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.'"
Alternative materials? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Alternative materials? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Use Thorium-based reactors instead (Score:5, Interesting)
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:The problem with Fusion... (Score:3, Interesting)
Doc Smith thought of this in the Skylark Series. The hero discovers total liberation of mass-energy from matter, and assumes the rational thing is to sell the energy at prices so low it's practically free -- he'll still get filthy rich. The bad guys realize that if they get a *monopoly* on the process, they can sell the energy at just enough below current market prices to drive competition out of business.
If ultra-cheap fusion becomes technically feasible, the race will be to get working plants on line so you can knock out the competition. Profits, unless regulated by law, will inevitably ensue.
In any case, there is no such thing as unlimited energy. If energy were 1000x lower in price than it is today, we'd still be facing some form of an energy crisis, because we'd adjust our economy to use energy on vastly larger scales. The place to be in that scenario is distribution. The people who own the power distribution lines will do very well indeed.
also a helium-3 shortage (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Alternative materials? (Score:3, Interesting)
Plutonium is man-made. It's more of a method for energy storage than an energy source.
Which is what makes Uranium nice since we can just dig it out of the ground. And I think that the claim that we don't know where to dig next is a little overblown. Uranium decays naturally into Radon gas which seeps up from the ground. That is, you can detect a Uranium deposit by gas chromatography and without digging.
Iran tried. (Score:1, Interesting)
Iran tried to do just that.
But the US got all snarky and threatened to invade.
Did you know that the US breached regulations when they kept hidden the knowledge that many US nukes were given to other countries for their use in abrogation of the NPT but finessing it to "well, really it's still ours, but if war breaks out then there's no treaty and although that means they get the nukes to use, the treaty doesn't apply in war so it's still OK"?
But the US still develops nuclear power.
And we don't invade them for it.
Breeder technology would mean we would have to let Iran progress THEIR breeder technology.
This won't happen.
Re:Alternative materials? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I mention this (Score:3, Interesting)
Does research continue on OTEC? It seems like it's been years since I read about any active OTEC projects.
In regards to your concern about wind power, a mindbogglingly large amount of energy passes through the atmosphere daily (absorbed and released). I can't imagine that wind farms could possibly have a significant impact. Whether or not it amounts to anything, it is good to think about such things.
Re:Alternative materials? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Use Thorium-based reactors instead (Score:5, Interesting)
"The people working on ITER clearly don't agree."
Er, no.
There are plenty of people working on ITER who do agree. But they figure that it's a worthy endeavor without necessarily being a commercially viable final product. (ie They think we'll learn a lot from doing it.)
Plus, it's funded by the EU and they're just throwing money it at with very little expectation of anything in return.
Ideal FBR Location (Score:2, Interesting)
Of course, you would need some kind of a monster microwave link to carry the energy back to the Earth...
Re:The folly of natural resource-based energy (Score:3, Interesting)
Something that doesn't seem to come through clearly in the above analysis IMO...
If a light water reactor is economical with $40/lb uranium contributing 0.2 cents / kWh, then a light water reactor could also be used with $400/lb uranium (from seawater) increasing the cost per kWh by 1.8 cents. Now, as cheap as that may sound, it could mean nearly 20%-40% increase in electricity costs if we assume all fuels are currently on par cost-wise; I don't see how to extract that with certainty from the provided numbers.
So not as good as the numbers with a breeder, but not nearly as bad as some scenarios we talk about with conventional fuels running scarce. It seems that if we seriously put light-water reactor deployment in gear, we'd be limiting the worst-case scenario to a 40% increase in energy costs.
That's without the political and practical security problems of a breeer. However, it is not without costs. Light water reactors do leave behind a lot of radioactive waste since they have a loose definition of "spent" fuel.
Re:Water on moon, why not uranium? (Score:3, Interesting)
The moon is the answer for all our future resource-problems..
You were probably going for a +5 Funny, but in case you weren't, there are various issues with that solution. First being that even if the moon were made of uranium (or oil), it would probably be too expensive to ship it in and out of our respective gravity wells to earth. Second, the moon seems to be pretty much mostly a large non-metallic mantel with a small non-active metallic core. Chances are that the moon simply isn't nearly mineral rich as the earth. Three, the moon is a really harsh environment, especially for the machinery that we would need to mine anything. Without weathering, every little bit of dust is a sharp jagged piece of sand paper that will wear down equipment fairly fast.
All in all, the moon probably isn't a good source of materials, even water. For energy, we'd be better harvesting solar energy in orbit and beaming it back to earth. For materials, especially metallic elements such as uranium, we'd be better off mining asteroids.
Re:I mention this (Score:3, Interesting)
The last time I did back-of-the-envelope math on it, uranium looks like 50 years worth of proven reserves, 500 or so with reprocessing, and close to 50,000 years if you use thorium, assuming you use it for *all* the energy needs, the use per-person will resemble the first world energy needs, and the global population continues to follow the logistic curve with an asymptote between 9 and 12 billion people.
Which, IMO, gives us plenty of time to get the next energy generating technology going, probably solar-thermal, or if if you like pie-in-the-sky exotic ideas, deep geothermal, depending on what environmentalists have to say about footprint.
Re:The folly of natural resource-based energy (Score:1, Interesting)
We're so far behind the energy resource curve that it is only a matter of time before we end up in the dark.
So give up and go live in the rain forest. The rest of us will man up and pursue other solutions such as the ones suggested elsewhere in the comments.
And anyone else notice that many people who warn of our impending doom seem to also be salivating at the prospect?
Something just seemed subtly wrong with it... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
It Is Just a Matter of Price (Score:3, Interesting)
In Sweden, there is said to be a whole mountain of uranium; enough to supply all the world's reactors for 100 years. World wide there are numerous other low-grade sources.
The trouble is, that these are low grade ores and it costs more to extract the uranium.
The point is there is a continuous curve (sorry I don't have that curve to show you)of the size of uranium supply versus the cost of extracting it. Therefore, it is not a matter of uranium shortage it is a question of energy costs.
Since nuclear power is so saddled with the sky high cost of meeting safety and environmental requirements, I'm not sure how much uranium contributes to the total cost. If uranium is only 10% of the cost of a Mwh, then doubling the cost of uranium adds only 10% to the cost. Perhaps another slashdotter can post the actual cost breakdowns for today's nukes.
Re:Ideal FBR Location (Score:3, Interesting)
Solar energy is very low density. It's used in spacecraft (out til about Mars) because except for RTGs [wikipedia.org] it's a lot cheaper than launching fuel into orbit. For terrestrial applications however, sunlight only has an energy density of 1500 Watts/m^2 in space, dropping to about 800 W/m^2 on earth. Factor in the 15% efficiency of mass-produced commercial PV (photovoltaics) and you're only talking about 120 W/m^2 peak production. Next factor in the movement of the sun (since you specified no moving parts) and weather, and realistically you're looking at maybe 50-70 W/m^2 on average during the day (halve this if you want average output over 24 hours). This is semi-reasonable for static applications (e.g. houses) where you can plaster a large area with PV panels. A house's average 36 kW-h daily energy use could be satisfied with about 40-60 m^2 of panels. (You'd still want to be on the grid though, so you could do things like heat the house when fresh snowfall covered up your panels.)
But it's useless for mobile and space-constrained applications. A typical sedan requires about 20-25 hp to maintain cruise speed on the highway. That's about 15-19 kW. If you go with the lower figure, if you covered the entire upward-facing surface of your car with PV (about 6-7 m^2), parking it on a sunny 8-hour workday would capture about 5 kW-h of energy in the battery. Or enough to drive your solar car at highway speeds for all of 15-20 minutes (never mind accelerating).
Another idea a solar advocate pitched to me was powering street lamps entirely with PV mounted on top of the lamp post. The typical street lamp uses a 250 W bulb. If you assume the light needs to be on for 14 hours in winter, it'll use 3.5 kW-h of energy. A static panel which could capture that amount of energy in 10 hours of daylight at 70 W/m^2 would need to be 5 m^2. There's no way you're mounting that on top of a lamp post. LED lighting would have to improve to the point where a 25 Watt LED bulb could provide the same light to make the idea semi-reasonable. And you'd still be talking about a half m^2 panel which although not overly large would still be highly visible and unwieldy should the wind pick up.
Re:Alternative materials? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Nevertheless. 3% growth it has been. (Score:2, Interesting)
The more fun argument is that if the growth is unavoidable, there isn't any reason to worry about how we will sustain it, so it doesn't matter how long the uranium will last.
Re:Ya (Score:3, Interesting)
If you make your own power onsite..electricity and transportation fuel, whether that is electricity as well or some liquid biofuels (or maybe hydrogen in the future from water) you won't be boycotting yourself or charging yourself an extra fat skim.
I agree. In fact, we are already doing that in my apartment building. The roof is covered with around 35 m^2 of photovoltaic panels, which are expected to provide 3500 kWh annually, and there is a carpool of one electric car (more will be added if the project is successful) to be used by the apartment owners. Sure, the power provided by the panels is not much, but then this is a one-year pilot project between the construction company (Skanska) that built our apartment building and the local power supplier (Fortum), intended to work out how to handle issues like consumers also becoming small-time producers (the electricity grid isn't really designed for this), and the feasibility of using electric cars for real-life local transportation needs.
there is no safe way to have nuke power without having weapons potential
Except for fusion power, which is certainly nuclear, but does not have any weapons potential.