The Coming Uranium Crisis 485
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. "
Which is why India's looking at thorium... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium... (Score:5, Interesting)
This article is just another resource scare article. Uranium is not like oil in that it only forms in the upper levels of the crust on the Earth. You can find Uranium anywhere in the solar system. When they say that uranium is becoming scarce they mean that it is becoming scare in the east to reach places of the top 0.5 km of the 6371 km radius Earth.
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.
Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium... (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that people paranoid about nuclear proliferation have successfully made it very politically difficult (it's not technically completely straightforward, you're running rather fiddly chemistry by remote-control in a very high radiation environment) to reprocess spent fuel to get the plutonium out for reuse.
So the current nuclear fuel cycle is the equivalent of running a basic oil refinery, taking out the small jet-fuel fraction from crude oil, and then pumping the remainder back into the ground in places deliberately chosen to make it hard to take it out again. Breeder reactors are the equivalent of those catalytic-cracking columns in refineries which can make something useful out of the heavier crude-oil fractions.
Uranium in Sweden (Score:3, Interesting)
However, the villagers in a nearby village of one place where initial test-drills was supposed to start soon, was not happy. They were very worried both about loosing tourists and that it might have a bad effect on the reindeers.
Re:Recycle the weapons then (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hopefully... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:And all this time I was taught (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, the problem the article mentions is not that the uranium is running out, it's that we aren't refining enough.
Although I would like to see some of the missing numbers from the article:
- How much uranium is refined per day (or year)
- What percent of uranium ore, by weight, is needed to produce fuel grade uranium
- What is the estimate of the available raw uranium in the areas we can reach
Re:Cost per Joule? (Score:3, Interesting)
Gasoline is about 20 - 30% of the cost of running a car IIRC, so a 50% increase in cost is huge. If fuel costs are only 1% of the cost of running a reactor, a 900% increase increases production cost by less than 10 %, an I bet fuel costs are far less than 1% of the total.
Since 9/11, US nuclear plants have probably spent as much money on guns for the security personel as they have on fuel. (assertion based on no real numbers)
Re:Energy scarcity (Score:3, Interesting)
Untrue - only for PUREX (Score:5, Interesting)
If you want to keep your tinfoil hat on, you could argue that there are great similarities between the oil industry and the RIAA. Neither of them want new technology, regardless of what the public want or need.
Summary of a poorly spaced post. (Score:4, Interesting)
99.5% - Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) (Score:5, Interesting)
The Integral Fast Reactor [wikipedia.org] (IFR) would have used 99.5% of the fuel. The remaining 0.5% of the waste would have had the characteristic of decaying to ore-levels of radiation within 300 years. That's nearly a 100-fold decrease in the amount of nuclear waste we'd have to deal with, and orders of magnitude shorter time for protecting the waste. The waste is also attractive from a non-proliferation standpoint
Unfortunately, the Clinton Administration defunded the IFR project almost immediately after taking office and killed it properly two years into the first term. After all, how can you count on donations from the NONUKES lobby if safe, responsible fission power is available?
Bush hasn't restarted the project either, so there's plenty of blame to go around in Republicrat circles.
We should finish the research and build at least one of these reactors at the Yucca Mountain site. There we can burn all of the incoming waste fuel, and light up Las Vegas or something with the energy. If it were only for waste disposal it would be a good idea, but once the research is done we also have a system for solving Global Warming. China is even interested but they're going with Pebble Bed Reactors since the IFR work wasn't finished. I'd be happy for them to finish the work, but perhaps they don't have the qualified staff. I abhor those who think Global Warming is man-made and dangerous and refuse to embrace technology like IFR. Even the founder of Greenpeace is a 'shill' for the nuclear industry - he recognizes you have to make choices, and none of them are perfect, but such is life. The choice matrix is simple if we want to get this solved this century: man-made global warming, nuclear, or agrarian society. Pick one.
I understand Bill Richardson groks these issues. I wish he'd come out in full support of solving our energy problems instead of beating around the bush on it. I'd definitely vote for him if he did, and I'm not in the habit of voting Democrat. Oh, and it also solves our little geopolitical security problem, depowers the middle east despots, and bolsters our economy.
Re:99.5% - Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny thing is, this is a MUCH better solution that WIPP. As it is, the only real place for WIPP was western Texas since Nevada IS earthquake prone.
Re:Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Canada and Australia
To be more accurate - Australia and Canada have 80% of the world's uranium between them.
Australia has a little more than Canada.
Compare that with Saudi Oil, at 30% of world supply.
Australia is the Saudi Arabia of Uranium.
Even if you add in Thorium, which is more widely dispersed (usable with breeder reactors, see below) we are a major player, with > 25% of world Thorium.
As to usage:
0.7 percent of uranium is 235, versus 99.3% is U 238
To use in a conventional reactor you need about >4%, and often higher levels of U235
Therefore, the majority of uranium in the world cannot be used in conventional reactors as it has to be enriched (by extracting the U235) to a higher concentration.
If you were to change the world over to conventional reactors for its energy supply, it would run into serious shortages within 30 years or so. By using breeder reactors this would multiply out to well over 100 years of uranium supply. Add thorium into this equation and you are talking many hundreds of years of energy.
And as the price of electicity from a nuclear reactor is only about 10% Uranium, the rest relating to safety, reprocessing and so on costs, a big rise in uranium price isn't such a big issue. However, we must convert to breeder reactor technology or there will be extreme shortages fairly rapidly.
Just FYI,
Michael
Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium... (Score:3, Interesting)
Coulda fooled me. The amount of uranium coming out of Saskatchewan is going to increase considerably this year. And before you scoff at some sparsely populated Canadian province, and wonder how much of the world's uranium it can possibly produce: try 50%.
Re:99.5% - Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) (Score:3, Interesting)
Let me preface what I'm about to say with this: I'm not an anti-nuke freak. In fact, I think nuclear power plants are the only thing that could sustain a permanent colony from Mars on outward. Nuclear power is perfectly safe.
However, more sunlight hits the planet in one second than we can use in an entire year. If we split this collection between solar panels and plants for biofuel, we could easily provide enough power for everyone, and without having to build giant centralized generation systems. Remember the blackout in 2003? Well, imagine if we all had solar panels on our roofs and batteries in our basements and more efficient loads on all of it. None of that would have happened.
I'm not opposed to terrestrial nuclear power because "OMG NUKEZ ARE TEH BADDZORZ!!1!!111!" I'm opposed to nuclear power because there are simpler ways to achieve the same end. Some nuclear plants with a big push for wind and solar and tidal, as well as decreasing our per capita energy usage is the model I'm in favor of. If we were on a barren rock, I'd go for the nukes. But we've got plenty of other sources of energy.
Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium... (Score:3, Interesting)
Temporary but quite painful for countries who are chasing down oil instead of locking up Uranium supplies (i.e. the USA).
Re:Solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Pfft. Canada has burned down the White House once before, we can do it again.
Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium... (Score:5, Interesting)
Interesting thing is that in the same breeder reactors as the GGP posted about you can use u-238 as a fissile fuel; it's a slightly more expensive process which is why we don't use it.
We have somewhere in the range of 10,000 to 4 billion years of energy via breeder reactors (and they're currently in production; it's not science fiction, it's just a bit more expensive).
Saying we're running out of uranium is like saying we're running out of rock. We've got so much of it around we're trying to get rid of it!
I'd say this is anti-nuclear pro-drum-circle sensationalist garbage.
Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium... (Score:5, Interesting)
The element of 'realpolitik' involved is that when a technology becomes so available it can't be controlled, the big powers just give up and move on to other problems.
However, there is a qualitative difference between WMDs and earlier weapons. WMDs can easily erase a city, fairly easily erase a country, and realistically could erase all life from the planet. So, there is a great concern about them regardless of ease of manufacture.
The bald fact is that both biological and chemical WMDs can be manufactured in very scary quantities in small labs now. Some of the recent developments with bioweapons make me personally more concerned with them than nuclear weapons. It is also possible that someone will finally figure out a practical method of laser uranium enrichment that'll eliminate all those pesky centrifuge cascades.
What is my point? That WMD manufacture is entering or has already entered a similar phase to dynamite in terms of ease of production. I feel we still need to cripple Iran's nuclear program, but we also need to start a determined and intelligent civil defense effort so when the inevitable WMD attacks occur we survive with minimal losses.
Will our species survive long enough to get off this rock? Stay tuned...
Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm going to have to go with yes.
While it is debatable, the generally held belief is that knowledge is increasing at a geometric rate.
That's why Moores law works: knowledge of how to make the changes is really the only barrier to increasing efficiency of silicon production.
Any other industry whose primary factor determining efficiency is knowledge should have similar results. Obviously, the ease of refactoring to meet the more clever ideas can affect the rate, but I don't think that its unreasonable to expect progress to double in constant periods of time.
That said, I doubt that the energy industry falls into this geometric rate category. The oil cartel wants to be the ones making the money, and that governs things more than the increasae in knowledge.
But what about other manufacturing? I'd say that most goods manufacturing is increasing in ability at a geometric rate because of increases posed by increases in knowledge.
Re:Yeah (Score:4, Interesting)
It's interesting that thorium was mentioned becuase that is a more plentiful fuel material. It is more difficult to handle than uranium and that has limited its use up to this point but there are serious efforts underway in India now that they can concentrate on a civilian nuclear industry.
People have been talking about the fuel scarcity for well over a decade (hence India's thorium work which started a decade or more ago), I have not read the article so I am commenting on the scarcity, the post above and not on anything new the article may have brought up.
Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium... (Score:3, Interesting)
By slightly more expensive you possibly mean breeders like Superphoenix - which ended up to be more expensive per watt than even if you replaced the thing with a vast farm of 1980s photovolaics. An unfair comparison on my part because as a new type of reactor it showed us many ways not to do things that were not apperent before but have not all been resolved and is one of the main reasons you don't see new fast breeders. Personally I think the "slightly more expensive" should be rephrashed as "we don't know how to do it well yet". When the nuclear industry actually spends some effort on civilian R&D instead of advertising and lobby money we may actually see some viable designs and a viable prototype. After they get that far we can think about taxpayer help for plants that won't get built otherwise - they should have to prove it works first.
Liquid sodium has a long history (Score:3, Interesting)
Bismuth is hard to handle and scarce, and, from my own experiments with bismuth alloys years ago, it has horrible flow and wetting properties.
It's amazing what IS handled quite safely in industry - molten glass in multi-tonne quantities, flammable gases, toxic liquids. The trick is to find a technology that works, refine it, and stick to it. Before long people forget there was ever a problem. In my kitchen cupboard I have nearly pure formic acid, sodium hydroxide, chlorine based bleach. And that's just household cleaners.