The Coming Uranium Crisis

tcd004 writes "MIT reports that the world is running out of fuel for our nuclear reactors due to production limitations and an aging infrastructure. Nuclear power has gained popularity as a carbon-free energy source in recent years, but Dr. Thomas Neff, a research affiliate at MIT's Center for International Studies, warned that fuel scarcity could drive up prices and kill the industry before it gets back on its feet. Passport has pulled together some interesting numbers: there are 440 reactors currently in operation and 82 new plants under construction. The demand for fuel has driven the price of uranium up more than 40% in the last few months — 900% over the last decade. You can follow the spot price for a pound of uranium. "

Fuel is not the major cost

[Anonymous Coward]

The cost of Uranium is not the major cost of nuclear power, its the containment, disposal and safety that costs. If it goes up 400% big deal, even 40000%, so what. Plus fast breader reactors of course, but load of other /. users will mention that.

Breeder reactors

[Prune]

Then we should concentrate on reactors with higher breeding ratios, as the exhaustion of mineable uranium can be slowed down significantly, and that is worth it despite the negative political implications of the ease of production of weapons-grade material in these reactors.

Hopefully...

[hcdejong]

this will lead to renewed interest in breeder reactors. Recycling nuclear waste is a good thing.

Re:Yeah

[gunny01]

Just come down under and borrow ours. No one here uses it for fear of inciting the omgnuclearpowereviljohnhowardbushblairwarcriminals bringinnocentdavidhickshomebanthenetespslashdotoil isevileivlevil! crowd.

Recycle the weapons then

[JackMeyhoff]

Recycle the weapons then

Energy scarcity

[LarsWestergren]

We (humanity) have been living beyond our means for a while, but all forms of energy is going to get more expensive - i.e. all products are going to get more expensive. This is going to mean a decrease in standards of living, for just about everyone. We might as well get used to the idea.

You can however lessen the impact of this on your life. If you have half a brain, look at ways to cut your energy costs NOW. If the energy bills for your house starts to skyrocket and you don't have the money to insulate the attic, get energy windows and/or install a heatpump... you are going to be in deep shit, aren't you?

Re:Breeder reactors

[arivanov]

Well... If this becomes the policy, any country which is allowed to produce nuclear energy will automatically be capable of producing proper nuclear arms (not U235 firecrackers like the one North Koreans did recently). The regime to handle this politically is simply not in place at the moment.

Poor Summary

[pavon]

From reading the summary it makes it sound like we are running out of natural supplies of uranium. This is not the case, and if we implement breeder or burner reactors, will not be the case for a very long time. The problem is that we don't have much uranium mining and processing capability in this country, since the outlook for future growth of nuclear power has been low the last couple decades for political reasons. So that would have to be ramped significantly as we build new plants, and MIT is worried that it is not happening at a fast enough rate, and may hamper further growth.

Need increased research funding

[starseeker]

I think there is an assumption made, almost unconsciously, that if our other power sources fail we could always "fall back" on nuclear if we wanted to take the risk. It's interesting to see that large scale nuclear power could have similar infrastructure problems to renewables - invest a lot or don't end up viable.

This article focuses primarily on the economic questions of scale-up. I would be curious to know how much uranium is theoretically recoverable and how long it would last us. Perhaps there is so much of it that we could live off of it indefinitely (particularly with waste reprocessing) but I don't know the numbers.

What this article DOES demonstrate, even better than renewables, is the need to sustain and increase basic research into ALL energy problems and technologies. Solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, and various storage techniques like hydrogen will be needed; it's not a one solution fits all kind of equation. Nor will the solutions just "be there" when we need them, unless we pay attention and take steps to ensure that they are. Even nuclear cannot be taken for granted.

Also - in the long term human beings will consume all available power either by technological/standard of living increases, population increases, or both. There isn't going to be a solution which will be "enough" - we will ALWAYS find something to do with it. Just the scale-up going on right now is putting a healthy demand on resources of all sorts, and that's just the short term. In hundreds or thousands of years there will be some very fundamental problems that need solving, and I think we need to get started working on them sooner rather than later. These things don't happen magically, they take hard and long work.

Business is not to be expected to think long term, certainly not in the current environment. That should be the job of government research funding, and there needs to be a LOT more of it. Perhaps the difficulties of scaling up nuclear power will help to wake people up - it would be nice to do the research on new power technologies in something other than economic crisis mode.

Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium...

[Mike Van Pelt]

Absolutely. According to my copy of the CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, "There is probably more available energy in the Earth's crust from thorium than from uranium and all fossil fuels put together." But even short of that:

1. The cost the uranium fuel is a relatively tiny part of the cost of nuclear power. Double, triple, quadruple the price, and it's not going to make a huge difference. There's a whole lot of energy in a little bit of uranium.

2. The "shortage" is, more than anything else, an artifact of failure to reprocess wastes. Fuel rods have to be replaced, not because all the U235 has been fissioned, but because neutron-absorbing fission products have built up and started getting in the way. Only part of the fissile isotopes in the fuel is fissioned before the fuel rod has to be removed.

   Reprocess, separate out the fission products, and put the remaining U238, U235, plutonium, and other actinides into new fuel rods, and available fuel expands by several times. This is before you even start thinking about breeder reactors.

3. Breeder reactors.

4. Back in the 1970s, the Japanese demonstrated a process to extract uranium from sea water using an ion exchange process, at a cost of about $200/pound in 1970 dollars. That could be considered a very long term ceiling on the price of uranium.

Re:Solution

[UbuntuDupe]

Show of hands: who actually believes that it is impossible for people in Country A to buy a natural resource in Country B unless Country A has a military presence in B or has defeated it in a war?

Alright, you with your hands up: explain Singapore, Japan, South Africa, China, and Switzerland.

Re:Solution

[aadvancedGIR]

Recent history has a fine example of country B not being able to produce as much oil after the invasion by country A as it used to be when it was simply under international embargo and country A having spent so much for that invasion it is nearly buying oil at the price of diamond.

Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium...

[timeOday]

The problem is that people paranoid about nuclear proliferation have successfully made it very politically difficult

Yes, that's the problem. Unfortunately I don't see a way to solve it, do you? Plutonium is pretty awesome stuff, and I don't think manufacturing it at 500 places around the world is such a great idea. Nuclear proliferation isn't a technical problem, but it is a problem.

Re:Give me more!

[LarsWestergren]

Since the dawn of environmentalism, we've been told to use less, deal with less, expect less. It isn't true. We've never run out of anything important and we never will.

Oh, I see, so when the Newfoundland [bbc.co.uk] cod stock was wiped out for instance, a benevolent market force fairy came down from the sky and replaced all the fish population, and left a big sack of gold for every person living there too. It must be nice living in la-la land.

Re:Good to Know

[Shakrai]

I don't like nuclear power either (it's unsafe, unsustainable and expensive), but in today's world, it's not like we have lot of choices...

Really? Cuz I think anybody that knows about the subject could dispute all three of those statements. It's unsafe? Want to talk about how many people die in coal mining accidents? Hell, that still happens in the Western world. Thousands die in the developing world. Want to talk about global climate change caused by CO2? Nuclear accidents get more press because of the fear of anything "nuclear" but if you look at the complete life cycle of fossil fuels they aren't any better. In fact they are probably much worse.

Define unsustainable? Because the general opinion seems to be that using breeder technology we will have fuel sources for tens of thousands of years.

Expensive? Compared to what? Coal? Gas? How much will climate change wind up costing us?

reduce our consumption drastically

Why should I have to reduce my standard of living when we have technology (nuclear) that won't cause climate change? Everybody talks about reducing consumption but that isn't going to fly. You realize that two or three billion Chinese and Indians are doing their best to get up to a Western standard of living? If humanity doesn't embrace nuclear, what other option is there? More CO2? What kind of world do you want your children to grow up in?

and removing nuclear power from our energy panel is as stupid as arguing about nuclear wastes in a 1000 years when everything that we do today (like planning 26 new coal powerplants in Germany to replace nuclear powerplants!) lead us into *big* troubles in no more than 50 years...

Thank you!

Re:Nuclear power is not 'carbon-free'

[khallow]

If the nuclear power plant replaces a fossil fuel burning power plant then it is heavily carbon-negative.

Re:I'm confused

[Dun Malg]

...does this mean Iran does have a legitimate reason to have a nuclear program after all?

Depends on your definition of "nuclear program" (and "legitimate"). A "nuclear program" can be anything from straight fission power generators to weapons grade plutonium production. No one really cares about the former, while the latter some find worrisome.

Re:Solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, they never stopped to consider how dumb it is to spread a highly toxic substance that will contaminate the soil and groundwater for decades, so some scepticism is warranted.

Re:Solution

[Mattsson]

The problem is when Country A want to get resources in Country B while paying little or nothing for it and at the same time stopping Country C from getting any of the resources from Country B even if they're willing to pay more than Country A for those resources.

Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium...

[Firethorn]

Lead(PB) is extremely common, used for all sorts of things from fishing weights, bullets, solder to radiation shielding.

Using a few tons of lead for radiation shielding isn't enough to impact the lead market in any meaningful way. Uranium is pretty much used solely in the nuclear industry, so a 50% increase in that will have a substantial effect.

But yeah, we've been living off of borrowed time for uranium for a while. We did a lot of exploration back during the WWII/early cold war period, found enough deposits to build enough bombs to blow up a good chunk of the earth, then pretty much quit because it wasn't economical to continue, we had enough stock for all demands for the next ~50 years or so.

Same story as oil, in other words. It's still going to take more than a 900% price increase to really start affecting nuclear power; The cost of the fuel is still considered 'insignificant'. It'd be like if gasoline for your car was one cent a gallon a decade ago and ten cents today. Paying somebody to refuel your car would still cost more than the fuel.

Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium...

[illegalcortex]

I don't really think you're being honest here. Yes, there have always been terrorists or guerrilla forces that could use explosives to blow things up. But we're really living in a lot situation today. Back then it was highly unlikely some group halfway across the world could successfully plot an attack on American soil. It's also a matter of scale. You have to admit that there's SOME breakpoint where it doesn't matter how much better you can make weapons. If an old weapon will kill X people, it will ALWAYS be scary as hell and something people worry about others getting their hands on. I think we reached that point with the atom bomb. Todays nuclear bombs have gone far beyond that.

Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium...

[hcdejong]

In an age where people understand such development principles like Moore's Law, you would think that people would have a little more imagination when it comes to the future of resource exploration in the next century or so.

Wait, you think that Moore's Law applies to anything besides semiconductor production? Do you know how rare it is to see such a quantum leap in performance, let alone have an industry keep this up for 20-30 years? Uranium isn't going to drop out of the sky on its own accord, it'll have to be mined, and the mining industry is subject to the same economic realities as the rest of the world (with semiconductor production as the sole exception).

Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium...

[Suidae]

They mean that people haven't invested in mining uranium lately. There is plenty of easy (for uranium) stuff in the US.

Uranium mining is great, but you can't do it in my state! (It's the one with a vowel in the name). Do it somewhere else.

Re:Solution

[zippthorne]

Yeah, it's better to let a thousand years of hatred fester another thousand, rather than try to do anything at all against it. Bush is the stupid one.

Re:Yeah

[Rei]

It depends on your reactor design. Plutonium != uranium.

This article is a bunch of pointless scare. There are huge known deposits of uranium, but a lackluster demand has kept them idle for years. Now there's a new uranium mining boom underway. When the deposits come online, the price will crash again (hopefully not so much as to drive most of the companies out of business, though).

Yes, uranium is far from the most plentiful or concentrated element in the crust. However, if you use breeder reactors (both uranium and thorium breeders), you're looking at hundreds of years worth. With seawater uranium extraction (more expensive, but an option), you could be looking at thousands of years.

The biggest fear that most people have with breeders is the production of material that could be used in bombs. However, you can "poison" plutonium (from uranium/plutonium) and U233 (from thorium breeders) with a proper reactor design to make it less reliable for bombs. I personally think people worry too much about "rogue states getting the bomb", anyways.

Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium...

[Grishnakh]

We don't need to change the rules; we need to just invade oil-rich nations and use their oil. When that all fails to give us our energy, we'll just let our economy collapse.

Meanwhile, more enlightened countries like India will develop breeder reactors and have more electricity than they know what to do with. Their societies will become the most technologically advanced, while the US will become a backwater full of ignorant hicks who sit around under candlelight talking about how dangerous nuclear power is, and how crazy other countries are for believing in Darwin's evolution theory instead of Intelligent Design.

A fuel crisis? The answer is three simple words:

[VTMarik]

Integral Fast Reactor.

It can use any actinide, and has almost 90 times the efficiency of regular thermal reactors.

Re:Uranium will outlast the sun!

[Rei]

No, not true, unless you can mine the core. Good crust deposits are pretty rare. Uranium, being very dense, tends to sink in the planet. However, it doesn't take much uranium to provide a lot of power. We're looking at thousands of years if power consumption keeps on growing, tens of thousands at current rates, if seawater extraction is used.

If we can't develop more cost effective, sustainable power sources during such a long time period, I'd say we have no right calling ourselves a sentient species. :)

Re:Yeah

[dbIII]

Since I originally come from a metallurgical background I find the estimate of cost mentioned in the article but no mention of what process will be used to obtain the fuel from seawater somewhat telling and that starts to ring the junk science alarm bells. That is not a serious article - it just has some simple maths thrown in to describe a simple process to make it look important while throwing up cost numbers from nowhere and expecting you to trust them. The guy is more qualified than an MBA or myself for that matter but this still looks like a throwaway article cooked up in an afternoon that does not even list it's basic assumptions.