CERN Physicist Warns About Uranium Shortage 581
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.'"
Re:Alternative materials? (Score:4, Informative)
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:The problem with Fusion... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, most of the things you buy on a routine basis are commodities, so obviously a lot of people believe in investing in them.
Also, I hate to burst your bubble, but fusion won't be "free".
Even after we learn how to build one that works, we'll still have the moderately colossal expense of building fusion plants.
And disposing of moderately radioactive fusion reactors at end-of-life. Mustn't forget that part.
Re:Alternative materials? (Score:3, Informative)
He talks about that. According to TFA, no one has come up with a practical, economic (at current price levels) re enrichment (breeder reactor) system. So, it's theoretically possible (along with a host of other things), but technically very difficult and likely not a good strategy to pin one's hopes on.
Re:The folly of natural resource-based energy (Score:5, Informative)
Research (Score:5, Informative)
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:Use Thorium-based reactors instead (Score:4, Informative)
And you can't use them to make nuclear weapons.
That last part is why. :'|
And also ridiculously misinformed. From wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
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 [harvard.edu].
Re:Use Thorium-based reactors instead (Score:5, Informative)
Just to silence the "citation please" trolls who can't use google:
Energy from Thorium [blogspot.com]
Nuclear Green [blogspot.com]
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 (Score:3, Informative)
Pretty much none of that is correct, unfortunately. Thorium is more abundant than uranium, but not by such a massive factor. There's no fissile isotope of thorium, so we'd have to start them on uranium. Current reactors will not breed in the thorium cycle, and it's questionable to what extend this is practical. The waste lasts for hundreds of years, reprocessing and fabrication for thorium fuel is not developed and U-233 (which the fissile isotope in the thorium cycle) certainly could be used to make a nuclear weapon.
Fast breeders on the U-Pu cycle are closer to practicality.
"for the accumulated knowledge on this subject is already sufficient to say that commercial fusion power will never become a reality.'"
The people working on ITER clearly don't agree.
Re:Alternative materials? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_IV_reactor#Fast_reactors [wikipedia.org]
Re:Supply equals demand (Score:3, Informative)
According to your source:
In late 2006, Denison Mines reopened the Pandora mine in the La Sal mining district of southeastern Utah.[8] Denison Mines has received all the required permits from the state of Utah and the US Bureau of Land Management to reopen its Tony M uranium mine in the Henry Mountains; ore production is expected to begin in 2008. The Tony M deposit is said to contain 5.3 million pounds (2400 tonnes) of U3O8.[1] Nearby the Tony M deposit, Denison has another uranium deposit, the Bullfrog. Denison is currently stockpiling ore at its White Mesa uranium processing mill in the Henry Mountains; the mill is expected to begin processing in early 2008.[9]
Your argument isn't so solid.
Re:Alternative materials? (Score:0, Informative)
What about plutonium and other radioactive materials? (first post? hehehe)
This is just more liberal non-sense. We have enough Uranium and Thorium for up to a billion years. We can extract it from ocean water even, our current mines are running out that's all. There is plenty to be had out there we will just have to mine it from areas that are not as rich increasing the cost but since the energy density is so high it won't matter that much in the end. Nuclear is going to be the only real energy source for the foreseeable future. We mined the easy ore now to start on the not so easy but much more abundant ores/water. Before we run out we will be able to mine if from mercury which should have a lot more than the earth since it had more heavy elements or some other source of power will be discovered. The end of oil doesn't have to place us in the dark ages it is up to us to actually start using these other resources. Nuclear tech is just starting, there are some nuclear fuels that you can hold in your hand and not be harmed by it! NASA has a new reactor that can be carried around on your back. The universe is made of energy don't let the liberal non-sense confuse you. (we also have 1000 years of coal energy left and oh yeah we can be extracting uranium from coal as well before we burn it...)
Here are a few references that back me up:
http://periodic.lanl.gov/elements/92.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Supply
http://www.nea.fr/html/pub/newsletter/2002/20-2-Nuclear_fuel_resources.pdf
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/08/how-long-can-uranium-last-for-nuclear.html
http://alfin2100.blogspot.com/2009/01/between-200-and-20000-years-worth-of.html
http://homelandsecuritynewswire.com/how-long-will-worlds-uranium-deposits-last
Re:Alternative materials? (Score:5, Informative)
Here [wikipedia.org]:
Re:I mention this (Score:5, Informative)
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 [nuclearfaq.ca]
Re:I mention this (Score:2, Informative)
Also, human power utilization is less than 0.02% of insolation (yes, 1/5000).
Re:Alternative materials? (Score:5, Informative)
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 [stanford.edu]. 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:I mention this (Score:4, Informative)
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".
Re:Use Thorium-based reactors instead (Score:2, Informative)
There is a company that knows how to include thorium into existing power plants and they have contracts to experiment in Russia and India: Thorium Power.
Their technology couuld quickly be included in existing plants refueling cycles.
Oh bomb making from Thorium is tricky as U233 has less than a 2 year half life. It is very radioactive.
Re:Alternative materials? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Use Thorium-based reactors instead (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]
"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 [wikipedia.org]
"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:Alternative materials? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
virginia deposit good for two months (Score:2, Informative)
Virginia land hides huge uranium deposit
First URL is UPI story. Second is abstract of a scholarly paper from Virginia Tech.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/01/02/Virginia-land-hides-huge-uranium-deposit/UPI-69751199296526/ [upi.com]
http://www.geoinformatics.vt.edu/server/docs/jjerden/NA99l.htm [vt.edu]
Estimated content 55,000 tons uranium per UPI. The second suggests ~40,000 tonnes of uranium, ~40 million tonnes of 0.1% ore. If the 0.1% ore is itself the usual 0.7% U235, then ~10,000 tonnes of 3% enriched would net from the ore body.
Re:Illuminati (Score:2, Informative)
Producing antimatter with current technology costs much more energy than you can get out, and even with perfect technology, it would cost exactly the same energy as you get back when using it, so it could at best be used as energy storage, but not as energy source.
Not that we could produce any significant amount of antimatter with current technology anyway.
Re:Well (Score:3, Informative)
I have no idea where you get your facts, but I look at tables that compare various energy sources and the cost of electricity associated with them. If you build plants of all available types nuclear is the cheapest, by a large margin. The most expensive being solar. Solar was something around 3x the price as nuclear.
There are may reasons why studies show skewed results when comparing numbers. Alot of nuclear power plants were built and then never produced a single kWh of electricity. Those costs are included with many estimates because they were part of the "nuclear envelope". When you look at the 50 year costs, nuclear wins hands down.
As an example, look at the costs of electricity in California. They have a program where you can "opt" to pay your electricity using a green source (they use wind). Guess what happens when you "opt" to pay for green electricity? Your bill goes up by like 40%. I tried to find a site that would show the values, but I couldn't find one to provide.
For solar and wind, make sure you are looking at numbers that show the "actual" generation. Remember solar does not make 100% power 100% of the time. You pay for the time that the solar plant sits there doing nothing at night. A 50kW solar plant does not make 50kW of electricity all day and night. In fact, I had read somewhere that optimally you'll typically only get about 80% of your "estimated" capacity from a solar plant. Nuclear, Coal, etc do have the capability to run at full load continuously (nuclear does need time to refuel, but is otherwise 100% power 100% of the time.
Solar and wind are great for those that want a low "investment" cost. You don't have to spend nearly as much money to build a wind farm as a nuclear power plant. But you will pay for that savings over the 50 years that you operate solar.
The truth, nuclear does provide a cost effective green energy source. We may have issues with fuel, but the same is true for anything we pull out of the ground.
Disclaimer: Yes, I do work in the nuclear field.
Re:Alternative materials? (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not talking about reprocessing fuel for use in thermal reactors, although as long as there are still legacy nuke plants in good shape we might as well keep fueling them.
Make. Power. With. Fast. Reactors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_cooled_fast_reactor [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-cooled_fast_reactor [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_cooled_fast_reactor [wikipedia.org]
These aren't research or materials test reactors. They do reprocess fuel, but mainly for their own consumption.
Re:Alternative materials? (Score:3, Informative)
You should be calculating the amount of uranium in the surface of the earth, not the volume. Deep mining is less realistic than asteroid mining; it's unlikely to ever happen. Practically speaking, at current demand and growth rates, with enrichment, u238 buys us only a couple hundred years. ("Only.")
But hey, eventually we'll switch to the thorium cycle, and then fusion, and scarcity will actually vanish.
If you actually read the calculations, they are done using only uranium in the crust (in fact, using only uranium in seawater). There is no deep mining, or indeed any sort of mining, required.
The growth rate concern is unrealistic, as it has been mentioned already that no constant growth rate is sustainable indefinitely, under any energy technology. The amount of uranium we lose from natural radioactive decay (half life of 4.5 billion years for U238) exceeds any amount that we are likely to consume for fuel.