Peak Uranium: What’s Going to Fuel All Those Nuclear Plants?

[Javaman]

http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/12/19/peak-uranium-whats-going-to-fuel-all-those-nuclear-plants/

Now that “peak oil” is seemingly in retreat, is the next big worry peak uranium?

The expected nuclear-power renaissance, from the U.K. to India, means dozens more nuclear reactors will likely be built in coming years. Current-generation reactors all need uranium for fuel—but where’s all that uranium going to come from? The Wall Street Journal reports today that some nuclear operators are getting nervous:

Japan’s Kansai Electric Power — which accounts for nearly a third of the country’s total uranium demand — says it plans to buy uranium mines to ensure its long-term supply of the fuel. Its chief manager says he worries that in coming years he won’t be able to buy what he needs “no matter how much you are willing to pay.”

Worries about long-term uranium supplies surface every so often; talk of a global nuclear revival fans the flames. So what’s the score?

The International Atomic Energy Agency and Nuclear Energy Agency figure there’s enough uranium to power existing plants for 100 years. Granted, there are some supply-side issues. About 40% of current uranium supplies come from stockpiles and old weapons—not from uranium mines—so new sources need to be developed soon to avoid “uranium supply shortfalls,” they say.

[Terry in Austin]

1. Say what?

> Now that “peak oil” is seemingly in retreat,

Funny, I never got that memo. Did somebody pay God to put more oil in the ground?

[Terry in Austin]

2. We'll get all the uranium we need from seawater, doncha know.

An endless supply of it, by golly, and we'll keep the lights on happily ever after.

B-)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=115x60377#60554

...the study looks only at traditional reserves, and makes no reference to the considerable amount of Japanese work showing that uranium can be recovered from seawater economically at a few hundred bucks a kilo. The reserves of uranium in the ocean, which is chemically saturated with respect to uranium, amounts to about 3 to 5 billion tons of uranium.

[TheWraith]

4. I'm sorry, are you trying to mock science? You do know this has been done, right?

The Japanese have built the nanomaterials for it, and successfully recovered usable quantities of uranium as well as tons of other useful heavy metals.

[joshcryer]

24. Yeah, 1000 tons of materials to get 1kg of uranium.

Get back to me when they've improved the process some orders of magnitude.

[Terry in Austin]

3. Seriously, though: uranium peak is built-in

You're right to be pointing out the troublesome limitations of supply. Uranium is a non-renewable, so the wisdom of committing to it on a grand scale is questionable, at best -- haven't we been through this movie before, with non-renewable petroleum?

Nor can we count on having enough uranium for that pesky peak to be the problem of a future generation. Some of the reserve estimates are more on the order of 30 years' worth or less, depending on assumptions about rates of use.

Good analysis of Peak Uranium at the http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379">Oil Drum.
More data and analysis in the definitive MIT study, "The Future of Nuclear Power."

[hunter]

10. Did you read the MIT report?

Assumption: A once through conventional fuel cycle, circa 2003. Okay.

Conclusion: "We believe that the world-wide supply of uranium ore is sufficient to fuel the deployment of 1000 reactors over the next half century and to maintain this level of deployment over a 40 year lifetime of this fleet."

My own assumption is that during the next 40 years most people's greatest concern will be finding something to eat.

So far it looks like we're going to burn coal and gas until the economic disruptions of climate change make it impossible to support any sort of large scale coal mining or natural gas production. I'd like to forecast an end to the current economic depression, but I don't think there will be one. When we get through this what's left of the world economy will be unrecognizable. It's quite possible that nations embracing nuclear power will be better off than those that rejected it.

At the moment "peak uranium" isn't something I'm worrying about.

[Terry in Austin]

21. Yeah. I liked its underwhelming view of a nuclear future

I think the whole nuclear scenario isn't feasible even on its own terms -- costs too much at any interesting scale, limited amounts of non-renewable fuel, etc. So I generally poke at those soft spots, without even getting into the policy madness it represents. It's tough to argue values.

> My own assumption is that during the next 40 years most people's greatest concern will be finding something to eat.

You'n me both, bro!

I'll gladly accept the condemnation of the cornucopians inclined to shout this down, and wait -- still -- for them to make a realistic case.

[TheWraith]

5. The manager of Kansai needs to work on his paranoia.

Even by the most absurdly pessimistic estimates, there's a 40 year supply available, and more realistic projections put it at 100 years. And that's just conventional mining, without looking at the recovery of uranium from seawater, which is being pioneered by the Japanese.

[Terry in Austin]

6. Oh, but science says "sorry"

:evilgrin:

[Nederland]

7. Nonsense

Sorry, but here in Colorado I've seen too many perfectly productive uranium mines shut down due to market conditions to believe that we will run out of uranium any time soon.

[Terry in Austin]

8. You might want to quantify "soon."

[Nederland]

9. 50 years (nt)

[Terry in Austin]

11. Good luck, grandkids...

Suckers.

[TheWraith]

12. Actually got about a 4,400 year supply of uranium.

400 years on land, an additional 4,000 in the ocean. That's without reprocessing to reuse our already mined stores.

[Terry in Austin]

13. ROFL!

Let me guess -- because "science says so."

Sorry, you'll need to back it up better than that.

[TheWraith]

18. Right, because it's not like science is a science or anything.

If you want to be treated as something other than a twit and a kook, try actually basing your arguments on facts. Otherwise, you're no different from a freeper saying that evolution doesn't exist because their holy book told them so.

[Terry in Austin]

20. You made the claim, so you make the argument

That's how it works. Whining doesn't.

[TheWraith]

22. It's not an "argument," and the only person I see who's not presenting facts is you.

But if you really need a link in order to know things about energy, here:

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/ENF_Exploration_drives_uranium_resources_up_17_0206082.html

http://www.jaea.go.jp/jaeri/english/ff/ff43/topics.html

But go ahead, keep pretending that "ROFL!" is somehow a technique of socratic inquiry.

[Nederland]

14. 50 years might as well be forever

So many things are going to change in the next 50 years planning beyond that is pointless.

[excess_3]

15. only the US needs fresh uranium every time

other countries would recycle

[NNadir]

16. Well, if you are into the science of the matter...

...the answer is available in many hundreds of publications.

An excellent one is Journal of Nuclear Materials 383 (2008) 54–62, "Advanced Fuel Cycles in PHWR."

The nuclear scientific literature abounds with these answers to this silly question.

But among nuclear energy's "concern trolls" there isn't very much interest in nuclear science, since you can't actually be a nuclear concern troll if you know any nuclear science.

But over at the soothsaying Wall Street Journal, where they were not so long ago predicting "Dow 30,000!!!!!" soothsaying is about as good as that of say, Amory Lovins, who said, in 1976 that by the year 2000, we'd have 20 exajoules of solar energy in this country, and in 2000, that we'd have hydrogen HYPErcar in showrooms by the year 2005.

It can be shown, in a series of 20 or 30 papers in Ind. Chem. Eng. (and elsewhere) reported in exhaustive detail, that uranium resources may be considered inexhaustible, particularly given that all of the internal heat of the earth comes from the low energy decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium-40.

Nuclear power is not only safer, cleaner, and cheaper than all of its alternatives, but on a more profound level it is more renewable than all of its alternatives.

[Name removed]

17. Deleted sub-thread

Sub-thread removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Nihil]

19. Let me list the ways ...

.. that this article is full of shit.

> Now that “peak oil” is seemingly in retreat

That's news to most people who have taken an interest in the subject.
Maybe the WSJ was just talking about US gasoline prices rather than the
geological constraints on extracting a finite once-through resource?


> dozens more nuclear reactors will likely be built in coming years

"dozens", "likely", "coming years" ... oh those financial types with their
hard-headed numbers! What a shame they were so taken by surprise when their
careful stock-market calculations went wrong earlier this year.


> it plans to buy uranium mines to ensure its long-term supply of the fuel

This is supposed to be a bad thing? Ensuring long-term supply of the one thing
that the company *really* needs to stay in business? Obviously a bad thing for
people who like to make their money on bets that companies are going to fail.


> The International Atomic Energy Agency and Nuclear Energy Agency figure
> there’s enough uranium to power existing plants for 100 years.

OK, so there's not too much urgency on this issue yet then?

> About 40% of current uranium supplies come from stockpiles and old weapons—not
> from uranium mines ...

Alternatively, "About 60% of current uranium supplies come from uranium mines.

> ... so new sources need to be developed soon to avoid “uranium supply shortfalls,”

"Soon". Is that "soon" as in "within the next 90 years" or "soon" as in "fusion will
be in commercial use soon"?


Please note that the above are digs at the article, not the poster.
However I sadly note your later response:

> I mostly post these kinds of topics just in a hope of getting one of
> <NNadir's> crazy ass responses.

That was a shame. I thought this might have been posted for discussion (for example,
of the dubious standard of WSJ reporting) rather than as a red herring to taunt one
particular poster ready for a pile-on ...
:shrug:

[jwirr]

23. Does this article talk at all about the oil based fuel needed to mine,

transport and repair the nukes? Not to mention build them? Just asking because we often are looking at solutions that do not consider the before and after of their own use.

[4dsc]

25. Looks like we have a winner

I guess if no one looks at how much oil will left in the world in say 90 years, we don't have to worry to much about predictions that uranium will still be around in that time. I guess we could use nuclear power to transport and repair and build nuclear power plants..

[kristopher]

26. I'm not a nuclear supporter but...

the question has merit whether we are getting the electricity from nuclear or from renewables.

The answer is "energy storage". Electricity is set to be the primary means of harnessing energy to do work, but having it delivered by the grid doesn't help much when we need to combine portability to areas where there is no grid, and high energy density. Fossil fuels are great in those areas - they are the picture of energy stored in a portable, highly energy dense form to move ships, airplanes, cargo etc.

Whether or not fossil fuels run out, we want to stop using them because they emit very large quantities of carbon dioxide. Burn one gallon of gasoline and the carbon in it links with oxygen and becomes much more "bulky" than the original fossil fuel. One ggallon of gasoline produces just under 20 pounds of carbon dioxide. Picture a bag of charcoal briquettes falling out of your tailpipe every 20 or so miles you drive and you'll sort of get the idea.

The most probable way to store energy for these purposes will be biofuels. A large part of the energy input to produce biofuels is electricity, and some of the new technologies are expected to yield up to 6X the total energy used to produce them. Right now, the best they do is to yield about 1.2 times the input energy in biofuel but the higher returns are close at hand.

Batteries will work better for light duty transportation because they have lower pollution, land, and water use issues than biofuels.

[4dsc]

27. again, without oil nothing will run

Correct me if I'm wrong but every process you described requires oil to run it.. Not to mention, biofuels are not renewable.. they are not sustainable..

[kristopher]

28. Yes you are wrong.

I've already addressed your mistake in the previous post.

[Dead_Parrot]

29. No, every thing uses oil *at the moment*

As Kris says, it's a question of energy storage: Batteries, fuel cells, synfuels (like DME), and biofuels can all provide non-fossil and carbon-neutral alternatives for transportation and mobile machinery, with varying strengths and weaknesses: Transitioning to these is something we need to do PDQ regardless of electricity generation.

Current biofuel production is certainly, err, less that perfect but the principle is fine: In particular, some of the algae-based research looks very promising.