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. "
Yeah (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Yeah (Score:5, Insightful)
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: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:Yeah (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.wise-uranium.org/upusa.html#SEAWATER [wise-uranium.org]
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/cohen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium#Resources_an
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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.
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, Informative)
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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: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.
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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 bef
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It wasn't actually a law, and it wasn't Reagan... I think it was actually Carter, but I'm not sure. Here's a relevant article [washingtonpost.com] about some consideration by the current administration to change said rules, allowing the rep
Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium... (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
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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
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That's what *you* think. [slashdot.org]
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.
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Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium... (Score:5, Funny)
We can solve the problem by designing bigger and better weapons. A century ago, nitroglycerin manufacturing was once an international political issue. Today, we really couldn't care less if some country wants to play with dynamite. Once nuclear weapons no longer instill the greatest fears, the uranium industry can start operating without the detrimental extra-market forces.
That's what we call the "peace dividend"
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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:5, Insightful)
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.
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Actually that is what happens in a normal PWR uranium reactor. The reaction starts with U-235 which fission, giving off more neutrons. Some of the neutrons hit U238, which converts it into NP239, which decays into Pu239. Hit the Pu239 with another neutron, and depending on the speed and probability, you either get a fission and more neutron
Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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%.
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Temporary but quite painful for countries who are chasing down oil instead of locking up Uranium supplies (i.e. the USA).
Fuel is not the major cost (Score:2, Insightful)
Solution (Score:4, Funny)
2/ Invade in the name of freedom.
3/ Profit!
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Did I say that out-loud? Damn...
Re:Solution (Score:5, Funny)
Well, in that case, we're just coming for an extended vacation.
Re:Solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Pfft. Canada has burned down the White House once before, we can do it again.
Re:Solution (Score:4, Funny)
Okay, so you caught us off guard once. We figured you wouldn't be able to use torches because they'd catch your tuques on fire. We won't make the same mistake again.
And don't try the ol' "Look out behind you! TERRORISTS!" trick, as we've already fallen for that one before too.
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Alright, you with your hands up: explain Singapore, Japan, South Africa, China, and Switzerland.
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Re:Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
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We need a +1 Sourcasm mod (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Solution (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Solution (Score:4, Funny)
We are working on that. The RIAA is at work this very minute taking away their freedoms. In about 5 years, Canadians will be begging for their freedom. That's when we move in with our military to protect them. They will be giving up their uranium for free!
Re:Solution (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it's depleted, but it's prefectly servicable fuel in a breeder reactor. A potential which rather makes me wonder how smart it is to spread it around in enemy territory.
Look, a breeder reactor isn't something two mujahideen can slap together out of adobe bricks in a weekend. It's safe to assume that anyone with the resources to build a breeder reactor can probably find something to put in it locally, they don't need to comb the Iraqi desert looking for 2lb bits of DU embedded 20' in the ground.
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Oh, true, you need at least a teenager, an antique clock and a backyard toolshed.
Breeding aint that hard. Controlled, safe breeding is harder, but I suspect the chapter on nuclear safety may have fallen out of the brains of those with an inclination to try it.
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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
And all this time I was taught (Score:2)
hopefully the people behind these "findings" aren't related to the fossil fuel industry in any way... or to any alternative power... in other words.. FUD (?)
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People have measured the uranium content of the inside of the Earth by looking for neutrinos of the right energy, which are produced during radioactive decay and fly
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That movie scarred me for life.
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Were you homeschooled? The core of the Earth is iron [worldalmanacforkids.com]. It's the reason we have a strong magnetic field.
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Also, the problem the article mentions is not that the uranium
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It's too early in the morning for this.
Suck on THAT, terrorists! (Score:3, Funny)
There are things scarier (Score:2)
Requiring Deuterium, which is pretty abundant, its a lot more scary.
The hard part is getting the tritium needed for the reaction.
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Wrong. Most "fusion" weapons in fact get the majority of their energy from fission.
For fusion to work, you need a heavy casing to channel the X-rays that compress the fusion fuel. If you happen to make the casing out of uranium 238 instead of lead, you get a 2-3X boost in power because the fast neutrons from the fusion reaction can split unenriched uranium without needing a chain reaction, which yields significant extr
Breeder reactors (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Breeder reactors (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Liquid sodium has a long history (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Breeder reactors (Score:4, Funny)
Not quite. They are proliferating more as if they have half-lives of their own.
*rimshot*
Finally! (Score:5, Funny)
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Ummmm... you're not storing it all in the same place, are you? I mean... all lumped together or anything like that? [inching away]
Hopefully... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Breeder reactors reuse spent nuclear fuel. They only need small amounts of fuel to keep the reaction going. However, what about the waste? Compared to a conventional reactor, how much radioactive waste do they produce?
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.
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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
Executive Summary (Score:3, Informative)
We have 2 choices for every X number of years each Nuclear power plant runs:
(A) Store 10,000 pounds of Spent fuel for 25,000 years safely, taking into account rising sea levels, earthquakes, movement of the earths crust, etc.
(B) Store 15 pounds of Spent fuel for 300 years safely, protect/monitor/gaurd the "recycled" parts, because they could be used to make weapons.
Our government has chosen (A)
Re:Hopefully... (Score:5, Informative)
Breeder reactors reuse spent nuclear fuel. They only need small amounts of fuel to keep the reaction going. However, what about the waste? Compared to a conventional reactor, how much radioactive waste do they produce?
Re:Hopefully... (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfair price comparison (Score:5, Informative)
Another point to consider is that while current steam based nuclear power plants do burn uranium down to an unusable 'waste product', that waste is actually quite useful with reprocessing. So, while it is true that were the world only to burn low-level enriched uranium the world would run out quickly, it is not true that with a more modern burn-reclamation cycle that fuel shortages would persist.
Recycle the weapons then (Score:2, Insightful)
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Cost per Joule? (Score:2)
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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 pe
Re:Cost per Joule? (Score:5, Informative)
Uranium is not dangerous, and one pound of uranium is not very much as far as power reactors are concerned. For reference, the density of uranium metal is 18 g/cm^3, so 1 lb of uranium metal would only be 25 cm^3 in size.
A typical PWR generates around 3000 MWt, runs for ~500 full power days, and is loaded with around 70,000 kg of uranium metal. So that is [3000 MW*500 d*24 hr/d*3600 s/hr]/[70 000 kg] = 1,851,429 MJ/kg. For comparison, gasoline contains 47 MJ/kg. Keep in mind though that the uranium metal is not really consumed, it is only depleted until it builds up too much neutron-absorbing fission products, at which point it can be reprocessed and reused.
If uranium metal is $80 per lb, then it costs a mere 2 cents for 1 GJ of thermal power. Gasoline costs about $3/gallon and one gallon weighs about 6.2 lbs=$0.48/lb. So gas is about $22.51 for 1 GJ, which is more then 1000 times more expensive then uranium.
No he's right. (Score:3, Informative)
Yes the total 25 pieces 1cm^3 in size is 25cm^3, because that's what cm^3 means - number of 1 cm^3 pieces. Perhaps you were thinking of it as being (25 cm)^3? That would be huge, but that isn't what 25 cm^3 means. 25 cm^3 is the volume of an object that is 1cm x 1cm x 25cm. Not that big, but also much bigger than 0.18in^3.
The original density unit was given as g/cm^3. You were performing an unecessary cub
Energy scarcity (Score:2, Insightful)
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 th
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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.
Thorium, Plutonium... FUSION (Score:4, Informative)
But I think the point of fissile materials running out is set to be quite moot. Fusion reactor output has been increasing exponentially since its inception, and it should not be terribly long before it will be a viable alternative to fission power. Once we're set into fusion, it is basically impossible to run out of fuel. Fusion reactors run off of deuterium, which accounts for about 0.015% of all hydrogen. That is a crapload of deuterium! Consider that the oceans are 2/3 hydrogen (more or less) and heavy water is fairly easy to separate. (*actually, a tritium-deuterium reaction is more preferable for future reactors, but the tritium is refined from the deuterium--there is no natural abundance of tritium since it has a half life of ~17 years)
As a worst case scenario, we can always mine other planetary bodies. But despite the article's hype, don't expect us to run out of reactor fuel anytime this century.
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.
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I smell a "liberation" coming!
Poor Summary (Score:3, Insightful)
Need increased research funding (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Meet the New Boss (Score:2)
timely article in new york times today... (Score:2)
There are a lot of unused uranium mines out there, is basically what its saying. That does not address the fundamental problem though, which is that easily fissile uranium 235 exists in a finite quantity, and unless the world is willing to begin building commercial breeder reactors, the supply will run out, around the same time as current fossil fuel reserves if use continues at its current rate.
Sumamry doesn't agree with the article (Score:2)
I said this would happen (Score:2)
Every time someone advocates a move to nuclear fission, I have said the same thing: we are setting ourselves up for a peak-uranium crisis just like the peak-oil crisis we now face.
Breeders, reprocessing, thorium, no such things (Score:4, Informative)
Folks, before you hop on a wishful bandwagon, how about making sure there is a wagon?
Re:Breeders, reprocessing, thorium, no such things (Score:4, Informative)
Uranium Rush (Score:3, Informative)
On the other hand, there is a limited suppy of ore which makes reliance on nuclear power to avoid further gloabl warming a poor proposition. Converting current power production to all nuclear runs out the recoverable fuel before the new plants end their design lifetimes so nuclear would be much more expensive than anticipated at a lower level of use.
--
Get Real! Go solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Go Fusion! (Score:3)
No Wonder - (Score:4, Informative)
This 'Uranium Crisis' isn't caused by the mere consumption of nuclear fuel, but rather the ridiculously wasteful manner by which we've chosen to consume it for over half a century now. Better technology is within our reach that could allow us to dramatically stretch our nuclear fuel supply, both at current and greatly heightened consumption levels. While this hardly means we should stop worrying (good ideas too often fall before bad people) it does offer a bit of hope for us until nuclear fusion power finally takes off some time toward the end of our lives, if it ever does.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Summary of a poorly spaced post. (Score:4, Interesting)
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