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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.'"
This adds another dimension to the whole Nuclear Iran foreign policy issue.
I do not have a sig. You are hallucinating.
Well Britain for example has about half of its electricity generating capacity reaching the end of its life in the next 10 years or so, so we need to build some new power stations. We have recently been building gas plants, but we are running out of gas in the North Sea, and now have to import some gas from Russia, who aren't very reliable as the past two winters have shown.
We have loads of coal, but that produces lots of CO2s, and the tree huggers don't like that.
We've been building some windmills, but the tree huggers and bird watchers don't like them either, and due to reliability issues about when the wind blows, that can only supply about 10% of our electricity. Currently it does a lot less than that so we should ideally get some more windmills, but we need something else as well.
We could have a tidal barrage on the Bristol Channel which could supply about 5 - 10% of our requirements, but again, the tree huggers aren't to happy about the idea.
If we are to go for nuclear, either for all of it, or for what wind and tidal can't do, then there is no particular reason why we can't go for Thorium rather than Uranium powered reactors.
I agree but not for the same reasons (since I'm not a nuclear physicist)... I prefer to follow the money.
If this guy's article gets a major government (think US or EU) interested, they may throw contract money his way to find a solution to the impending doom he predicts. It reminds me A LOT of the the amazing rise in "climatologists" claiming that global warming is going to destroy humanity in the next 50 (or 10 or 100 or whatever) years. It is in their best interest to paint a scary picture, using fear to get funding.