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.'"

Comments

Alternative materials?

[TheDarkMaster]

What about plutonium and other radioactive materials? (first post? hehehe)

Re:Alternative materials?

[SatanicPuppy]

You'd have to re-enrich, which is the whole problem. We're not geared to do that on a large scale right now, and we won't be for a while.

Hopefully this will kick some asses into actually looking into re-enrichment. Most of the waste problems we have are due to our refusal to use the existing methods.

Re:Alternative materials?

[Useful Wheat]

The problem is that plutonium is a man-made material. We make it from uranium by bombarding it with high energy particles. So if you run out of uranium, you also run out of plutonium. This is of course dependant on us not discovering alchemy in the next 10 years. To be honest, that would be pretty awesome, if watching TV has taught me anything.

Re:Alternative materials?

[SatanicPuppy]

No, I know it's do-able, and I've actually been agitating in that direction for a long time. Re-enriching nuclear waste makes more sense (to me) than dumping tons of usable, highly radioactive, quarter-spent fuel in landfills that no one wants within a million miles of their house.

But the problem is mainly that re-enrichment is frowned upon because it creates tons of weapons-grade plutonium, so the only plants we have are clunky, inefficient, research plants. We'd have to redesign them for commercial use.

Re:Alternative materials?

[Kartoffel]

We're not running out of uranium. We are running out of *enriched* uranium. Fast breeder reactors (FBRs) solve the problem because they (a) run on plutonium and (b) transmute depleted uranium and other "waste" products from legacy reactors into useful fuel.

FBRs can can reprocess or dispose of weapons material and spent fuel from legacy nuke plants. Once bootstrapped with plutonium, they'll happily run on crap that your typical nuke plant considers useless waste. They're also more efficient. Would you rather have 100 tons of waste annually from a thermal reactor plant, or 2 tons from a breeder reactor? It's radiocative either way.

Expecting anyone to bring a commercial FBR online before 2013 is ludicrous. You'd be hard pressed to complete even a boring coal fired plant in that short of a timeframe. FBRs are also "scary" and utterly taboo for anyone besides trusted friends to own or operate, because the fuel that they produce happens to be plutonium that's great for making bombs. So, ummm, as with any nuke plant, you maintain a certain level of security. It ought to be common sense.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_breeder_reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor#Fast_reactors

Re:Alternative materials?

[mrdoogee]

Without good security you'll get Libyans stealing your plutonium, and then some crazy scientist gets a hold of it and puts it in a DeLorean....

Re:Alternative materials?

[dachshund]

The problem, as I understand it from TFA, is that the existing designs for FBRs are enormously expensive and dangerous --- not just because of the plutonium stockpile, but because they're cooled with liquid sodium. Most of the safety advances in modern reactors haven't been replicated to the FBR technology yet. We're not even sure how to do it.

As for the "securing plutonium is easy" argument, well --- geez, any engineer will tell you that making things work is the easy part. Making them work in the face of malicious actors, now, that's the hard problem.

Effectively securing that plutonium may be possible in the more developed nations (though there are risks). However, any solution that significantly reduces CO2 emissions is going to require global deployment. That means not just first-world countries, but "second" and third-world ones. Countries with political instability, criminal gangs, and in some cases nasty dictators. TFA is pointing out that every FBR will have enough plutonium lying around to build at least one fission device, possibly more. As the number of reactors hits the thousands, the probability that some will be stolen/misappropriated rapidly approaches one. This means wide-scale nuclear proliferation, the very real threat of cities being nuked, etc. And it's a problem that can't be put back in the bag even if we do eventually develop a safer technology. That will make civilization enormously more painful and expensive as we go forward.

The author appears to be advocating Thorium reactors as a solution. No idea if this is the right idea, but he seems to know more than myself or the parent poster, so I won't dismiss him with a handwave.

Re:Alternative materials?

[__aamnbm3774]

I am supporting your evidence, but found this more concise

Here:

Current economic uranium resources will last for over 100 years at 2006 consumption rates, while it is expected there is twice that amount awaiting discovery. With reprocessing and recycling, the reserves are good for thousands of years.[42]

Re:Alternative materials?

[David Jao]

The problem is that plutonium is a man-made material. We make it from uranium by bombarding it with high energy particles. So if you run out of uranium, you also run out of plutonium. This is of course dependant on us not discovering alchemy in the next 10 years. To be honest, that would be pretty awesome, if watching TV has taught me anything.

You're right, but also wrong. Plutonium is made from U238 (emphasis on 238). The nuclear fuel that we're using right now is U235. There is one hundred and fifty times more U238 in the ground than U235. So, by switching to plutonium, we expand the available supply of uranium by a factor of 150.

The whole debate about uranium fuel reserves is totally ludicrous. An utterly simple back of the envelope calculation demonstrates that the Earth contains sufficient uranium to supply fission power for billions of years. Uranium fuel will last literally longer than solar power (since the sun's remaining lifetime is only 5 billion years). Yet periodically we see attention whores showing up in Slashdot articles and crying that we will run out of uranium, a statement which is so obviously wrong that it is hard to explain by incompetence and bordering on the realm of malice.

Re:Alternative materials?

[RAMMS EIN]

``Would you rather have 100 tons of waste annually from a thermal reactor plant, or 2 tons from a breeder reactor? It's radiocative either way.''

Well, there's radioactive, radioactive, and radioactive, so saying "it's radioactive either way" is not very informative. How dangerous is it and how long will it stay that way?

I am sure that virtually everything I will come into contact with during my entire live will be radioactive, but it will probably emit so little radiation that I don't bother even thinking about it. Similarly, a small amount of highly radioactive matter doesn't bother me a lot, either; it will decay in a flash and then life will be back to normal.

What I am bothered by, though, is the idea of creating large amounts of material that will be dangerous long after we are gone. Past generations haven't made my life miserable by making my world a nuclear/toxic/what-have-you waste dump, and I'd like to not do so to the generations that come after me, either.

Re:Alternative materials?

[HungryHobo]

From a quick reading he does hand wave quite a bit.
Anything that's not a full scale commercial enterprise doesn't exist and never will.... research is pointless.
For the uranium from seawater thing he talks about the cost of the experiment rather than any kind of estimated costs of large scale extraction.

It seems to boil down to "we're not getting much uranium out of the ground right now while prices are low and we have massive stockpiles keeping prices low.... hence somehow people won't start mining more as the price of uranium goes up again....."

Re:Alternative materials?

[init100]

Fast breeder reactors (FBRs) solve the problem because they ... (b) transmute depleted uranium and other "waste" products from legacy reactors into useful fuel.

FBRs can can reprocess or dispose of weapons material and spent fuel from legacy nuke plants. Once bootstrapped with plutonium, they'll happily run on crap that your typical nuke plant considers useless waste.

Um, no. Breeder reactors can produce fuel for other reactors by irradiating natural uranium with neutrons, which produces primarily plutonium-239 with several other minor byproducts. They cannot by themselves reprocess spent fuel ("waste") into usable fuel, although they can play a (minor) part of this process.

There are several steps that spent fuel must pass before it can be used as fresh fuel in a common LWR again. To begin with, the spent fuel contains a lot of nuclear poisons that prevent the reactor from retaining the nuclear chain reaction, so these must first be removed from the spent fuel. This is not done in a breeder reactor, but rather using centrifuges similar to the ordinary enrichment process. This produces two products: Real waste, and a precursor to fresh fuel. The waste can be transmuted into less dangerous waste in a breeder reactor or an accelerator-driven reactor. The fuel precursor then needs to have elements such as plutonium removed (unless it is meant to be part of Mox fuel) before it can be recast into its ceramic form and used again in an ordinary LWR.

As noted above, a breeder can be used to transmute the real waste into less dangerous waste, but its primary function is to transmute natural and depleted uranium into usable isotopes through neutron capture in that uranium. Breeders are not reprocessing facilities.

Re:Alternative materials?

[shirotakaaki]

With reprocessing and recycling, the reserves are good for thousands of years.[42]

Again 42 is the answer to everything.

I mention this

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Everytime nuclear fission comes up as a possible viable alternative. Peak Uranium is as real as peak oil, and it's here now.

Re:I mention this

[Profane MuthaFucka]

And oh yea, we should be investigating Thorium reactors. Thorium is plentiful in the Earth's crust. That's a better way to go than uranium.

Re:I mention this

[omeomi]

Am I the only one who's starting to think that as soon as we put all of our eggs in the solar energy basket, somebody will come along and say that we're almost out of sun?

Re:I mention this

[LSD-OBS]

Seconded.

ATTENTION WORLD GOVERNMENTS:
Fund. Fucking. Thorium. Fuel. Cycle. Research.

PLEASE.

Re:I mention this

[HangingChad]

And oh yea, we should be investigating Thorium reactors.

That's fine, but our entire nuclear energy infrastructure is built around uranium. It's not like you can put different fuel in a reactor and just carry on with the plants online today.

This is going to be interesting.

Re:I mention this

[natehoy]

Solar power IS nuclear power, we've just offshored the actual reactor. Some loss of energy occurs during transport, though.

If we run out of Sun, running my hairdryer is going to get really low on my list of priorities, really fast.

Re:I mention this

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Building an all-new infrastructure vs. not and running out of fuel.

It's an easy decision, and a painful one too.

Re:I mention this

[confused one]

There's no uranium shortage. There's a U235 shortage. Sure, our infrastructure, such that it is, is based for the most part on U235 cores. It's not terribly difficult to use mixed oxide as a supplement in an existing reactor, once you have the Pu239 or U233; so, the existing reactors are not left out in the cold (I meant that as a pun). But considering the U.S. infrastructure is 30-40 years old, and we need to start building new(-er) reactors to supplement and replace those, it would be a good idea to design some of those to use the alternatives: U238 is available in fairly large quantities (Hell, we have it in south central Virginia) and Thorium 232 is available in larger quantities. Both yield fissionable fuels in "breeder" reactors.

Re:I mention this

[melikamp]

This hairdryer?

Re:I mention this

[mrdoogee]

I'm just glad that out corporate overlords at ExxonMobil made it for us. That's a load off my mind.

Re:I mention this

[Loki_1929]

Existing CANDU plants can already use Thorium.

The infrastructure already exists for those bright enough to use an awesome design like CANDU.

http://www.nuclearfaq.ca/brat_fuel.htm

Re:I mention this

[natehoy]

Our global temperature is affected by three factors:

1. Amount of energy input.
2. Amount of energy stored or released.
3. Amount of energy radiated.

The amount of energy entering the Earth's atmosphere is, for all intents and purposes, a constant. The Sun is almost completely responsible for all of that.

If I have a black roof on my house, my roof will absorb the sunlight shining on it and turn it into heat. If I interrupt that with a solar collector, ~90% of it will still become heat, and ~10% of it will become electricity. As I use the electricity to do stuff, it generates heat. Including the losses over the wires, etc.

Net result: There isn't a significant difference in the actual amount of heat, only how we use the potential energy in sunlight before it turns into heat. Entropy is like that.

As far as the other two factors, we stored a crapload of solar energy and sequestered a crapload of carbon dioxide a long time ago in the form of dead plants and critters. That matter decayed and turned into what we now call "coal" and "oil". Burning those releases both that energy and CO2. CO2 is an insulator and therefore reduces heat radiation.

So if you use solar (or one if its indirect factors, like biofuel or wind) you get three wins - you're using heat that would be there anyway, you're not adding more heat, and you're not releasing sequestered material that may help the earth retain heat.

You do, however, get one loss. We've already built a HUGE infrastructure for using sequestered energy and built our demand around it. Direct and indirect solar has a long way to go before it can replace all of our wants, if it ever can. At some point, mankind is going to have to face "want" versus "need".

Use Thorium-based reactors instead

[Dark Fire]

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.

Re:Use Thorium-based reactors instead

[eldavojohn]

And you can't use them to make nuclear weapons.

That last part is why. :'|

And also ridiculously misinformed. From wikipedia:

The thorium fuel cycle creates mainly Uranium-233 which can be used for making nuclear weapons, and since there are no neutrons from spontaneous fission of U-233, U-233 can be used easily in a gun-type nuclear bomb. Thorium can and has been used to power nuclear energy plants using both the modified traditional Generation III reactor design and prototype Generation IV reactor designs.

Citation here.

Re:Use Thorium-based reactors instead

[greg_barton]

Just to silence the "citation please" trolls who can't use google:

Energy from Thorium
Nuclear Green

Disclaimer: the second link goes to my uncle's blog. My grandfather worked on the original liquid fluoride thorium reactor at ORNL, and my uncle has advocated the technology for quite some time.

Re:Use Thorium-based reactors instead

[VShael]

"The people working on ITER clearly don't agree."

Er, no.

There are plenty of people working on ITER who do agree. But they figure that it's a worthy endeavor without necessarily being a commercially viable final product. (ie They think we'll learn a lot from doing it.)

Plus, it's funded by the EU and they're just throwing money it at with very little expectation of anything in return.

Re:Use Thorium-based reactors instead

[kc8tbe]

If you read the *entire* Wikipedia article on the Thorium fuel cycle, you would understand why Thorium is proliferation resistant instead of calling the parent "ridiculously misinformed".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle

"Because the 233U produced in thorium fuels is inevitably contaminated with 232U, thorium-based used nuclear fuel possesses inherent proliferation resistance. Uranium-232 can not be chemically separated from 233U and has several decay products which emit high energy gamma radiation. These high energy photons are a radiological hazard that necessitate the use of remote handling of separated uranium and aid in the passive detection of such materials."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor

"It is verifiable because the epithermal thorium breeder produces only at most 9% more fuel than it burns in each year. Building bombs quickly will take power plants out of operation."

Basically, because almost all naturally occurring Thorium is 232Th, it's possible to isolate Thorium fuel chemically -- without centrifugation. In other words, a country that uses Thorium exclusively for fuel has no reason to develop centrifugation technology. On the other hand, separating 233U from 232U requires centrifugation. Thus, aforementioned countries would be unable to access the 233U they produce for bomb-building purposes.

Also, the poor breeder coefficient of 233U Thorium reactors means that most of the 233U produced by the reactor is required to produce the neutrons that convert fertile Thorium into more 233U. If you were to remove the 233U from the reactor for use in a bomb, you would halt additional production of 233U by the reactor. Either you would have to harvest very little 233U over a long period of time, or you would have to supplement the Thorium fuel with some other fissile material such as bomb-grade plutonium (and if you already had access to that, you wouldn't be trying to produce bomb-grade material in the first place).

While it's possible to produce a bomb using a the thorium fuel cycle, it is inefficient and requires advanced centrifugation technology to mitigate the 232U. It would be easier to just start with uranium ore.

Iranium?

[vvaduva]

Uranium is for infidels and suckers. Iranium is the future of nuclear development!

Non-issue

[BlueParrot]

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.
 

Re:The folly of natural resource-based energy

[andy1307]

A lot of natural resources go into Solar panels. Resources that need to be mined.

Research

[dachshund]

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.

Re:The folly of natural resource-based energy

[Quiet_Desperation]

Cohen neglects decay of the uranium. Since uranium has a half-life of 4.46 billion years, about half will have decayed by his postulated 5 billion years.

I can't believe someone would counter a plan to provide energy for 5 billion years with "Nuh-uh! It's only good for 2.5 billion!"

Nope

[zogger]

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).

Re:Ideal FBR Location

[FireFury03]

Build the FBR on the moon.

I think we all know how that ends.

Re:Ideal FBR Location

[Nathrael]

A high-energy, high-accuracy energy beam transmitted from some installation on the moon? What could possibly go wrong...

Re:Ideal FBR Location

[LordVader717]

Hey. I've got a brilliant Idea. Let's construct a thermonuclear fusion reactor at the center of the solar system. We will collect the radiation energy with photovoltaic cells pointed to the sky. As there are no moving parts, it wouldn't require much maintainence either. Why hasn't anybody implemented such a brilliant idea?

Something just seemed subtly wrong with it...

[dentin]

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.

Re:3% growth

[Zalbik]

Do that calculation again, and instead of assuming zero growth. Do it assuming 3% growth, because that's the average.

That's the average right now. There is no way that humanity will be able to maintain that average over the next 200 - 300 years.

If we attempt it, that will likely solve the growth problem right there (war, famine, disease, general Malthusian badness).

Ya

[zogger]

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.