from Virginia Tech.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/01/02/Virginia-land-hides-huge-uranium-deposit/UPI-69751199296526/
http://www.geoinformatics.vt.edu/server/docs/jjerden/NA99l.htm
Estimated content 55,000 tons uranium per UPI. The second suggests ~40,000 tonnes of uranium, ~40 million tonnes of 0.1% ore. If the 0.1% ore is itself the usual 0.7% U235, then ~10,000 tonnes of 3% enriched would net from the ore body.
Let's use the republican answer to everything and just dig up more of it.
People said I was crazy stockpiling Uranium in my basement, but who's laughing now?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor/
A type of PHWR. They normally used natural uranium, but can also use a wide range of fuels such as (and not limited to) spent enriched uranium, thorium, plutonium/uranium mix.
They are currently generating commercial power in Canada, Korea, China, Romania, Argentina, Pakistan and reversed engineered versions in India.
They have their fair share of disadvantages, but obviously there are benefits to not sharing fuel with the PWR/BWR crowded market.
What a load of crap. It's nowhere NEAR that area of PV cells. 231sq km is enough for THE ENTIRE WORLD PLUS SOME.
About the area of Wales or NY State (I think. one of the smaller states definitely).
That is at ~3% efficiency. Even if you count cloudy days and nighttime into the equation, we're well above that now.
No, you're thinking of 655,360 tons. *That* ought to be enough for anyone.
Never said Iran tried a breeder reactor.
And those nukes in Europe aren't necessary. France and UK have their own deterrent and Russia don't really want Europe anyway. That thinking is old cold war.
And it doesn't stop them being a finessing of the rules to break the spirit. Many of the signatories are very unhappy with it. Yet they aren't calling for the US to be invaded.
"Not that that gives us the moral high ground, but it puts us squarely on the practical don't-fuck-with-us ground."
Three Words:
Windows For Warships.
The US last won a war when they were part of the Great British Empire. Nukes wouldn't work because to stop an INVADER you'd have to nuke your own flipping COUNTRY.
The problem is that the US are as much a danger to their own allies as the opposition and "friendly fire" practically a home industry. Face it: your guys suck. You've got some REAL pros but your ingestion from the bottom end of the US population means you have badly trained people who can't handle a real war. And a soldier who isn't well trained is a danger to your own side and a friend to the enemy.
But cutting back on the manpower spending means that you'd have massive unemployment so politically cannot be reversed.
Needs to, though.
But the US is very definitely on the "fuck them if you like" category.
Ask a Canadian.
Read some of the comments to the original article. This guy has apparently been severely criticized on more than one for the quality of his research.
That's not to say that he's necessarily wrong. However, it's probably wise to take his statements with a grain of salt until other qualified people weigh in.
The real problem is the lack of breeder reactors. Without them, we're only using a few percent of the energy contained in Uranium. It's a waste far worse than what we're doing with fossil fuels.
Why aren't we using breeder reactors? Because the US declared a few decades back that they are a proliferation risk. Why the US decided that isn't clear, since they really aren't.
Old news. Guess why the US and Russia are so eager to sign a new nuclear disarmament deal ?
Lots of U235 in those warheads. The wish to 'make this world a better place' has nothing to do with it.
This just in!
Non-renewable resources are in limited supply!
News at 11.
Disarm "israel" and get yourself lotsa good stuff.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Lets use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SI SI units, shall we? 40 Gigagrams of uranium.
PS: I couldn’t figure out how to create proper links, and I am too tired to keep on looking...
They had a working system on Hawaii a few years ago. I just like the idea because it seems so elegant. Of course you then have to worry about the effect of the nutrient up welling you would get with it. But it really is such a cool idea.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Lies! Nuclear power is the best and the cleanest source of energy, and it will last forever because of breeder reactors! It doesn't pollute or produce greenhouse gases! It is cheaper than anything else! It is safer than any other power source! It protects our national security because we wouldn't have to import oil! We can supply the energy needs of our entire economy forever on nuclear power! Those are all of the foaming-at-the-mouth claims I can remember at the moment. Any more?
We can build fusion machines right now that can produce enough neutrons to make a hybrid reactor practical.
Very true, and this kind of makes me a bit skeptical about the statement that "we know enough about fusion that we know it will never work". If recent history has taught us anything, it's that "never" is a very big word in the modern era, especially when applied to technology.
This is of course dependant on us not discovering alchemy in the next 10 years.
We've already discovered alchemy, at least the transmutation aspect of it, over a hundred years ago. We can convert one element into another. We can turn lead into gold. It's just ridiculously inefficient and uneconomical. Even the more economical way of producing gold from mercury is mostly used as a source of neutrons rather than gold.
The alchemists of hundreds of years ago thought they could do this in table-top experiments. Well, they were wrong. They were also wrong about the economics of turning lead into gold. But they were right that it is possible. We already know how. It's just... useless for this purpose. Except creating the Plutonium. That's downright useful alchemy. :)
The enemies of Democracy are
read this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor
yes sodium is dangerous but its easier to keep a sealed, near ambient pressure, containment unit free of oxygen than contain high pressure super heated radioactive steam in conventional reactors.
Also, the IFR will passively shut down, no human or machine intervention, needed if over heats.
The IFR may not be THE answer but its something. No matter what, humanity is going to need to develop any and all non-fossil fuel related energy sources, oil/coal/natural gas supplies are not going to last forever.
The sooner we start making adaptations the better.
It's right there in the population charts.
Do you think that the people 300 years ago could believe there would ever be 6 billion people on the planet? The kind of technology and energy which would be required to sustain a population that size?
Well, if you make the energy available, the entire planet (apart from megacities) will be turned into a farm to feed a growing population, and the population will grow, the energy consumption per capita will increase to consume all the available energy. That's humanity. That is exactly what has happened so far. You do want a flying car right? Flying SUV?
Deleted
Why not build a few type of nuke plants in the same location? The waste from one type is fuel for the next.
Old school nuke power plant's waste feeds the breeder power plants.
The breeder plant's waste feeds a plutonium power plant (or what ever the new type is called).
The plutonium power plant's waste hopefully is less radioactive and can feed the breeder or old school power plant.
Am I the only person who finds it odd that nuke plants waste is more radio active the more it is processed or used as fuel? I would think that once it is used as fuel it would have less energy so less radioactive.
Is there a nuclear expert that can chime in? After heating the water to generate power, or energy was transferred from the nuclear fuel (as heat) to heat the water, I would think the fuel would be less radioactive. This is wrong?
human power
animal power
wind/water power
wood powered steam
coal powered steam
oil power
nuclear powered steam
http://greenberg-art.com/.Toons/.Toons,%20Environ/qqxsgPopulation%20chart.gif
Whether it's unreasonable or not is irrelevant. It's fact.
If the energy is made available there will be economic growth. Then there will be a continuing requirement for continuing growth.
3% per year gives what? How long will billions of years of uranium last? 250 years? 300? (I haven't run the numbers, but what I can tell you is that the emeritus professor from Stanford is wrong (or irrelevant) because his starting assumptions are wrong)
You also might want to acquaint yourself with Olduvai Gorge theory.
http://www.oilcrisis.com/duncan/road2olduvai.pdf
Deleted
We need to overturn the cold-war era ban on spent fuel reprocessing, get over the fear mongering and FUD about "reprocessing == nuclear weapons" or whatever it is and reprocess the stuff comming out of nuclear reactors.
If the right kinds of reactors are built, its possible to get a LOT more energy out of each bit of uranium that comes out of the ground than we are doing now. And there are other radioactive minerals you can process too and get energy out of.
Shouldn't that be T (rather dense) FA ?
(Yes, I DID go to an English grammar school)
"Cats like plain crisps"
Ya, read about that, sort of a giant pie in the sky boondoggle. The people there, Africa in general, should get the power anyway.
That and other reasons are why I am way more in favor of individuals (and small co-ops) doing it themselves and owning the means of production and routing around obscene middle man costs and the vagaries of geopolitical reality that can impact your delivery. Europe has already gone through that with Russian natgas, and man boy howdy do I remember the OPEC embargo and the tanker war shortages. Then just last year we had the fast rise of gasoline and diesel from those dogpuke investment banker wallstreet speculators, who nailed both food commodities and energy *at the same time*.
If you make your own power onsite..electricity and transportation fuel, whether that is electricity as well or some liquid biofuels (or maybe hydrogen in the future from water) you won't be boycotting yourself or charging yourself an extra fat skim.
DE-centralization and the open-sourcing of energy producing tech should be the next great step for people. The collective "we", all the people on the planet, been held in perpetual economic bondage and gross physical peril by centralized and politicized energy supply and delivery. The cost in money is too great, the cost in lives and misery and health is much much worse. the cost of future conflicts going really bad becvause of nuke tech is..insane, just crazy.
There are no "solar proliferation" issues really, not like nukes, and as we see, there is no safe way to have nuke power without having weapons potential, so it will always be contentious. And we already know people fight over oil, heck, japan attacked the US in ww2 over access to oil, we finally ended the war with nukes. Just that should have been enough to tell humanity we had really screwed up and we should have been looking for alternatives right back then, not still floundering around like we are today "thinking" about it.
If we run superinsulation at our home and business energy needs one way, then run onsite made power at it from the other direction..eventually those two things cross, poof, energy independence, a *sweet thing indeed*.
And the really cool part is, it IS possible today, with no new tech having to be invented or produced, so those who want to..can already. Yes, it is still "early adopter" phase, but it got good enough awhile back, it is doable today.
First we run short of petroleum.
Then we run short of uranium.
I just hope we don't hit peak solar power too soon.
I am anarch of all I survey.
More fear mongering. There are nuclear powered liquid sodium cooled submarines. This isn't really challenging or new technology.
In 1988, back when anonymous cowards were not known by name, Freeman Dyson published a book confronting "Ignorant in all Dimensions", including several choice myths about the history of nuclear power. He was there when it all started, working for General Atomic in 1956.
I'll try to quote the least amount possible to make the point, which I'm dead certain Dyson would wish to hear people screaming from the roof tops. This is from a chapter titled "Quick is Beautiful" about how not to invest ten billion dollars in a program unlikely to produce a profit in less than ten years, if ever (while taking scant account of civilian safety).
What happened between 1956 and 1987 to cause such a disastrous slowdown in reaction time? Part ... blamed on government ... and part can be blamed on the hardening of arteries in individual heads. ...
Bandwagon jumping is not always bad. [Look before you leap.] In the case of the American nuclear power industry, the bandwagon was started by Admiral Rickover, who developed ... a reactor to drive nuclear submarines ... went into production ... flying start to the industry ... pressurized light water reactor ... everybody except General Atomics jumped ... Unfortunately, they overlooked a well known fact about submarines. There is not a lot of room to spare ... most important requirement ... to be compact [rather than safety] ... [more power to volume] the more quickly it will melt or vaporize in case of an accident ...
The other thing about submarines, which I don't see in this passage, is that being submersed in the ocean is a rather convenient massively over-specified cooling system, an advantage not enjoyed by civilian power plants.
Dyson goes on to argue small is beautiful and says that the envisioned economy of scale with 1000 MW light water reactors had proved illusory, at the time of writing. I happen to know that reactor efficiencies, for existing reactors, have increased over the past twenty years due to improved operating knowledge, so maybe that remark now needs a footnote.
The point here is this: the original market momentum in power-dense light water reactors, which are highly suitable for nuclear submarines, goes against everything that we've know since the 1950s about safe civilian reactor design.
This particular AC post deserves special moderation points for piling onto an artery hardened bandwagon that first departed 50 years ago.
better get chuck norris on that tredmill fast
No one's threatening to invade the US because we spend about as much money on defense as the rest of the world combined.
I couldn't let this stand, it needed to be challenged. There is no need for others to invade the US. Look at what happened after 911, the Northeast Blackout of 2003, and the rolling blackouts in California in 2000 and 2001. It is relatively easy to cause a lot of distress in the US without military arms.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Waste from slow-neutron reactors (pressurized-water types, the current standard) is dangerous for something like ten thousand years. According to this article, the waste is as safe as the original uranium ore after two centuries, and there's about 1.7 kilograms of it produced per megawatt-year.
Every time I read about this, I headdesk a little bit more that the advanced liquid-metal reactor project was cancelled back in the mid-1990s.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
http://www.solarroadways.com/
I have no idea if this would work on a large scale but, man o man, talk about thinking
outside the box.
You argued, probably correctly, that's it's not feasible to put PV cells on automobiles.
This man's work says that you can put them, feasibly, on what automobiles are traveling on.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
tech.
There is one exception though: There are people that propose building solar panels in the Sahara desert, and then building long power lines to Europe to transfer the generated power. It sounds fine until you realize that it means that Muammar Qaddafi and his pals can turn off the light in your home if he gets worked up for some reason.
Europe can also use geothermal, tidal, and wind power. Every region should use energy sources that are plentiful in those areas. The problem is with an area that does not have a plentiful source of energy. Then though they may trade.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
If you really think that there will be a severe shortage of uranium in 2013, you need to get into the uranium futures market. Oct 2014 futures for Uranium are going for 47.50 right now. http://www.cmegroup.com/trading/metals/base/uranium.html
Oh really? Payback period: The Energy Information Administration lists average U.S. residential electricity prices at 11.23 cents per kwh, as of February 2009. A turbine that puts out 2000 kwh a year saves $224.60 annually at that price, making the payback period just under 20 years on a $4500 panel. (The government rebate would lower the payback period to about 14 years.)" 3.5.4 Payback
"The detailed analysis done regarding the payback shows that with good wind resource at the installed site, the payback for a 15kW wind turbine will normally be about 10 years. Further with the usage of additional storage facilities like battery would increase an additional payback period of 13 years."
Meanwhile the nuclear power industry is Hooked on Subsides. "How do France (and India, China and Russia) build cost-effective nuclear power plants? They don't. Governmental officials in those countries, not private investors, decide what is built. Nuclear power appeals to state planners, not market actors."
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Where's the Map for THAT?
Although I can't be bothered to read the PDF, I take it the good doctor hasn't heard of a little thing called ODX?
It's short for Olympic Dam eXpansion, a project by the world's largest mining company, BHP Billiton, to create the largest mine the world has ever seen. We're talking about an open cut mine that will eventually be over one kilometre deep and multiple kilometres in diameter where they'll be shifting more than one tonne of ore out of it every second, 24/7 for 100 years or more. They keep upgrading the reserve estimates because they haven't found the true extent of the ore deposit, which alone accounts for something like 30% of known reserves. Currently the mine produces around 5,000 tonnes each year, which isn't the largest (Ranger in the Northern Territory is) but if the expansion goes ahead on the scale they're planning then it will be spitting out much, much more.
Then there's some other large deposits in Western Australia that are only now being developed as a change of government has seen the ban on Uranium mining lifted. It's even worse in the eastern states of Australia, as they have prohibited even exploring for uranium. Hooray for the luddite Labor party! The party that is okay in South Australia and federally to be mining and exporting it, but not using it here and won't even entertain discussion of the pros and cons of Australia adopting nuclear energy.
So if there's a shortage then the price will rise (which it did in the last few years because of fears of running out of the cheap bombs) and that will spur miners to start mining already known deposits that couldn't be mined profitably at lower prices. It will also spur further exploration and eventually the price will rise high enough that it becomes more economical to reprocess spent fuel, which is apparently 90-95% still good.
There's enough Uranium out there that we'll never run out for centuries, and then there's Thorium if fusion continues to forever be 40 years away.
Yes, exactly what I was talking about, decentralization and energy independence. Do you guys have a website with pictures and tech specs and so on for what you have? And what electric vehicle are you sharing? And is the building built to passive house or superinsulation standards?
The International Committee on Future Accelerators periodically publishes "newsletters" with a theme. The most recent newsletter is on the subject given above. It may be obtained at
http://www-bd.fnal.gov/icfabd/
The theme is "Accelerator Driven Sub-Critical Assemblies (ADS) and its challenge to accelerators." This is a topic that could have a deep impact on the future of our society. As we all know, developing clean energy and protecting the environment are two top priorities in countries around the world. ADS is an accelerator-based technology that may provide a viable solution to these major problems. Jiuqing collected 6 excellent articles in the theme section. They give a comprehensive review of this important accelerator field, including valuable lessons learned from the past.
But the population charts say that the population will peak at 9-10 billion and decline slowly thereafter. And the socioeconomic forces that drive declining fertility are the same increased access education and widening labor markets that drive global economic growth.
Your post is nonsense.
But the earth has an average albedo of around, what, 0.3?
So a black solar collector will warm the planet compared to a patch of typical land.
In fact I doubt we can cover enough of the planet to make a difference that way globally. But a sufficiently large solar power array may make a hot spot, creating a large thermal air upwelling, and have a constant cloud perched at the top of it.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
Even with solar being taken seriously, you'd be using up a lot of land (hopefuly not arable) to be able to provide enough to satisfy household + industrial need.
Just as almost everyone else does, you're concentrating on the One Big Energy Source instead of looking at what sources can be harvested in different locations. The "Economist" has the article A new look at solar power about a solar farm in the Mojave Desert in CA. Both it and the article Sunny Outlook: Can Sunshine Provide All U.S. Electricity? says it produces 350 megawatts of energy, enough to power 90,000 homes. According to the SciAm article using the technology available in 2006 building solar farms on a piece of land 92 miles squared in Nevada, that's just 10& the Bureau of Land Management's land, would produce almost all of the electricity of the US.
That's just solar power. The Wind Energy Resource Atlas of the United States details the wind potential of different regions of the US. The Rocky Mountains alone contain enough potential wind energy to supply all of the 48 continuous states with electricity. Then there's geothermal, which is a baseload provider, hydroelectric, and tidal power sources. One geothermal power plant on Hawaii's Big Island provides 25% of the island's electricity. Geothermal generated 13 terawatts hours of electricity in California. Combine these with a rebuilt smart national electric grid, which needs to be done anyways, and almost every coal, Natural Gas, and Nuclear power plant can be closed. Until the bulk energy storage problem is solved some plants can be kept running for more of the baseload.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
We've got a truly enormous uranium find right here in Southern Virginia. But we can't mine it due to politics. I wonder how many other cases like this are out there. Our older, closed down mines out West also still have tons of uranium in them. It's all just sitting there waiting for two things. One, the price of uranium to rise enough and make it too attractive for pols to resist, and two, the time when the pressing need for uranium overwhelms the cries of the 'no nukes at any cost' cohort.
What a great tragedy that the nuclear engineering industry got pretty much put out of business and neutered starting about 30 years ago. We've got gaps in where we are in our capabilities to where we ought to be.
We need to get busy and get to work on these problems and not hamstring ourselves with all these ludicrous political machinations.
Except that you need to get your electricity from the Death Valley to where it's needed, and a lot can get lost in the process, plus it costs infrastructure money.
The US electric infrastructure has to be rebuilt anyway. That's true no matter where electricity comes from, whether it be coal, nuclear, solar, or wind. According to the US Department of Energy [pdf] the US loses billions of dollars a year due to power blackout, brownouts, and poor quality of electricity. In 2000 when the "Chicago Board of Trade lost power for an hour during the summer of 2000, trades worth about $20 trillion could not be executed."
Should there be a Law?
We already know that fusion power is a comercially viable final product.
Can you name one plant where fusion is used commercially to generate electricity? I hope it becomes economically feasible soon but I know of no plants in commercial operation.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I don't think we are *anywhere* close to peak nuclear.
The Candu reactor NOW can use thorium as part of it's fuel load. It can burn unenriched uranium. It can also use spent fuel from light water reactors. And in doing so can remove 60% of the actinide series hot elements.
As others have pointed out, the current price of U is a tiny part of the cost of nuclear power. As the price goes up, it gets economical to go after less rich ore.
My dad worried about peak oil, and peak coal in the 30's. It's almost a century later. Simple crude may be peaking. We have more carbon in tarsand in Alberta than there is oil in the rest of the world. I thought natural gas was past peak, and bought a high efficiency boiler for my house. New discoveries have caused the price of gas to plummet.
I will consider peak nuclear when I see the level of searching for it approach the level for the search for oil. Right now I don't see anything like that level of activity.
We MAY be faced with a production shortfall if we build a bunch of light water enriched fuel reactors.
Third Career: Tree Farmer Second Career: Computer Geek First Career: Teacher, Outdoor Instructor, Photographer.
The car is interesting but one car for all those people doesn't make any sense. They should have a one apartment/one e-bike instead. Then everyone can ride. I imagine the electricity use would be similar to just one car, and the purchase costs similar as well. Maybe you could bring that up as an alternative? I've seen those things going for less than US $1,000, and just wheel motor swaps for less than that.
Although I must say, as an outdoorsman and farmer, if I lived in Finland I'd want a nice cabin out in the sticks someplace where I could have some cows and good hunting/fishing and wood heat, etc. I consider firewood to be "stored solar". We use it here as our primary and I am going on my third winter now (at this place, I have used it before elsewhere) with zero propane use.
Anyway, a cool project, and yes, I think solar panels on roofs *everywhere* there is some sun is a dandy idea. I wish we had a national goal of reopening a lot of our closed rust belt factories to make solar stuff and windchargers on MASS scale so it got cheaper faster.