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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.'"
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.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
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.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
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.
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.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Building an all-new infrastructure vs. not and running out of fuel.
It's an easy decision, and a painful one too.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Uranium is for infidels and suckers. Iranium is the future of nuclear development!
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.
A lot of natural resources go into Solar panels. Resources that need to be mined.
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.
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.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
This hairdryer?
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
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....
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.
Here:
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
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
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.
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!"
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....."
A high-energy, high-accuracy energy beam transmitted from some installation on the moon? What could possibly go wrong...
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
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?
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
Again 42 is the answer to everything.