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

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

[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

[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.

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:The folly of natural resource-based energy

[andy1307]

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

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?

[__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: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!"

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.