Uranium Depletion and Nuclear Power: Are We at Peak Uranium?
Posted by Prof. Goose on March 21, 2007 - 12:00pm
This is a guest post by Miquel Torres.
A recent post by Martin Sevior has invigorated the nuclear energy debate causing over 240 comments with the most diverse opinions. I would like to further pursue this debate, as the question of whether nuclear power can provide a big part of the worlds energy needs is extremely important in the Peak Oil debate, because it is the only alternative energy source beside coal providing the type of electricity production necessary for the current electric grid model: big, base-load capable power plants. If that role is fulfilled, the current electricity production system can continue beyond Peak Oil, and even expand to provide the energy necessary for electrified transport. If it falls short, a new energy model is needed.
To anyone seeking the truth about the issues surrounding nuclear energy, the situation is extremely frustrating. There are two camps stating opposing claims. On the one hand, the environmentalists dislike everything nuclear, and on the other hand the nuclear industry paints an overly rosy picture where all problems are solvable, or non-issues at all. Whom should we believe?
Because Martin Sevior has portrayed the view of the nuclear industry, this post will explain what the other camp has to say. While I could address his post point by point, it would result in a very large article that nobody would read. So I have opted to first answer just one point, Uranium production, which I chose both because it is most similar to the PO depletion theme, readers should be familiar with some of its challenges, and because a new study sheds new light on it.
The biggest issue I have with nuclear energy proponents, including some members of TOD community, is that they just repeat what the nuclear industry sales men say. A good example is the post by Martin Sevior. It repeats their arguments without a shadow of doubt nor criticism. The same highly educated, Peak Oil literate individuals who know about OPEC resource mis-reporting, and can tell the difference between KSA reserves and Canada's, the difference between light crude oil and tar sands and know who Yergin and CERA are, believe all the arguments of the nuclear industry word by word. Why that is so, I do not know.
TODers should know that even though Canada now has greater stated reserves than KSA, tar sands will never reach OPEC production volumes. Reserves, and R/P ratio is not the same as a production profile, which produces a peak well before complete exhaustion. Uranium, like any other resource, can't be mined at any desired rate, nor every last drop or ounce of the resource can be mined. No matter the technology, at some point it is just not worth it to mine lower grade ores. While energy balance analysis are complicated and a discussion about it would only bring controversy, another way of putting it is more easily grasped. For any mined ore, the lower the grade, the higher the material throughput you need to process. There is always a limit. And despite what the nuclear industry might tell you, for Uranium too. The materials throughput (not unrelated to the energy needed) is inversely proportional to the ore grade for any mined material: To extract 1 kg of uranium out of 1% ore containing material needs the processing of 100 kg. Extracting the same amount from 0.01% ore needs the processing of 10,000 kg. You can easily see that even if, for the sake of the argument we assume that the EROEI of nuclear energy for all ore grades is positive, there are physical limits to the production throughput Uranium production can ever reach. So what should be done is not just to list possible Uranium reserves, but also to analyze the maximum throughput attainable by the mining industry. That is: The Uranium production profile for the world.
The recently formed Energy Working Group has recently published a paper titled URANIUM RESOURCES AND NUCLEAR ENERGY. I will now explain their work. All figures and quotations are taken from this paper.
About the Energy Watch Group
This is the first of a series of papers by the Energy Watch Group which are addressed to investigate future energy supply and demand patterns. The Energy Watch Group consists of independent scientists and experts who investigate sustainable concepts for global energy supply. The group is initiated by the German member of parliament Hans-Josef Fell.
SUMMARY
Any forecast of the development of nuclear power in the next 25 years has to concentrate on two aspects, the supply of uranium and the addition of new reactor capacity. At least within this time horizon, neither nuclear breeding reactors nor thorium reactors will play a significant role because of the long lead times for their development and market penetration. This assessment results in the conclusion that in the short term, until about 2015, the long lead times of new and the decommissioning of ageing reactors perform the barrier for fast extension, and after about 2020 severe uranium supply shortages become likely which, again will limit the extension of nuclear energy.
I won't discuss the first point here (you may read the whole study, if you so wish) and I will concentrate on the Uranium supply.
Uranium Supply
This study uses the same data as the post by Martin Sevior. What he labels "Additional recovarable Uranium" is in reality "undiscovered resources prognosticated" and "undiscovered resources speculative". They are very unreliable data, considered by the study too speculative and with a very low probability of ever being brought into production. While some quantity in that category will be eventually mined, it wouldn't matter much in the time-frame considered.
Figure 1: Reasonably assured (RAR), inferred (IR) and already produced uranium resources
About 2.3 million tons of uranium have already been produced. Reasonably assured resources below 40 $/kgU are in the range of the already produced uranium. At present reactor uranium demand of about 67 kt/year these reserves would last for about 30 years, and would increase to 50 years if the classes up to 130 $/kgU were included. Inferred resources up to 130 $/kg would extend the static R/P ratio up to about 70 years. [...] However, the production profiles and reported reserves of individual countries show major downward reserve revisions in USA and France after their production maximum was passed. These downward revisions raise some doubts regarding the data quality of reasonably assured resources.
It will surely be interesting for TODers to have a look at the depletion curve for uranium in France. It clearly shows that uranium does deplete in a manner not entirely dissimilar to oil.
Figure A-3: Uranium production in France
According to the latest NEA statistics the "inferred resources between 80 and 130 $/kgU" still amount to about 11 kt. Now, the interesting thing is that "reasonably assured" and "estimated" resources estimates were increasing as long production was increasing, but as peak was reached, resource estimates were significantly downgraded.
While the USA is not nearly completely depleted like France is, the analysis of historical resource reports reveals similar patterns like the ones shown for France before. Shortly after reaching the production peak, in 1983 the "reasonably assured and inferred resources" where downgraded by 85%, a decline of almost 1,000 kt. The implication is that the reserve reporting practices are not "transparent" and "understated" as the nuclear industry will tell you.
This happened at a time when exploration expenditures reached their highest level. Though the reasons for the production decline in the USA could be manifold, this strong correlation between declining production and downgraded resources is at least interesting. Therefore it is possible that production was declining because of a lack of resources. Apart from this observation, a decline of "reasonably assured resources" is hard to understand, this is to say that in fact the formerly stated resources were not "reasonably assured" after all. A known discovered resource was converted into an unknown undiscovered resource: this does imply that the reporting practice of known resources is highly questionable and unreliable. A decline of 1,000 kt is a relevant quantity which reduces the static R/P-ratio (at 50 kt production) by 20 years.
Back to the big picture. At present, of the current uranium demand of 67 kt/yr only 42 kt/yr are supplied by new production, the rest of about 25 kt/yr is drawn from stockpiles which were accumulated before 1980.
If the present reactor capacity remains constant, the annual demand amounts to 67 kt/yr. If the annual production amounts to 45 kt and if 22 kt are taken from stocks, then stocks will be exhausted by 2015 (possible changes due to uranium enrichment and MOX fabrication are marginal). The continuing consumption of 67 kt/yr exceeds the reserves below 40 $/kgU by between 2030 and 2035. The inclusion of reasonably assured resources below 130 $/kgU would exhaust these resources by around 2050. Even the inclusion of the inferred resources below 130 $/kgU would lead to exhaustion of resources by around 2070.
But as any Peak Oiler knows, ultimate reserve exhaustion is not the only important thing. Throughput is as important. Uranium production lends itself to a bottom-up approach to production forecasts probably better than oil.
Figure 6: History and forecast of uranium production based on reported resources. The smallest area covers 1,900 kt uranium which have the status of proved reserves while the data uncertainty increases towards the largest area based on 4,700 kt uranium which represents possible reserves.
So it looks like Peak Uranium for this reserve estimates arises before 2040 at the latest, even though reserves will still be available beyond 2100.
In Annex 9 we find a Country by Country Assessment of Future Production Profiles Based on Resource Restriction (According to NEA 2006). Essentially the same as before but with individual countries represented.
Figure A-9: Future production profile If all "Reasonably Assured Resources" and "Inferred Resources < 130 $/kg U" are producible, this roughly corresponds to "Possible Reserves".
In order to ensure the continuous operation of existing power plants, uranium production capacities must be increased considerably over the next few years well before the stocks areexhausted. Rising prices and vanishing stocks have led to a new wave of mine developments. Actually, various projects are in the planning and construction stage which could satisfy the projected demand if completed in time. Annex 7 lists the mines which are planned to be in operation by the indicated years according to the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA 2006). In total, about 20 kt/yr of additional production capacity are expected by 2010. This would increase the present capacity from about 50 kt/yr to 70 kt/yr, enough to meet the current demand once the stocks are exhausted. However, it is very likely that new mining projects experience cost overruns and time delays which raises doubts whether the production capacities can be extended in time. These problems can be observed e.g. at the development of the Cigar Lake project which is supposed to produce about 8 kt/yr U3O8 (equivalent to 6.8 ktU) starting in 2007. In october a severe water inflow occured wholly flooding the almost finished mine. At present it is very unclear whether the project can be developed further (more details are given in Annex 8). The black line represents the uranium demand of nuclear reactors which in 2005 amounted to 67 kt. The forecast shows the uranium demand until 2030 based on the forecast of the International Energy Agency in 2006 in its reference case (WEO 2006). Taking account of the uncertainty of the resource data it can be concluded that by between 2015-2030 an uranium supply gap will arise when stocks are exhausted and production cannot be increased as will be necessary to meet the rising demand. Later on production will decline again after a few years of adequate supply due to shrinking resources. Therefore it is very unlikely that beyond 2040 even the present nuclear capacity can still be supplied adequately. If not all of the reasonably assured and inferred resources can be converted into produced volumes, or if stocks turn out to be smaller than the estimated 210 kt U, then this gap will occur even earlier.
Now if you take into account that nuclear energy produces 16% of world electricity, and less than 5% primary energy supply, it seems impossible to me for nuclear energy with current technology to ever satisfy a big part of the world's energy demand.
This study may have flaws, but so far it is more convincing to me than the position of the nuclear industry, which regards Uranium as mineable without limits. If you believe some, we could mine it form the earth's crust, from sea water, ... or use breeders. And if all fails we have thorium. That is not serious. Being able to do it, even to technologically demonstrate it is not the same as doing it. We can extract gold from sea water too. While all those possibilities may be workable in the future, they could just as well not be viable. You cannot bet your energy future, the biggest investment society has to make, on such assertions. You may as well choose fusion.
There is a real posibility that Uranium supplies will not be sufficient for an expansion nuclear energy capacity and I am concerned that the reserve reporting practices could be too optimistic. Breeders, Thorium and such, whether workable or not are another matter not discussed here. I'll be glad if the members of the TOD community that evangelize nuclear fission step up to the challenge and criticize or outright debunk this study. That way, between all the highly educated people in the community we may even reach a conclusion on the Uranium resource question.
On a closing note, Raise The Hammer has posted an interview with Richard Heinberg, known for The Oil Depletion Protocol and his books The Party's Over and Powerdown, where he gives a hint about the second study of the Energy Working Group. Apparently they consider coal reserves to be as overestimated as Oil and Uranium reserves. Heinberg also states that he is tracking an independent Dutch study-in-progress reaching the same conclusions (for coal).
Ryan McGreal, Raise the Hammer: Coal is cheap and abundant. Other than the fact that it would increase CO2 production, can countries resist ramping up coal-to-liquids programs to replace declines in conventional oil?Miquel Torres has a degree in Physics from the University of Valencia, he currently lives in Germany and works in secondary education and in the field of energy investment.Richard Heinberg: Actually, future global coal production is routinely overestimated. That, at least, is the conclusion of an as yet unpublished study by the Energy Watch Group of Germany. That team has found that in the countries where coal reserves are well reported, the size of resources has been downgraded dramatically in recent years. There are other countries that have not changed reserves reports for decades, and it appears that those numbers are probably even more inflated than oil reserves numbers for OPEC.
The study concludes that global coal production will peak in 10 to 20 years. I'm tracking a Dutch study-in-progress where the researchers are using different criteria, and their preliminary results confirm the German study.
All of this has enormous implications for the climate debate (which is mostly about coal) as well as discussions about substituting coal-to-liquids for diminishing oil. Ultimately we are facing not just a liquid fuels crisis, but a general energy crisis.
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don't forget reddit and digg and the linkfarms!
Since this post uncritically reviews an article by a group of anti-nuclear activists and seems so at odds with what is known, without serious question, about the abundance of Uranium in the crust, it has the potential to seriously mislead people. This issue is one of the most important in the whole energy area, as oil and gas decline and we realize that coal cannot be the answer. I think TOD should try to get someone who is expert in this area to write a much more comprehensive and balanced article about the world Uranium and Thorium supply.
Well, this was a kind of response to just an aspect of the very much uncritical post by Martin Sevior.
That was part of the intention. To present this new paper to give the opportunity to discuss it.
It is not at odds. It only considers the reserves in the categories that can be most easily extracted.
The rest of the reserves not considered are labelled "Undiscovered Prognosticated and Speculative". A discussion of those would have to involve EROI factors as well as a bottom-up analysis of production through output potential. Those are more difficult and controversial.
Martin Sevoir is a physicist at the University of Melbourne, unconnected in any way with the nuclear industry. The website nuclearinfo, of which he is one of the main contributers, and from which most of his post here on TOD derives, was written by scientists unconnected with the nuclear industry under the rigours of peer review. Thus, it is misleading in the extreme to paint him as a propagandist for nuclear power and yourself as merely the other side of the coin.
As for peak uranium, two main facts give the lie to this contention:
1) The latest Red Book survey produced by the NEA and the IAEA gives 14 million tonnes of conventional resources in all reserve categories. This does not, however, include speculative resources in Australia which could conceivably double this figure.
2) Only $13 billion has been spent on uranium exploration in the last forty years. Compare this with the trillions spent on oil and then try to claim that all the mineable uranium has been found.
Yes, but............
He did make the point that oil reserves kept going up until the went inexorably down ;>) Why should we think that the Uranium industry is any different on that count?
Since oil isn't radioactive, maybe it is easier to find Uranium
He did make the point that oil reserves kept going up until the went inexorably down..
What is described follows the general principle of over-optimism followed by over-pessimism, if I may put it like that. For ex. I have money in the bank to refurbish a house, I over estimate my resources, don’t husband them properly, or plan well; when things start going west I suddenly say, no we can’t afford this, or that, or the other, we are broke, etc. Result: the house is not properly done.
Social psychology has shown, if one extrapolates from all kinds of studies on germane or tangential topics, that group-think, or group-processes (as contrasted with my illustrative individual example) can both amplify and mute such phenomena. In some cases, the group exagerates or polarises the individual opinions or planned actions (eg. risk taking: groups like it, individuals are more wary, which is quite comprehensible; or crowd behavior, everyone becomes infected with nutty zeal...) and in others it smoothes out the extremes to settle on a mean which is often very sensible and accurate (eg. bets; judicial decisions, etc. - the ‘hive’ mind.)
It is all a mystery.
Energy ‘reserves’ or energy future 'projections' are definetly subject to these processes. That is hardly STOP PRESS material I know..
I didn't say or suggest he is "connected with the nuclear industry". I said he has stated the position of the nuclear industry, which is true. Or can you find a single point of his article that either differs or disagrees with it?. You may conclude that what they call "their findings" prove the nuclear industry provides very good data and never lies. That is fine. But they sure are what the nuclear industry has to say.
And your two points don't change anything. The peak will probably be higher than their world production graph shows, as resources in the "Undiscovered" category are developed. And the tail will be less steep and will probably begin later. The paper points to a problem the nuclear industry will have if it ever expands beyond 80kt/year demand.
I would argue the reserves in the "Undiscovered" category will have a hard time to make up for the decline of the best, high grade reserves.
Nice. The "position of the nuclear industry" here also happens to be the "position of reality." Should we dig up a quack to claim up is down just to make sure that this "up is up" stuff doesn't go unchallenged? You've watched too much nightly news, not every issue has two equal sides that can be faced off in the sound-bite-athon.
Mr. Sevoir doesn't need to be directly connected to the nuclear industry for making a point out of the fact that he - and many other physicists - has nearly identical beliefs as the industry communicate.
I think it's a issue of self interest. Of course they want society to increase their budgets and become more interested in their fields of expertise.
At my faculty, those involved with nuclear very often have almost an copernician view of the possibilities within their field. They basically believe that the resource base is infinite and that all technical problems (e.g. waste) undoubtedly will be solved.
Sometimes it's hard to tell - did they teach econ classes in a previous life?
Martin Sevoir's speciality is particle physics, not nuclear. He, together with scientists from various specialities, conducted an impartial investigation into the issues surrounding nuclear power under peer-review.
They did indeed use data from the nuclear industry as this tends to be high quality, being independently audited or peer-reviewed. They also consider data from nuclear detractors (Storm/Smith), geologists (Ken Deffeyes) and the companies that actually mine the uranium (Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton).
The fact that a study with no hidden agenda weighed the evidence and concluded that the anti-nuclear arguments were lacking and that the nuclear industry's have substance is noteworthy and I'm glad you acknowledge it, Miquel.
Interesting, so global warming isn't happening then, right? After all, only those pesky climate scientists say it is, and of course their research funding under the extremely liberal Bush administration is linked to them finding critical environmental problems that will cripple the fossil fuel industry, right?
How about peak oil, clearly that isn't happening either, as only the geologists and scientists say it is. For every scientists who believes this, Exxon can show you 50 hairdressers who do not.
Science isn't a popularity contest. 99.99% of the people who know anything about the field concluded that the Reimann hypothesis was true about 100 years ago, and yet a mere vote isn't enough, they still are trying to show it.
Here's my idea. If some tenured professor who answers to nobody (even his students perhaps), and spent his life studying a field you haven't the foggiest clue about says a thing is true, and the rest of these scientists agree with him, and they put their research out there where you could review it if you had the skills and inclination, perhaps it is more prudent to believe that it is probably true than to believe that it must therefore be false.
The greens and the right wing could really learn from each other, well, already have I guess. The greens complain about the wingnuts dismissing every shred of scientific evidence with respec to global warming, while simultaniously doing exactly the same thing with respect to nuclear power. Funny how life works.
Pardon, I now see that my post omitted some statements.
The observations I shared with TOD, which I'm quite sure other physicists on TOD share, was mainly about the behaveor and the way they argue. There is no room for doubt and they uncritically postulate that all problems will be solved within the necessary timeframe.
It's a slighly unintelligent and counterproductive retoric because it repels many people who may potentially be in favour of nuclear.
A somewhat amusing comment BTW. You know, there is quite a lot of academics who have studied the scientific community which more or less conclude, loosely speaking, that science in fact is a popularity contest. Of course, there are other scholars which oppose such views. I guess what you has been told about science mainly depends on who's outnumbering who :)
But of course, the above scheme is not absolute. Many times minor positions gain ground on basis of the contents of the arguments.
It's easier for "science" to avoid being a popularity contest in some fields. I'm not quite convinced that e.g. predictive climate science is one of them. Too much politics and orthodoxy.
(I'd briefly like to mention that i favour all carbon reducing measures. I live in norway, love tax.)
Seriously, bring on the holocaust deniers, I mean we apparently don't have any standards of reasonability here. If an anti-nuke says anything, and it's not the equivalent of "My cat's breath smells like catfood." CHECK YOUR FACTS!!!!!
99% of the time they are outright lying, or just understand nothing about the subject. Nuclear power has problems, availability of Uranium is NOT one of them. It is a settled question, far more so than "Global warming is happening.", maybe about on the level of "Smoking causes cancer." or something similar.
I mean, are we seriously going to start talking about EROEI of a resource that is conservatively pegged at around 100:1 (except by the anti-nukes, who claim it's more like 1:100)?
Time to whip out the clue stick. Much (probably most) of that energy is spent enriching, which has nothing to do with the grade of the ore, so even with really terrible ore, the situation won't get much worse than its spectacularly good level right now. Nuclear always had better EROEI than any fossil fuel, and always will.
Eh, whatever, why do I even bother.
Please calm down.
It is impossible for most of us here at TOD to discern real sources accurately. We are not experts in net energy analysis with several years of experience in the field.
Let's see what some experts have to say about nuclear (old style plants) EROEI.
Charles Hall: Nuclear (total system, probably old style plants) - around 10:1. Apparently not enough data exists to make accurate estimates. The around 100:1 figures are from industry, not from peer-reviewed sources. Need more data.[1]
Us Dept of Energy: EROI near 16:1. NB! The figures from various sources are not necessarily comparable. Problems with boundary definition are significant. [2]
Nuclear Energy industry: 47:1 to 59:1. Haven't checked sources to original sources, but look reputable on the surface (to a layman). [3]
"Green eco nutters" as they are often called here: c. 4:1 or possible systemic energy sinks. Many completely disagree and I'm not sure they are experts, but they do try to address the problem of "very wide boundary" systems.[4]
My apologies to anyone I've paraphrased. Any possible mistakes are mine and not intentional.
So, based on the data I'm able to find, the assertion:
Does more disservice to your argument, as 100:1 is more likely to be wrong than 10:1 is. The 100:1 figure, is not afaik substantiated by studies.
Or if you think it is not, can you please try to cite some sources.
BTW, I think the argument here should be SYSTEM EROEI, not fuel EROEI. That is the one that matters to us as a society on the short-to-mid term, although it may be possible to move closer to the theoretical fuel EROEI by taking into use better technology on the long term (less energy wasted in input and output).
[1] Charles Hall, Presentation at ASPO-USA 2006
[2] US Dept. of Energy
[3] http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf11.html
[4] http://www.mnforsustain.org/nukpwr_tyner_g_net_energy_from_nuclear_power...
PS I'm not and do not pretend to play an expert on the issue. I could be dead wrong on this, but this is what I've come across myself.
Those are also my thoughts.
I commented on this below, but the pro-nuclear posters are (mostly) neither polite nor very constructive.
Part of the response to a study I mentioned was: "They also appear to indulge in some magical thinking when it comes to the co-extraction of copper at the Olympic Dam mine which is quite amusing.". Condescending comes to mind.
About "Green eco nutters". I give this example(not representative):
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Nuclear-Energy-Recovery-TimeOct00.htm)
They state an EROEI of 13, very different from the 4-5 you cite.
The other one is a "more recent Life-Cycle Energy Balance analysis by the university of Sydney". "Life-Cycle Energy Balance and Greenhouse Gas Emissions of Nuclear Energy in Australia". They are not anti-nuclear at all, and their conclusions do favor nuclear, but they calculate a EROEI of ~10. That is using Australia's present 0,15% ore grade average, an optimistic assumption for the future.
They are treated as incompetent and ignorant by the poster that aswered.
The argument I think, does just that. But you have to consider EROEI for the fuel cycle in the process.
It is very difficult as you say, to sort out reliable sources. But 100:1 doesn't look right. Such a dream EROI would have made Nuclear really cheap no matter the technology costs and all the world would be building nuclear plants. I guess we'll know for sure only when the good ores are depleted. In a free energy market it has not proved that it is as cheap as they say. And the argument that environmentalists have the power to stop nuclear power development is ridiculous. The societies with most green activism have the most nukes. And I am sure China et al. won't be stopped by those pesky greens. So when the real energy crisis starts, look at what those countries without "greens" do.
When one is refuting the same obvious half truths, statistical misrepresentations and outright lies over and over, polite manners are often in short supply.
Are we talking about energy payback of fuel? If we are, then solar and wind has an unmeasurably high energy return. Or are we changing the subject again?
Again, energy return of 10 on the fuel is absolutely ridiculous, because today most of the energy cost is enrichment via centrifuge, where we got ore from similar grades fifty years ago with gasseous diffusion, 50 times more energy intensive.
The notion that energy return on fuel or systems is directly tied with the price has been bandied about forever, but it just aint so. Its a bastardized simplification of economics.
Thank you Miquel (and Prof. Goose for posting). Great work.
I misread the 1980 production/price peak yesterday, my mistake.
But it is clear that the Uranium supply will not last for 'Millenia' as someone posted yesterday.
When I hear 'Millenia or Centuries', I can't help but to think there is a lack of understanding of the exponential function.
From the other side, if it we true, we are saved, let's build 1000s of reactors, change over with all that power to electric cars and trains, oooh...hydrogen.. and, oh maybe, 100 reactors just to power the space shots to launch the waste to venus. But alas, it is not so.
Nice fantasy though. It's almost as good as the ethanol one.
====================
It's all about population!
Then you cant think. Naive extrapolation of a function can lead to all sorts of nonsense results that have nothing to do with reality; When there are an estimated 120 trillion tons of fissionable material in the crust, the bottleneck stops being fuel and becomes waste heat rejection.
Even in case we could extract uranium from the Earth's crust with a meaningful EROI, do you really think it could be extracted at a high enough rate to be significant? like in the 50-100 kt/year range? Could you please calculate what an amount of soil/mountain you would have to process at that ore grade in order to achieve that through output?. Once you've done that, share it with us and then we'll talk again about those "120 trillion tons of fissionable material".
Oh easily. We remove mountaintops for a small amount of coal, and thats with a much smaller energy gain than you would get if you extracted the uranium and thorium from the coal instead of just burning it.
Oh come on, you got your degree in physics and can't even do arithmetic yourself? Fine...
1 metric tonne of U or Th per GW/year.
About 12-15 ppm of U and Th in the crust.
You need about 60-90 thousand tons per GW year.
Compare that to the average coal plant of several million tons of coal.
from http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2323
- A typical 1 GW Nuclear reactor requires around 200 tonnes of natural Uranium per year
- Uranium has an average crustal abundance of about 2.7 Parts Per Million
Result: 74 million tonnes.
That is a fine way to discuss things.
When you're talking about extracting beyond 1 trillion tons, we enter breeder reactor regimes, which consumes 1 ton of uranium/thorium per GW/year. Given theres about 1 trillion tons of uranium with ore concentrations above 20ppm I'd say its fair to say that we'll have developed some decent breeder/converter reactor before this fuel is used up. (At about 10million tons per GW/year, similar to coal power plants)
Fissionable material includes thorium which is roughly 10-12 ppm, which you seemed to have ignored.
Now if we dont use breeder regimes we certainly will use something more efficient than light water reactors, at the very least CANDU with MOX fuel, wich stretch fuel reserves by 4 times or more.
Your challenge was basic arithmetic, and waiting for me to set it up for you is either an illustration of complete ignorance on the very subject you just wrote an article on or a rhetorical challenge response tool for setting up your argument. If you have your ducks in a row, present your numbers rather than play this game of fools and politicians.
We are talking uranium here. If you want to discuss CANDU, MOX, or breeders, there is another set of issues with them, and they are not a technology we are currently using on a big scale. The costs per KWh wouldn't be the same with them.
I am not discounting those technologies at all. What I say is, If uranium reserves are not enough for a nuclear expansion, you have to clearly say that future nuclear means breeders, MOX, whatever.
For CANDU and MOX it nearly is! And thats with the old PUREX aqueous techniques from the 50s. Your challenge was on the 120 trillion tons of fissionable material which includes thorium. Now if you want to change the subject...
If you dont want to talk about that, fine, we'll restrict ourselves to the trillion tons of fissionable uranium ores with concentrations above 20ppm, and its still quite manageable... for LWR once through regimes with 20000 1GW reactors its still enough fuel for a quarter million years, and with historical energy demand growth trends its still enough to last a number of centuries.
By that point its fair to surmise we'll get decent breeder reactor regimes or cheap solar, and then the maximum power for earth is around 10^16 watts because any larger than the solar flux and you have serious climate control issues unless you're sticking giant radiators up into space. More likely you just start moving industry off planet at this point.
Your numbers seem off. I'm not sure where you got the "1 metric tonne of U or Th per GW/year" figure. If we just consider conventional fission reactors, the numbers I'm seeing are 20 - 50 kW per kg of uranium. Using an average of 35 kW per kg of Uranium, I get 30 tons of fissionable uranium per GW of energy. Uranium is present in soil at 2 - 4 parts per million. Of this, 0.7% is fissionable U-235, which has to be enriched to 5 - 20% to be used as fuel. This increases the number to something like 20,000 tons of soil per GW. For a 100 GW power plant, that would be 2,000,000 tons of soil per year?
I can't speak for Dezakin, but I think he's referring not to a generalized amount of Uranium in the soil, but specific places where Uranium does make up 20ppm - maybe in the same areas we currently mine coal? I do not know, but I'm reading between the lines of his overwrought rhetoric and thinking that must be referring to such places where Uranium is somewhat more common but not yet at a density that we would currently consider "conventional".
He does seem to have forgotten about the 0.6% being fissionable.
No, .7% is fissile. All of uranium and thorium is fissionable.
Whenever someone refers to U and Th they are speaking about breeder reactor regimes. I answered this in the post above.
If we are refering only to LWR once through regimes there are an estimated 1 trillion tons of uranium with energy returns in the range of coal, minable at 20ppm and greater. For a molten salt breeder reactor you need 1 ton of fuel (fertile or fissile) per GW year, and this has a correspondingly huge effect on energy return from ores such that ordinary crust has a rather huge energy return... You can mine the whole crust for its entire 120 trillion tons.
But at that point, its entirely academic. Its a moot issue before you even get to breeder reactor regimes.
Ahh..I see.
So can we continue growing for the next millenia or not?
Do the calculations and get back to me, cause you may just saved the world.
Best of luck
If you dont believe figures from resource estimates, why should I even talk to you? You'll chose what you want to believe and engage in a shouting contest. Is this the way of it or are you prepared to listen?
We can continue to raise energy production on earth untill it approaches the solar flux of 10^16 watts. With 120 trillion tons of uranium and thorium in converter reactor regimes that will last about 16 million years. After that further growth must be in space.
Does this smarmy bit of nonsense make you feel better about yourself? All the figures are here and its basic arithmetic.
"We can continue to raise energy production on earth untill it approaches the solar flux of 10^16 watts. With 120 trillion tons of uranium and thorium in converter reactor regimes that will last about 16 million years. After that further growth must be in space."
There are huge assumptions in this statement. It simplifies and takes a narrow view on things. How would such an endeavor affect global ecosystems? Human societies? If we managed to capture the entire solar irradiance falling on the Earth, as has been suggested about solar power elsewhere, that would leave nothing for vegetation, wouldn't it (save waste heat)? And if nuclear power achieved a near-equivalent energy output to total solar irradiance on the Earth, there'd be some serious warming issues from all the waste heat (after all, the sun would still be shining on the Earth, so the nukes would be adding considerably). Forget about fossil fuels being a problem. Doesn't sound like a world I would want to live in.
Ah, hell, I guess the world will be turned into a pile of slag one way or the other. Nuclear war, overrun with nuclear power, or that pesky sun getting ever brighter. All’s well that ends nuclear.
Anyway, it seems to me that a good exploration of nuclear power would integrate many important aspects. For instance, take an initial build-up of, say, enough nuclear plants to supply the world with 85 million BOE per day (or whatever would be required to eliminate all FF use), with a subsequent indefinite ramping up of, say, a modest 1% a year to allow for some constant economic growth. How would this effect the world’s ecosystems, and the human condition, among other things? What would my community look like in 2025, 2050, 2075 and 2100? Let me know what my child, and grandchildren will see. Now that would be interesting, and meaningful.
-best,
Wolf
The only point of talking about 120 trillion tons of U and Th is to lay to rest this idea that we could run out of fission fuel in the short to medium term. That idea is completely at odds with reality.
With that behind us, now we need to consider how we use this effectively limitless energy resource to address peak oil and global warming. Get used to the idea that fission power is not going away and is likely to be the mainstay of the world's energy future.
No, it just illustrates that the notion that there isn't enough fuel for nuclear power just doesnt have legs. If you want to take it into the far future, fine and well, but that changes the subject.
Sure if we got everything. But photosynthesis is less than 1% efficient and doesnt cover a huge percentage of the surface of the earth. Not our problem anyways, not for a good century or more... however long it takes for energy demand to grow 1000 fold.
You take it too seriously. Its an illustration that nuclear power isn't bound by fuel constraints. Its bound by waste heat rejection on any timeframe worth considering. I'd consider 10^16 watts the upper desirable bound for waste heat rejection without doing deliberate climate engineering.
Well that would require roughly 10000 1GW plants. With A 1% growth rate per year it would be about 30000 1GW plants at the end of the century.
Well the environmental impact would be significantly less than using coal.
"Well that would require roughly 10000 1GW plants. With A 1% growth rate per year it would be about 30000 1GW plants at the end of the century."
Hmmm... According to the US Census 2000, there were 19,355 incorporated cities in the US. So, even at the end of the century, with approximately 30,000 nuke plants operating world-wide, there wouldn't even be one nukie-wookie* per community (using the US Census definition of "city" across the gamut of urban centers world-wide). That seems a tolerable density of nuclear facilities, but I'm still not sure of the entire ramifications of such an endeavor. :o)
-best,
Wolf
* Maybe if y'all painted them pink, or friendly pastel colors, people wouldn't mind them so much. ;o)
Photosynthesis reflects 3% of radiation back into space, all the rest of the energy is either used by the plants or converted into heat, which is necessary to keep those fluids fluid. That's 97% efficiency.
That's true. But why use "better than coal" as a sufficient standard?
Given the fact that coal is about to be staring us in the face, do you have a better and perhaps more importantly "reasonably" easier standard to adhere to?
Don't get me wrong, I think Solar and Wind and tidal power have a big role to fill, one that could reduce the need for nuclear even, but I don't think Solar, Wind and Tidal can fill 100% of the bill, and thus Nuclear is going to have a role.... The is unless we want to keep burning FF on a grand scale.
Personally I think if we can reduce FF usage down to very niche endeavors were the advantages of having FF as a fuel outweigh having electricity as fuel, then we will be ok from an environmental standpoint. An example of what I'm talking about would be temporary high energy endeavors such as launching rockets, or exploring remote areas such as Antarctica where running electric power lines would be impractal. You might throw in mass shipping via Freighters into that mix, unless you want to make commercial nuclear reactors available on ships.
Try again when you learn something about thermodynamics. The carnot efficiency is less than 1%. Heat isn't work.
I do not understand why people find such good news so upsetting.
"Nuclear..is the only alternative energy source beside coal providing the type of electricity production necessary for the current electric grid model: big, base-load capable power plants. If that role is fulfilled, the current electricity production system can continue beyond Peak Oil, and even expand to provide the energy necessary for electrified transport. If it falls short, a new energy model is needed."
In a narrow, technical sense this could be considered accurate, but it's misleading. Wind and solar could provide what we need, and they could be accommodated by a grid that is somewhat more flexible than today's grid. This would only require expansion of existing elements of today's grid, such as long-distance transmission, demand management, storage, low cost peak generation, etc.
Actually, I think I'd have to argue that the proposition above is false. While nuclear is reliable, it is inflexible. France, for instance, realistically works because it is part of a larger grid that can absorb it's night time surplus and provide daytime peak capacity: probably nuclear can cost-effectively provide a maximum of very roughly 40% of a grid's kwhrs.
In this way it is very similar to wind and solar, and in fact the very same strategies that are needed by nuclear will also work for wind & solar. A good example is the Ludington, MI pumped storage plant, installed 30 years ago to handle the demand/supply mismatch problem for nearby nuclear capacity.
In fact, a viable non-fossil fuel grid would probably need 3 sources of generation, in the following very rough estimates of proportion: 45% baseload from wind & nuclear, 40% peak from solar and hydro, and 15% backup/peak capacity from biomass (biomass electrical generation is infinitely more efficient than liquid biofuels). These would be assisted by non-generating methods as mentioned above: long-distance transmission, demand management, storage, low cost peak generation, etc.
You may argue that Wind and Solar energy will be enough to cover all our energy needs, but we would need a grid that is more than "somewhat" more flexible than today's grid.
That is not to say it is impossible or much more expensive, it is just a different grid structure that needs to be worked out. Whether it is a completely decentralized model, an on-supply (instead of our on-demand model), an EUMED saharian concentrated solar electricity import model or whatever. Without those big, 1000MW power plants we would have to change our distribution grid.
Part of the point of my post is to reassure people that multiple alternatives to fossil fuels exist, and that renewables are up to the job even if nuclear is not. It sounds to me like you agree.
"we would need a grid that is more than "somewhat" more flexible than today's grid. That is not to say it is impossible or much more expensive"
First, it sounds like you agree that this is entirely feasible, and at a reasonable cost - that's the important thing.
Second, what makes you think an entirely different grid structure is needed?
For instance, adding long distance transmission (LDT) is a straightforward extension of the existing grid. Additional LDT would make the grid more robust, and reduce the variation of wind by increasing geographic diversity and reducing the ratio of variance to mean production.
Pumped storage is an old technology - have you taken a look at the Ludington, MI, US installation? It's cheap, it's proven, it's scalable.
Demand management is also very old. A very simple form of it is used universally for Industrial/Commercial billing, and has pushed a great deal of consumption to the night time. It works well, and it can be made much more sophisticated. The most obvious use is with plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles (PHEV's). As PHEV's expand they will provide an enormous synergy with variable sources like wind and solar.
Wind is perfectly consistent with a utility-managed grid. Don't forget, all generation sources have some variability, and consumption has enormous variation. Utilities have always had to deal with annoyingly unpredictable customers. The variation of wind is just more of the same.
Don't forget, solar is much better correlated with consumption than nuclear. That correlation is more important, and more valuable than the flat reliability of nuclear. Central CSP plants output curves (like those proposed for Africa) would look very nicely matched with peak consumption to a utility manager. Finally, the existing grid can and does accomodate roof-top PV.
Geographic diversity would reduce the relative variation of wind enormously. PHEV charging and pumped storage would soak up the remaining diurnal (within 24 hour) variation. Cheap backup generation would deal nicely with the very occasional protracted trough in generation.
All of this is very familiar to existing utility managers. Would they prefer the simplicity of nuclear? Sure. They'd also prefer customers that have flat demand curves, but they have very few of them, and pretty soon they'll be dealing with more and more variation on the supply side. A bit more work to manage, but not a whole different animal.
Does that make sense to you? Do you have sources that discuss the idea of a need for an entirely different grid? I've certainly seen much discussion of the need for a more intelligent grid with much more decentralized generation, but I see that as an evolutionary change, not a whole different species of animal.
Wind power as baseload power?
I would regard wind power as supplemental power for saving water in the hydro dams, fuel in fossil power plants and providing poor people with cheap hot water and power to clean clothes every other day.
Wind power could also be used for intermittent industrial processes such as production of hydrogen for nitrogen fertilizer production, heavy oil upgrading and other chemical synthesis. This could also be a use for night time nuclear power, in a society with lots of nuclear power and hourely rates metal will be melted and washing machines started during nighttime.
One problem with this threads article is that it concludes that uranium supplies are smaller at higher prices. It ought to be the other way around for geological reasons. Uranium is not about finding smaller and smaller geological lottery winners where everything happed to be perfect for creating and capturing an odd liquid substance. Uranium is a metal where lower grade ores are much more plentifull then higher grades.
It can be considered baseload at some 20%. See "Security assessment of future UK electricity scenarios" by the Tyndall Center.
It does not. Resources untill $80 include also those below $40. What you mean is "doubling the price doesn't more than double the reserves". Lower grade ores are included in the Undiscovered category. That wouldn't be a conclusion of the paper anyway, as it is the categories the nuclear industry uses.
"It can be considered baseload at some 20%."
The UK is much smaller than the US, and even there they find that with sufficient geographic diversity (within the UK) that wind variation is greatly reduced.
Further expansion is very doable, but it would have some increasing costs for integration. The optimum generation mix would have a wide variety of sources, so as to not push any one source past the point where marginal costs start to rise quickly than you would reasonably want. My estimate of that point, for wind, is around 35%. AlanfromfromBigEasy estimates that point at 53%.
It cant ever be baseload. You need dispatchable power for it to count. With either nuclear or wind you need some dispatchable power (hydro or natural gas) for peaking, but wind by itself just cant do baseload.
Well, not really. Some background:
1) Wind isn't the only generation source that has variance. In fact, all sources do. Most of it (maintenance, refueling, etc) can be scheduled, but not all. Nuclear can be tripped very suddenly - it doesn't happen all that often, but when it does the plant is offline for more than one day. The size of nuclear plants, and the duration of outages amplifies the impact of the variance, such that a small market like Ireland, for instance, has ruled out nuclear.
The key is managing the variance, and reducing it to tolerable levels. As discussed, this can be done in many ways, and in much the same way as is done to match nuclear's flat output with the variation in demand.
2) As you note, nuclear isn't really dispatchable. Wind and nuclear are similar in that they are capital intensive, and have very little marginal cost of generation. That means that utility managers/system operators will always maximize their output. "Dispatching" of these sources really consists of wasting some of their potential output at times of low demand when there is no place to put it.
3) "Baseload" itself is a bit of a misconception. Humans live in the light, and in effect have evolved to use solar energy. "Natural" night time energy use is very low. A large % of what we call "baseload" is Industrial/Commercial
demand which has been shifted from daytime to night time by very simple Demand Side Management (DSM): charging higher rates, or "demand charges" for peak daytime usage.
DSM could be easily expanded. The first, obvious place to start is eliminating flat pricing for residential. A second is going to dynamic pricing, to reflect variable costs.
"negawatts" in the form of reduced demand as a result of DSM is also very cheap. PHEV storage will be cost-justified by the vehicle owner, and reduced rates for scheduled charging will be a bonus.
4) Capacity is very cheap, if you don't have to use it often. The cost of diesel and natural gas generators is almost entirely in the fuel.
This is one big reason pumped storage hasn't been more widely used: until very recently natural gas peak capacity has been dirt cheap, and so relatively large-scale, long-term projects couldn't be justified. They often had to be paired with other large projects, like nuclear plants.
5) Biomass is a cost-effective (though not quite as cheap as coal), and scalable form of generation. It currently provides more electrical generation than wind. Biomass generation is much, much more efficient, cost-effective and E-ROI justified than liquid biofuels, and shouldn't be confused with them. Biomass provides energy storage, and could provide cost-effective seasonal or periodic backup.
So, the upshot of the above is that wind doesn't have to be 100% reliable, just reliable enough.
Does that help?
This sort of is besides the point. Nuclear is considered baseload where wind isnt because for 90%+ of the time it can supply the load of the minimum demand, where wind isnt reliable enough for that.
Thats not saying wind can't supply the grid if you have enough dispatchable power, but this isn't free. I sure hope wind can continue to grow, but I just cant stand it when the apparent success of wind as a small component of the grid is leveraged by some to imply that nuclear is unnecissary. We haven't seen any country manage to run the bulk of their electric grid on wind yet and I suspect that the costs of wind is much higher than many proponents suggest, though I honestly hope it becomes less expensive.
The real problem with wind is when its used as an excuse to avoid nuclear where its necissary (Germany for example) and then leading to a buildup in coal power to keep the lights on (Germany for example).
Exactly.
" Nuclear is considered baseload where wind isnt because for 90%+ of the time it can supply the load of the minimum demand, where wind isnt reliable enough for that."
And my point is that this is not true. Please re-read my post. Wind is indeed usable for this.
"Thats not saying wind can't supply the grid if you have enough dispatchable power, but this isn't free."
I agree that some backup would be needed. OTOH, such backup can be extremely cheap if it isn't used often. Again, I just finished discussing this in detail, and I'm afraid we'll go around in circles if you don't read it carefully and deal with the individual ideas there.
"We haven't seen any country manage to run the bulk of their electric grid on wind yet "
And the same is true for nuclear. Nuclear has been around longer, and has had the chance to grow more, it's true. This means that we have somewhat more experience with larger market penetrations of nuclear, but the technical characteristics of individual wind turbines are very well known. I agree that there is some uncertainty about system level behavior of large wind market penetrations, but we should keep in mind that utilities have been managing very large amounts of demand variation for a long time, and the methods for doing so are pretty well known. Applying them to production variation is technically straightforward, and in fact has been done with nuclear for load-following for a very long time - see Ludington, MI, USA.
You might object that France has a high % of nuclear, but in fact France only succeeds because it is part of a larger grid. It sells surplus to other countries like Switzerland, which conserves it's hydro production and in effect sells it back during the daytime peak (at a premium). As a practical matter the % of nuclear in this case is very roughly 25% of the grid, which is not far from the US, and not far from the 20% market level at which there is consensus that wind would be practical.
The German example is interesting. I would argue that wind feasibility may indeed make a difference, but that it's important to recognize the depth and source of European objections to nuclear. It's not really about environmental problems like waste. Really, it's about the connection with weapons production and proliferation - that's a different thing, and I think they would argue more important than any of the other objections. Europeans have a much more intimate experience with war than Americans...
Dispatchable power isn't extremely cheap, just less expensive than baseload on a per mw rating and more expensive on a per mw/hr rating. Both nuclear and wind need dispatchable power but because wind behaves like negative load you need far more dispatchable power than nuclear.
Its rather unclear that wind is competitive anywhere where there isn't allready a large surplus of dispatchable power.
Its been the case for decades that every time nuclear has been blocked for one reason or another the replacement has been largely coal and natural gas. Optimisitic assumptions for renewables encourage more of this tomfoolery.
I read all of your defense of wind, and it sounds rather optimistic. I'm sure wind will play a larger role in 30 years but I suspect the largest producer of electricity will still be coal and the second largest nuclear.
This is very wrong; Really think about this. Proliferation and weapons production is something everyone is concerned about except their own.
"Dispatchable power isn't extremely cheap, just less expensive than baseload on a per mw rating and more expensive on a per mw/hr rating. "
My understanding is that gas turbines can cost about $300 per MW, and diesel even less. That seems pretty cheap to me, compared to very roughly $1,000-2,000 for coal and nuclear. Yes, it may be more expensive per MWhr (if it's used infrequently, or fuel is expensive), but again, that doesn't matter that much if you don't generate that many MWhrs from that source.
"because wind behaves like negative load you need far more dispatchable power than nuclear"
I would disagree. Nuclear needs quite a lot of peak power (at least an amount equal to the nuclear capacity, and probably twice as much), and it would need even more if not for demand management (high daytime I/C rates moving consumption to night-time). Demand side management (DSM)can be thought of as a cheap form of dispatchable power, and nuclear needs quite a lot of it. All in all, I'd say nuclear needs a ratio of at least 3 kw of equivalent dispatchable power (peak power + DSM) for every 1 kw of nuclear. If you disagree, would you like to quantify your thesis?
"Its rather unclear that wind is competitive anywhere where there isn't allready a large surplus of dispatchable power."
Hmmm. It's certainly hard to compete against coal, which would cost at least twice as much if all of it's external costs were included. It's not hard to compete against nat gas lately, and I'd estimate most wind is cheaper than nat gas. If you disagree, would you like to provide your estimated costs for each form of generation, as I have done previously?
I'd say any form of generation would have a hard time functioning alone, especially nuclear, as I argued above.
"Its been the case for decades that every time nuclear has been blocked for one reason or another the replacement has been largely coal and natural gas. "
Sure. The problems with coal & nat gas weren't fully recognized before, and there weren't really alternatives. That's not the case now. What did you think of the NEI data on 2007 planned generation? For convenience, here it is again:
Check page 8 of www.nei.org/documents/Energy%20Markets%20Report.pdf
keeping in mind that wind has less than a 2 year planning window, so only 2007 is reasonably accurate for wind.
You'll see that wind is already 44% of planned new generation in the US (adjusted for capacity factor). It could easily provide all new generation in 5 years, and start replacing coal & nat gas after that.
"I read all of your defense of wind, and it sounds rather optimistic. "
I understand you feel that way, but we don't seem to be making headway understanding why. I've given a fair amount of specific info. Could you be more specific as to why you disagree?
"Proliferation and weapons production is something everyone is concerned about except their own."
Sure. We already know that countries that have nuclear weapons, or want them, have or are pursuing nuclear power. I think that the Germans and Swedes feel that's exactly the problem: the two are connected. You seem to be agreeing with them.
Yes well, here in Sweden we are very worried that our massive nuclear power program will result in us aquiring nuclear weapons, or that the Germans will.
We also warned for a very long time that the massive Israeli push for civilian nuclear power would result in them getting nuclear weapons.
Not.
Look, it is entirely possible to have civilian power without weapons as Sweden and Germany shows while having weapons without power is also possible, as Israel shows.
The fact of the matter is that every civilized country will aquire nuclear weapons if they believe it to be in their interest. The only way to stop it is to show them it is not in their interest. For this we have both stick and carrot.
The US successfully gave Sweden a carrot and ended our nuclear weapons and dual use program through a promise to put us under their nuclear weapons umbrella and supply us with cheap enriched uranium. This meant we left our domestic heavy water dual use program and went for wholly civilian light water reactors.
Iran should be offered a deal on these lines.
"here in Sweden we are very worried that our massive nuclear power program will result in us aquiring nuclear weapons"
As you note later, clearly at one time this was indeed a very big concern.
I cite Sweden and Germany because a large % of the population in those countries would like to see nuclear power end. I am discussing the reasons for that.
"The fact of the matter is that every civilized country will aquire nuclear weapons if they believe it to be in their interest. "
If the technology isn't easily available, the situation is very different. If Iran didn't have a nuclear program weapons would be harder to acquire. India & Pakistan wouldn't have weapons if they hadn't had a nuclear power program.
Regimes and their motivations change. Heck, 25 years ago Saddam Hussein was our bosom buddy, and Rumsfeld was selling weapons to Iran. Five years before that Iran started their nuclear power program under the Shah, and no one was concerned. If there had been no nuclear program for the ayatollahs to use, there would be much less concern now.
The Christian Science Monitor recently wrote about nuclear power vs proliferation. The CSM has been long considered one of the top 3 US newspapers for international coverage (along with the WSJ and NYT). Here's what they have to say:
"...the huge increases in energy demand anticipated across the developing world over the next two decades, coupled with a growing urgency about global warming, have nuclear nonproliferation experts focused on Iran's case for broader and even more unsettling reasons. If a sense of entitlement to nuclear power and the fuel that makes it possible is allowed to take root, they say, the world soon could find itself with dozens of nuclear countries with the means to switch from peaceful energy production to building a nuclear arsenal virtually overnight."
See the rest here http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0227/p01s01-wogi.htm
Yes, because we had a dual use program and were indeed developing weapons. Now we have a wholly civilian program and no weapons, as we do not believe we need them. If we felt we needed them we would build them.
You are misinformed. Swedes are the most pro-nuclear people in the world. More than 80 % support nuclear power.
You don't even need a reactor to build weapons. An enrichment facility will be well enough. And we can't stop any civilized country from aquiring either weapons or civilian power. Everyone who wants it will get it, no matter if we have nuclear power or not.
It's pretty sad if that's the best international coverage in the US, as the paper is pretty crappy.
The thing is that already today, all civilized countries, with nuclear power or not, can rather swiftly become weapon states.
Dual use reactors will speed that up, but entirely civilian ones won't.
"Swedes are the most pro-nuclear people in the world. More than 80 % support nuclear power."
I think that's a bit strong. OTOH, I guess Swedish public opinion has shifted more towards nuclear lately. On the 3rd hand, there are indeed a lot of Europeans that oppose nuclear power.
"An enrichment facility will be well enough."
Sure. But how do you defend enrichment with no power plants? A nuclear power program is a powerful figleaf. Even now there are people who defend Iran's nuclear program as having peaceful aims.
"we can't stop any civilized country from aquiring either weapons or civilian power. Everyone who wants it will get it, no matter if we have nuclear power or not."
On the one hand, I agree that the best defense against proliferation is to remove the desire for weapons. OTOH, If what you say about access to weapons is true, then I see a very bleak future, indeed. It alarms me that some nuclear advocates seem to think that widespread nuclear weapons are no big deal. I've even seen one advocate (Rod Adams) suggest that every nation should have them, to promote peace. I think that's a good example of either one's economic interest making one lose one's objectivity, or just irrationality, period.
"It's pretty sad if that's the best international coverage in the US...."
hmmm. Well, it certainly used to be. Maybe it's gone downhill. What makes you feel that way? Have you read the paper for a while, or are you judging just from that article? What english language paper would you suggest?
It was probably a mistake to point to the paper's credentials. The more important question is, what did you think of the article?
" all civilized countries, with nuclear power or not, can rather swiftly become weapon states."
That seems too strong, but even if we stipulate the point, the caveat "all civilized countries" is a big one. Would you include countries at the same level as Pakistan and N. Korea in that group?
To the surprise of our Swedish MSM public opinion has continued to be positive to nuclear power after the Forsmark incident and numerous negative articles about nuclear power.
In february 33% wanted to build new nuclear power if it is needed, 44% wanted to keep what we have and 20% wanted to phase out nuclear power. www.temo.se
Sometimes it is quite funny. As when a transformer burned at the Ringhals nuclear powerplant and the web vote below a very nuclear negative article topped by a picture of a nuclear powerplant with a black smoke plume had more votes for building new nuclear powerplants then for getting rid of nuclear power. No statistical significance but hopefully it made the journalist think some new thoughts.
I suspect you mean per KW, but you do have to spend a significant amount on the fuel when your swing load is high. This isn't free either. You could go for pumped hydro which has a higher cost per installed KW, but it all comes down to extra cost for intermittency.
Excuse me? First you're disagreeing with an obvious statement, that nuclear needs less dispatchable backup than wind, with lots of assumptions and no numbers and then say if I disagree I better put my numbers up?
Only where surplus dispatchable power is free. Where you have lots of hydro or natural gas plants that were operating as baseload.
I think you're optimism is getting not only the better of you but this sort of optimism leads to consequences like Germany phasing out nuclear power and installing 26 new coal power plants.
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/mar2007/gb20070321_923592.htm
I'll review this in some depth and provide technical comments later.
In the meantime, the top Google item for the study's author came back as:
"Hans-Josef Fell, 2001 Nuclear-Free Future Solutions Award Recipient"
(http://www.nuclear-free.com/english/fell.htm)
While this admittedly ad hominem point is not definitive it should suggest caution. The man had his mind made up before he started the study and intended to produce the result it did. That is, this is not a disinterested study - the conclusion came first.
Likewise, I am transparently pro-nuclear and have devoted my working career to using nuclear power to produce clean, commercial electricity. I would add that before I made that life commitment, I investigated this very point about resources and found a substantial body of work that shows the opposite conclusion - there is an stupendious amount of energy to be had from uranium and thorium.
Now, back to work building new nukes - more comments later.
Joe Somsel wrote:
Hopefully we haven't just seen a confession to being some form of mechanical zombie.
If so, you are likely to get treated like a vending machine. We'll give you a kick to get something real out of you.
(Not anti-nuke. Anti-PR. Contra faith-based zombies)
That would be great.
All that body of work you found showing the opposite comes from the nuclear industry. The whole text I quote from you applies even more to the nuclear industry, who doesn't have an excellent track record of making accurate statements. Of would you say their ethics are stronger that the other members of the EWG advisory group, like World Watch Institute for example?. That said you make a valid point. Renewable Energy associations will try to show that the forms of energy they promote are enough for our energy needs, and Nuclear energy is not feasible. Either you decide whom you will always believe, or you remain vigilant (sceptical?) of any claim and try to dissect it.
I see sometimes exaggerated criticism comming from the environmentalists camp. But I also see blind acceptance on the part of the pro-nuclear side of any statement made by the nuclear industry.
Wasn't Hubbert's original paper entitled "Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels" and didn't he work for an oil company?
Sorry, your assertion that "blind acceptance on the part of the pro-nuclear side of any statement made by the nuclear industry" does not apply to my case. Remember, I'm one of the guys who has to deliver.
I think we agree that any thinking citizen needs to remain skeptical and probative of most claims and assertions they receive on energy.
That said, one of my former positions was to be press technical liaison for a utility company during an emergency at our nuke. Our experience with the press was that any detail could and would be distorted to make us look bad - incompentent, evil, or both. I've seen very few direct public statements by the leaders of our industry that I didn't know to be rooted in solid fact/science/engineering or legitimate, sincere belief (for projections.) However, media accounts of those statements are regularly spun and distorted.
What are now commercially viable proven reserves are relatively small. What is vast are low grade sources.
The first point that is not really addressed is how little of the cost of producing electricity from nukes the fuel cost reprents. Someone on this board can probably post the answer, but my understanding is that it is a very small fraction.
In a crunch, as long as the EROI is positive, lower and lower grade deposits can be mined.
I also have a great deal of difficulty with the greater than $130 per kilo resources indicated in the posting. We are already at this sort of price point aren't we? And why isn't this category vastly larger than the high grade stuff? Consider what occurred with gold mining in Nevada. Small stringers of high grade. Mountains of rock with minute specks of gold.
Resources are finite, but the case appears to have been vastly overstated in this keypost.
"In a crunch, as long as the EROI is positive, lower and lower grade deposits can be mined."
This is a fallacy, oft-repeated by defenders of low eroi activities such as liquid fuel production from bio-mass (sugar cane ethanol excepted), but a fallacy nonetheless.
As EROI declines, the investment available for the reproduction of the civilization declines, the civilization declines and its capacity to turn low grade deposits into a highly ordered energy resources evaporates.
Rust never sleeps.
Because it demands such a complex level of social organization, nuclear energy is particularly vulnerable to declining eroi.
How fast must a civilization regrow its components to continue to tick?
The answer must depend on how long the components last and what life people find worth living to continue to have children and then be able to eductae them and the children to find suitable niches where they can work and renew.
There ought to be a vast difference between "fuck the customer after the warranty period" to "built with maintainability and to be easy to recycle", between "dont worry about the cracs, it takes several years for the rust to seep visibly" and "built for 120 years as long as you maintain the surfaces". Both societies are nice to live in but one can be run in a lower steady state withouth deteriorating.
Finding meaning in life is harder. But people raised very good engineers and so on when living conditions were a lot poorer. Most of the "stuff" around most of us rich people is not needed to raise children and the slide-rule generation built perfectly ok nuclear reactors. Most of the reactors running today are built on their ideas.
But if things do get tough it will be hard to get from here to what people where happy with 50 years ago withouth serious depression and so on. On the bright side, having lots of electricity makes it easier to maintain an effluent lifestle and areas who have it a lot worse will probably provide a contrast making some losses of cheap oil stuff more bearbale. I would surely like to se a few more nuclear reactors built over here in Sweden, preferably togeather with restarting nuclear supply industries.
I dont know the EROEI that future societies will be run on but I enjoy very long life lenghts in what gets built as long as it isent in fast technological progress such as computers, for such is recycleability enough.
"having lots of electricity makes it easier to maintain an effluent lifestle"
Hard to argue with this point.
"the slide-rule generation built perfectly ok nuclear reactors."
My point exactly. Just take a look at EROI in the era of slide rules.
Thats a pretty sparse point. It depends who is doing the accounting.
And no matter how you cut it, nuclear power has such a staggeringly huge return on energy that EROI arguments are sort of pointless this side of a thousand years.
"And no matter how you cut it, nuclear power has such a staggeringly huge return on energy that EROI arguments are sort of pointless this side of a thousand years."
You of course need to believe this, or the whole house of cards tumbles. You also need to go with a carefully selected parameters to determine EROI.
People might want to consider the difficulty Iran is having in its attempt to build a 'self sustaining nuclear industry' to get some idea of what the parameters should be in EROI calculations for a nuclear industry.
As for the relative eroi of the energy systems in the countries building nukes in the 1950's and '60's, and today, I would be most happy to read any analysis you might dig up which attempts to show that the EROI is the same or higher today.
So because Iran has access to such huge amounts of cheap and high EROEI energy they can't create a domestic nuclear fuel cycle?
Getting nuclear power to work well is not about energy, and especially not about fossil energy. It's about technology, skilled workers and engineers, and clever financing.
"It's about technology, skilled workers and engineers, and clever financing."
This part is certainly true. Just make sure you and your fellow travellers include it in your EROI analyses. And please try to give a little thought to the matter of the amount of sustained investment that is required to create and maintain these conditions.
The amount of sustained investment needed to run a nuclear power program is comparably tiny, after the initial investments are made, and are usually financed by a tax on nuclear electricity.
The initial investments are not very big either. At 1000 MW per 1 million people (pretty average Western consumption*) and a conservative $2000 per kW it ends up at $18 billion for Sweden, while our annual GDP is somewhere around $350 billion. If you spread the investments over 10, 20 or 30 years they will hardly be noticeable.
Electricity production is just such a tiny albeit vital part of the economy.
* Swedish power consumption is about twice the Western average as our economy is disproportionatley focused at heavy electricity intensive industry. Hence the 1000 MW per 1 million people supplies only half of our power needs, with hydro power supplying the rest.
Oh come off it. Iran is going for dual use all the way, and their self sustaining nuclear industry is running into issues with enrichment. If they wanted to be fully self sustaining they could have gone for CANDU or even RBMK reactors without having any issues with enrichment whatsoever, but at the cost of not having readily weaponisable enriched uranium and no chance for a domestic nuclear submarine program.
Enrichment in the 50's and 60's was almost entirely gasseous diffusion which required roughly 50 times more energy than modern centrifuge enrichment plants, and enrichment is roughly half of the fuel cost today for LWR regimes.
yes it is.
they also neglect the fact that the times are different then they were then.
back then one could take the larger amount of time needed to draft board something like a nuclear plant using slide rules etc.
this was a time of abundance, the time it took was cheap in both energy and money.
but times change and as we take our first steps into a resource constrained world, overpopulated with people, time becomes our enemy. as each month and year tick by the situation gets /worse/ not better. then at one point, it would just cost too much in time, energy, and money(of any form) to do certain things.
What does slide-rules have to do with EROEI?
It's not like you need lots of energy to build a reactor.
We did some rough calculations earlier and got it to something like 125.000-250.000 boe for a 1000 MW plant.
Interesting:
1 barrel of oil equivalent = 6.12 x 10^9 J
1 ton of TNT = 4.189 x 10^9 J
A barrel of oil equivalent represents more energy than detonating a ton of TNT!
Now, taking 125,000 BOE for a 1,000 MW plant:
(6.12 x 10^9 J) * (125,000 BOE) = 7.65 x 10^14 J, or 765 TJ.
The energy yield of the Hiroshima atomic bomb was somewhere around 63 TJ. Therefore, to build a 1,000 MW nuclear power plant, it requires an amount of energy that, if delivered in a specific manner, could destroy 14 cities. Maybe 28. Hardly a small amount of energy. Each power plant is a megaproject!
Just playing with numbers. And it is a reminder of the times we live in: On a human scale, the amount of energy flowing through global civilization is tremendous. Maybe better termed, “mind-boggling.”
-best,
Wolf
That 765 TJ you calculate is typically spent over a 3-5 year period while the reactor is being built. In its first full year of operation, by contrast, a modern 1000 MW LWR working at 90% capacity will produce:
(1 x 10^9 J)*3600*24*365*0.90 = 28.4 x 10^15 J, or 28,400 TJ.
Thus, the energy spent in building the plant equals 2.7% of the first year energy production and 0.04% of the energy generated in the plant's 60 year lifespan.
Truly mind-boggling.
I think you made some calculation error. It usually takes 3-6 months to repay all the energy expended to build the reactor.
The error then is either in your original figure for construction (125,000 BOE) or Graywulffe's conversion factor (1 barrel of oil equivalent = 6.12 x 10^9 J), which lead to the 765 TJ value. My calculation of the energy produced by a 1GW reactor in a year is easily checkable and, what's more, correct.
In any event, my point was that what Graywulffe thinks is a large figure is a piddling little one compared to the lifetime generation of a nuclear plant. This is true whether one takes 765 TJ as the construction energy or 14,200 TJ (six months of generation).
Aye, it just makes the amount of energy we use seem monumental! If it were all muscle power, how many people would that be? This should be front-page news every day... "World-wide today, X-amount (a really huge number) of energy was again successfully produced from a myriad sources and distributed along one of the most complex and massive networks ever devised..."
Anyway, I suspect, then, that the 125,000 to 250,000 BOE for building a nuclear plant might be low. My figures seem ok. (I checked yours, too :o). It adds a bit to my point, but doesn't take away from yours.
-best,
Wolf
They built perfectly ok nuclear reactors in an era that used much less energy. The engineers and mechnical workers, builders etc used less kWh personally and at the workplace. Then came computers, air conditioning and much higher productivity in both usefull and useless things. The energy input for the thoughts to get things right using a slide-rule or a computer is still food.
In what way where it important that this eras oil wells needed less equipment?
"In what way [is] it important that this era's oil wells needed less equipment?"
It is important because the low investment cost to provide a continuing supply of oil freed investment for the construction, maintenance and expansion of the infrastructure, including advanced research labs, that provided the organizational and resource base for the nuclear industry, among others.
I'm sorry toil, but you just noticed the funniest slip I've read in a long time. Thanks for making sure no one missed it--I nearly fell out of my chair.
It's not really fair. Magnus is working in a second language. I live much of my time in a second language and make equally hilarious mispronunciations and mispellings.
I figured it was his second language which is why I apologized. The the truth contained in that nugget is still priceless. It's perfect!
I've made worse mistakes in my first language. I remember years ago, in 1984, when PC's were just becoming the rage. I was a dBase programmer and also setup and managed our network. My manager, a devout Mormon, brought all of the company bigwigs over for a tour of our facility with a focus on the network and custom programs. As I explained our network to all of these stuffed shirts, I explained that the women in the office had "a single, large hard d_ck that they all shared..."
Never been so embarrassed in my life, and English is my 1st language. 'Nuf said.
It looks to me like any energy source that we get out of the ground has a peak associated with it; apparently the distant future of energy belongs to the renewables, wind, solar and waves.
I wonder about the comments regarding Thorium. The author assumes that using Thorium in reactors is somehow an unproven concept. I worked on Thorium fuelled reactors in the early 1970s. It certainly wasn't considered very special at that time. I left the nuclear industry in 1979 partially because I didn't believe that the decision-makers were acting responsibly regarding waste and safety issues. I still believe that to be true today. Yet we have to be careful distinguishing between fact and wishful thinking both on the positive and the negative side.
One other point: Remember that the "useful" part of all that Uranium ore, the U235, is only about .6% of the ore. If you need to enrich it to, say, 10% to fuel a reactor you are going to throw away 96% of what you mine. What an environmental mess!
I also worked on a successful thorium reactor project in the 1970's. Thorium fuel can be "retrofitted" into some existing pressurized water reactors, which could accelerate its usefulness at mitigating a uranium-235 shortage. It would take some serious political commitment because the fuel handling and reprocessing are different than with current uranium fuels. However, the amount of thorium fuel potentially available dwarfs the amount of available U-235 by at least a couple orders of magnitude.
I didn't say thorium is not viable. I limited the post to uranium because that is a different problem.
If it is proven that usable uranium is plentiful, a proven technology can be immediately deployed. We can leverage the huge R&D costs nuclear energy has had. It not, you have to develop a new nuclear cycle. That competes with other alternative energy sources, that have not yet got the chance to be developed with the huge resources nuclear energy enjoyed between 1950-1970. I think that belongs to another discussion.
This is misleading. Th232 is nearly as useful as U238 as a fuel in light water reactors, and only slightly more common. To fully utilize Th232, breeder reactor regimes are required.
I asked a geophysicist involved with the Olympic Dam mine about thorium. Along with rare earths it is abundant in the tailings after processing the brannerite ore. It is put to one side and not used as backfill. So at a guess I'd say there is at least 100,000 tonnes of thorium compounds in powder already at the surface.
Great summary Miquel, thaks a lot. I have peeked into the EWG pdf and it looks really informative, I will read it in detail.
I would like to add a great graph from the report that you haven't posted.
My conclusion, don't ever trust forecast from the agencies!
:-)
Yes, that looks uncunningly like the way I expect IEA's oil production forecasts will look in the future (The graph is about nuclear capacity though, which is not the same as Uranium resource).
There are other interesting things in the paper, like the second point they study: nuclear capacity construction. But the post would have been much too long.
Can someone explain to a nonscientist how "breeder reactors" fit into this picture.
I have a vague idea that they are bad because they involve plutononium...
I have a vague idea that they are miraculous because they "breed" fuel, which sounds like a ridiculous "perpetual motion" concept (so I know I don't understand that part...)
I know that as an environmentalist I should be even more opposed to them than to conventional reactors... presumably because of the plutonium issue.
Do they in some sense derive additional energy from the total fuel cycle of uranium that is not available if we confine ourselves to conventional light water uranium nuclear reactors?
Wikipedia has all this...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
but I must admit I'm not enlightened on these issues after reading it.
Thanks!
It sounds as if we can enhance the total energy value of mined uranium by about 1/3 by using breeders, if we are willing to take the risk of plutonium production and storage.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor
It doesn't seem like a good idea, but is that the deal?
Oregon7,
That is a great link. I had not read the Wikipedia writeup. The total energy value with breeders can be orders of magnitude greater because the amount of fissile (burnable) uranium in natural uranium is less than 1%. Uranium-238 (the other 99+%) can be bred to plutonium-239 and thorium-232 can be bred to uranium-233. Both plutonium-239 and uranium-233 are burnable in reactors. The difficulty with uranium-238 breeders is that they use liquid sodium coolant, which can be tricky to work with. Also, plutonium-239 is a good bomb material. There is less proliferation risk and less long-lived waste with the thorium fuel cycle, but the spent fuel is hotter (more radioactive) to handle.
Thanks!
OK, but what does this mean from Wikipedia?
"Historically, in order to be called a breeder, a reactor must be specifically designed to create more fissile material than it consumes."
If we were talking about coal, it would mean that I tossed a lump of coal in the fire, and I got energy plus another lump of coal to burn again, which of course is impossible.
So assuming that is not the case what does "produce more than it consumes" mean?
And what it the percent increase in energy that can be derived from uranium when it is cycled through a breeder reactor? (I'm uncomfortable with the word "burn")
I gather from "orders of magnitude" that you are saying at least 100 times more energy than is available by processing uranium through a breeder than in a conventional reactor?
Why?
I'm asking these questions because I want to understand how much the supply of uranium matters if we change the technology we use to produce energy from it.
Breeding fuel means making U-238 or thorium usefull as a reactor fuel. It is like burning a lump of coal with a lump of grey rock in a magic boiler that turns the grey rock into coal, then you burn that coal with a new lump of grey rock and so on.
Breeders can use all of the mined uranium and now only the small U-235 part plus what is bred into plutonium and then fissioned within the fuel pellet. This makes granite rock into a viable EROEI fuel source.
...so how much more energy can I get out of a ton of uranium ore if I run it through a breeder reactor?
And is that the right question?
Its close, but not quite right. You can get approximately 100 times more energy out of a ton of uranium ore through a molten salt fluid fuel reactor than a light water reactor with the once through fuel cycle. But you can do fun things with numbers to change it around. If you include thorium ore as your fuel resource then you can get 400-500 times as much energy out of a ton of ore because theres 3 to 4 times as much thorium fuel.
However if you reprocess for uranium extraction, you can get over twice as much fuel from a light water reactor as without. If you spend more money/energy on enrichment cycles you can double your efficiency with a light water reactor. If you use MOX fuel you can double your efficiency with a LWR. If you use a heavy water reactor you get a much higher efficiency because you dont have any enrichment losses and heavy water reactors have a higher breeding ratio (they arent called breeders because they have a breeding ratio of around .8 rather than above 1) so you convert more of the U238 to fuel.
We still use LWR with the once through fuel cycle though because uranium is still so damned cheap.
Oops. Sorry I underestimated. A molten salt reactor will be 200 times as efficient as a LWR with once through, and 800-1000 times as efficient as a LWR when you include thorium in the resource base.
Actually, you don't have to use molten salt reactors. A combination of CANDU heavy water reactors and retrofitted light water reactors would also work. The molten salt reactor provides a more elegant method for reprocessing-in-place. The molten salt reactor also needs more development.
Its an illustration that there are many ways to cut the pie. MSRs will give you the biggest slice so far.
If you get into speculative future technology I suppose you could use accelerator driven systems with very high energy neutrons to fission lead in a plasma core reactor.
About 60(!) times as much energy.
Nice analogy Magnus!
The critical thing is that there is a difference between fissile material (materials that can fission by capturing a zero energy neutron, usable as fuel in a thermal reactor) and fissionable material (that needs to capture a high energy neutron to fission). Additionally, a material is termed fertile if it can be converted to a fissile material.
In a breeder reactor running on the Uranium cycle, fissionable U-238 is converted into fissile Pu-239. That's how a breeder can create more fuel than it uses itself.
Natural uranium contains about 0.7% U-235, and basically the rest being U-238. So with non-breeding reactors, we can use only 0.7 % of all the uranium we mine, whereas by using breeders we can use all the uranium. Hence about two orders of magnitude more energy from the fuel we mine. Well, in practice current reactors breed slightly, I think the breeding ratio is about 0.3 (meaning about 30% of the energy generated comes from Pu fission rather than U-235).
OK, forgive the really naive question but how is this possible?
It sounds like a "perpetual motion" scheme... start with a little bit of fuel... get more fuel than you use... from which you get even more fuel... and so on.... when and why does it stop?
That can't be right!
It doesn't. A breeder reactor converts useless U238 or Th232 into nuclear fuel such as Pu239 or U233. It stops when you run out of U238 or Th232.
Oregon7: when a high energy neutron, ejected as a result of a U235 fission event, is 'captured' by a U238 atom's nucleus, the nucleus's arrangement becomes unstable [I don't know why] and two of the neutrons change to protons.
U238 + neutron => U239 => P239 + 2 electrons ?
Note that the numbers 238 and 239 are the combined count of the protons and neutrons in the nuclei. Also note that U hs number 92 on the chemical table [92 protons] and Pu is 94 [protons].
This all involves the strong and weak nuclear forces and complex energy balances which again I don't know.
Almost. U238 + neutron -> U U239 (nuclear strong force)
Then it undergoes beta decay because Np239 has a lower energy state than U239. The halflife depends on the energy hill that has to be overcome to tunnel over the lip (a bad analogy I know) and the full ab initio equations are sort of impossible (well computationally at least) to do right now so we just measure half lives.
U239 -> Np239 + electron + electron antineutrino
Np239 -> Pu239 + electron + electron antineutrino
To make it clearer: it is not a perpetual motion machine.
In a "regular" reactor there are plenty of neutrons that don't find a useful life but get absorbed by useless (for energy production) material. All the interesting designs talked about above simply find better uses for those neutrons. Eventually you do run out of fuel.
So there is no magical get-out-of-thermodynamics-jail-free card at play here.
My first thoughts when I read this were "which (political) party is this Hanz-Josef chap a member of"
No surprise then that he's a member of an anti nuclear group.
Talk about starting with a conclusion and then finding the facts which are convenient.
And besides its irrelevant anyway. If we really wanted sustainable* nuclear power then we'd simply restart the old molten salt thorium reactor research programmes that were abandoned in the 60s.
*by sustainable I mean provide 70% of the worlds electrical output for more than 1000 years.
Andy
Miquel,
Can you give us info on what's behind the categories like $40/kg, $80/kg etc?
i.e. Can $/kg be tied to a certain grade of ore like you discussed at the top of the article? I realize there are many other factors involved in mining.
Trouble is cost estimates seem very slippery. But maybe they are stable in that business (eg. unlike the oil sands).
Those categories are used by the nuclear industry itself. The reserve numbers used in the paper are the same as in the pro-nuclear post by Martin Sevior excluding "undiscovered resources". http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2323
Thorium seems to be the key going forward. The question is whether new technologies can come on line at a useful rate as uranium becomes scarce.
Here's a useful fact sheet from World Nuclear Association.
Let's try that again:
World Nuclear Association.
Thanks, Miquel.
As many, including myself, have said at this website, nuclear power is a at best a fantasy of the technophile. For a carpenter, every problem is a nail and the solution is a hammer. No less true for those who work in the nuke industry.
Because the scientific tendency is to isolate whatever you are examining in order to get clear results, you will see here time and time again factual statements and hopeful tech-talk that in and of themselves appear to be a cause for celebration.
For instance, the comments that state something to the effect, "We just got to figure out how to do this nuclear thing efficiently and then we can keep on with business as usual." For anyone not in the know, business as usual means growth.
A smarter, more holistic view of the problem and the proffered solutions will show the rather less than spectacular level of critical thinking that scientists willfully subject themselves to. They feel this is a GOOD thing. LOL. Poor sad, world-destroying fools.
The point of our existence is not to continue at all costs a destructive lifestyle. Save the cars! Keep on growing!! We need more people!!! If one were to perform a deep examination of the energy flows on this planet, along the same lines as used in the book "Cradle to Cradle," you would see that this road ends in vast human suffering and, perhaps, the destruction of the planet.
I know there are people out there who will jump on me saying, "We cannot see the future. We cannot plan on such an extended timeline."
The truth is, we could. The truth is individuals are only gifted with an innate biological drive to survive the next few days, but we have used our gift for critical thinking to short circuit harmful short-term thinking many, many times, practically every moment of the day. Also impled in that critique is the idea that some future technology will sweep in from the wings and save us from ourselves. If you believe this, you have not been listening, understanding or thinking critically. Unlimited growth is IMPOSSIBLE. Should we develop fusion, titanium oxide hydrogen production, and hydrogen from algae, the population will still collapse.
The ad hominem people who point and snicker at the "doomer" probably believe in nuclear energy too cheap to meter, that they will be going to heaven when they die, that if they went to war, they would survive.
I got news technophile, you're going to die anyway. Even if we all zoom off into a Star Trek episode complete with Tribbles, you will complete the closed loop. My only question is will we allow the technophiles to ruin a perfectly good planet in pursuit of a faulty line of thinking. Will we?
Probably. Science is our religion. The priests have spoken. You must obey.
I dont feel sorry for wanting to live and extending that wish to a larger group then immediate family and friends.
For survival and to leave the world in a better shape then when I entered it I prefer to use technology and hope that I can make some kind of difference.
Other people can use other skills but talking people into wishing for cultural and perhaps personal suicide do not seem like helping people. (And no I dont count consuming less plastic crap and car km:s as cultural suicide. )
His point has entirely eluded you.
I suggest you locate a copy of "The Entropy Law and the Economic Process", Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Harvard University Press, 1971. Georgescu-Roegen was according to Nobel laureate Paul Samualson, 'a scholar's scholar', so give yourself sometime for the ideas to penetrate. If they do, you will come to understand what Cherenkov is saying.
We have put ourselves in a position where the need to steal from the future is inescapable in the present, and where every act of theft is defended as better than an alternative of misery and starvation today.
Your statement:
"For survival and to leave the world in a better shape then when I entered it I prefer to use technology and hope that I can make some kind of difference."
amounts to a platitude. We have rather to discuss what each acts steals from the future and which acts are most likely to put us on a path of longer term sustainability.
I don't believe that people are irrationaly suspicious of nuclear power. I think there is an intuitive sense that what you advocates of nuclear are pushing, not just this or that reactor, but the whole social order, is unsustainable, and undesirable.
Bah. Talk about platitudes...
Some of us are not anti-civilization Marxists who want to run the "social order" on its head, but just prefer to find the best way to sustain our high quality of life for our children and grand children (etc), not to mention ourselves.
And no, a SUV or badly insulated house does not count as quality of life, so don't try to put words in my mouth.
I didn't know that the majority of people are anti-civilisation marxists, but I'm glad that some of us aren't.
If you want to "find the best way to sustain our high quality of life", then I suggest you begin to consider the ramifications of an economy that is based on an ever increasing portion of investment being directed to net energy production.
I push the social order of technological society that uses the scientific method for gathering knowledge. I would like to have that in a society that respect individuals, have a rule of law and where gifted individuals can have a career that makes them productive. Preferably a secular democracy.
Will such a society destroy its surroundings or find some near steady state and excist for hundreds and then thosands of years? Such a state is of course impossible if physical consumption goes exponential but I dont get why exponential growth is a must for maintaining a technological society.
And yes I did not realy answer on the post, I took it as an example of a line of reasonoing that bugs me.
We may be thankful for a summary of a major report, and not blame the messenger.
The $/kg costs do not appear to make sense as cutoffs. The energy yield from any chemical reaction is a few electron volts per atom involved. The energy yield from a nuclear reaction is reckoned in millions of electron volts per atom. Net result: each atom of U gives you 10^6 or so more energy than an atom of coal (well, C). Now, U is considerably more massive than C or H, so you lose a factor of 20 or 200 because of the mass per atom, but if you were willing to pay as many dollars/megajoule for uranium as for oil you could pay $100,000 (order of magnitude*) per kg and be happy about it.
*order of magnitude. My number might want an extra zero attached. However, a reactor is rather more expensive than a coal furnace. Other processing costs are also higher. Nonetheless, once upon a time, close to a half-century ago, I recall seeing an analysis of extracting U from New Hampshire granite, including reduction to elements of all components, which claimed to show what we would now call a large positive EROI (a phrase not then in use to my memory).
I believe further analysis is needed on the alleged Uranium shortage. My impression is that the cost of the U itself as opposed to the reactor rod manufacture is currently minimal for atomic reactor expenses.
What a rambling crock of half made nonarguments. 'We can extract gold from sea water too' is a good analogy if we know the cost of extracting the gold and can run the numbers on using that gold to run power plants. And we can! Fusion is a terrible analogy because its never been technically demonstrated let alone economically analyzed. Nuclear fission power succeeds on being economically competitive with very high fuel prices and low grade ores. Its almost as if you never learned anything about ore distribution.
This post is ignorant misapplication of various resource measurment methodologies that completely ignores low grade fuels and fuel price as a component of nuclear power price. Uranium is still so cheap that its cheaper to mine fresh stuff than to do uranium extraction from spent fuel, let alone plutonium extraction for MOX.
In addition it ignores using heavy water reactors (CANDU) which have higher breeding ratios without enrichment losses. This is before we even touch the issue of breeder/converter reactors.
Note: the link to the ODP interview with Richard Heinberg (excerpted in the article) points to an older interview. The correct link is:
http://www.raisethehammer.org/article/526/
The nuclear industry is not monolithic. It includes government-supported nuclear workers who commonly, and in my opinion misleadingly talk up the scarcity of uranium in hopes of persuading their governments to fund breeder reactor experiments. Geologists investigate how much uranium is in the Earth purely out of curiosity --
The midpoint of "(0.3 - 0.4) × 10^17 kg", in notation this forum will probably find more familiar, is 35 trillion tonnes. Half of it is as near the surface, proportionally, as the skin of an apple.
Torres' discussion tendentiously leaves out the effect on price and production that the megatons-to-megawatts dilution of bomb-grade 235-U from the former Soviet Union had.
--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.html: oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes
The paper has nothing to do with talking "up the scarcity of uranium in hopes of persuading their governments to fund breeder reactor experiments."
Please reread it or look at the production profile graph for the world. I think it is made clear the effects uranium stockpiles (mostly from former Soviet Union) have had.
In a few years people will be clamouring for nuclear when clean coal and renewables fail to deliver on the scale they want.
Assume we have several decades of uranium. Then a
timeline for a 'nuclear bridge' might be
2007-2020 rapid oil depletion and GW with widespread conflict
2020-2040 flat out nuclear build
major build of 'clean' but low EROEI tech
major rethink on sustainable population
post 2040 2 billion people living in clean-tech
communities insulated from environmental extremes.
I think the analogy of uranium mining to oil extraction is stupendously misleading.
The main difference between rock mining and oil:
Miners typically only claim 'proven' resources of perhaps 10 years out because proving these resources requires additional drilling which costs money. This is the same issue of "reserve growth" as in oil in SEC regulated oil companies (intentionally conservative reporting).
The physical difference between oil and uranium extraction and exploration is very large---with oil you can infer resources quite remotely and significantly; and moreover you can extract them from a vast area with a small number of wells.
Hence, you can really 'run out of feasible extractable oil' over a large area, i.e. oil field depletion.
It's much less likely to happen with uranium, which is just there, not formed by specific bio/geological processes. Note that the countries with large resources of uranium (Canada, Russia, US, Kazakhstan, etc) have just plain large surface areas.
Exploration for uranium has been miniscule compared to the enormous effort in petroleum. Just one 10th of the petroleum industry's effort would likely result in major increases in uranium resources.
Uranium has been extremely cheap until 2 or 3 years ago because of a near total lack of new exploration and production expansion due to recycling of Russian bomb uranium. As that is used up there was a price jump due to logistical problems. Now, there are many new startup explorers finding new uranium. (note I am invested in some).
The nuclear 'waste' contains still plenty of uranium and fissile plutonium which isn't even really used because uranium is so cheap.
Now, once the uranium exploration and mining industry is as big and mature as petroleum, and output starts to decline despite increasing new investment (like oil), then I may accept that 'peak uranium' is imminent.
I think it's nothing remotely at that point, and of course there is the more abundant thorium and fast-neutron fuel cycles which could greatly multiply the utility of mined uranium by an order of magnitude.
And if all fails we have thorium. That is not serious. Being able to do it, even to technologically demonstrate it is not the same as doing it. We can extract gold from sea water too. While all those possibilities may be workable in the future, they could just as well not be viable.
Why does technologically demonstrating it bears no relation to success?
There are no big technical barriers to throrium reactors; I think India is building them already. Thorium mining isn't rocket science either. We have already produced breeder reactors. This isn't anything remotely like presuming to have solved fusion.
Simply put there isn't any economic incentive now to pursue them, because the cost of uranium is so cheap relative to the operating & capital costs of reactors (5%-10% of costs??), which nonetheless can supply large amounts of baseline power competitively.
This scenario is not remotely compatible with imminent permanent uranium depletion.
There is good evidence that we are approaching serious limits in petroleum. None really with uranium; problems will be entirely logistical.
If I recall correctly, fuel is about 5 % of nuclear power costs, broken down equally in uranium, enrichment and fuel element manufacture.
That's why reserves are classified with such cautious names as "Reasonably Assured Resources", "Inferred Resources (IR)" and "Undiscovered Resources Prognosticated" and "Undiscovered Resources Speculative"
That is fully taken into account.
That is nowhere stated (disregard the title, a misunderstanding). Peak would be 2040 with the reserves considered. Some of the reserves in the category Undiscovered will be developed, of course, and I think the tail will be much bigger (possibly with a plateau) than in the graph. But even if the peak is much later and higher, bear in mind that that is for current production. So a peak with double the hight would still wouldn't allow nuclear to expand it's share a lot.
You bring again breeders and thorium. I agree they are not in the same "future technology" category as nuclear fusion. What I tried to say was that their requirements, problems, and costs are not the same as for the current uranium cycle. Those would have to be analysed in much greater detail.
http://www.energybulletin.net/9248.html
Note that in the 1980 study they didn't take into account price nor EROI. They just find 300 times as much uranium dropping the ore grade by a factor of 10.
You also left an interesting response:
That is of course a straw man. Bringing up Chernobyl is just childish or ignorant as it can't happen in anything but a RBMK reactor, and no one will ever build one of those again.
And renewable systems are of course not "perfectly safe". There is no such thing as safe energy, just risk minimized energy. The EU study ExternE takes into account all external risks and converts them into costs. Everything from noise to emissions to radiation and risk of meltdown. Nuclear was among the very safest, safer than solar power for example. Wind came in a bit ahead of nuclear though, if I recall correctly. But then it is very hard to quantify the cost of spoiling the country side.
And price, well... Dropping the ore grade by factor 10 should make uranium about 10 times as expensive. 10 times as expensive uranium will be shrugged of by the nuclear indsutry. It doesn't really matter that much when it comes to the price of electricity, especially when we consider how the price of fossil fuels will develop in the future.
And then, you suddenly have 300 times as much uranium.
"Dropping the ore grade by factor 10 should make uranium about 10 times as expensive."
This is a fine example of wishful thinking.
In an example, where nuclear energy remained a small part of the overall energy mix, in which the eroi of the other energy types wasn't declining, which was characterised by advances in mining and milling technology, and in which environmental costs continued to be externalised, then you might just get lucky and keep costs in this proportion. In the real world expect a much higher cost.
Why should costs rise more than ten times?
You need to mine, mill, enrich and transport 10 units instead of 1. This says that costs rise ten times as you need to do the same work only ten times over. Off course, 10 times is to get 300 times as much uranium. Getting only 100 times more uranium would need maybe... 5 times low ore grade? 10 times as much uranium... maybe 3 times lower ore grade?
Anyway, it's unlikely that costs will even rise as much as ore grade goes down as processing larger amounts of materials should give economies of scale which would partly offset the increased costs.
On top of this comes likely gradual improvements in mining technology.
While no one will build an RBMK reactor without a containment again, it might be premature to suggest that the RBMK style is dead forever (though it probably is). It has the advantage of not requiring any isotope separation anywhere in the nuclear fuel cycle... which is why this unstable design was selected in the first place.
The Chernobyl RBMK had quite a lot else wrong with it though before you get to the positive void coefficient instability.
It does? Perhaps it could run on unenriched uranium, but as far as I know it never did.
--- G. R. L. Cowan, former hydrogen-energy fan
http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan/Paper_for_11th_CHC.html :oxygen expands around boron fire, car goes
Its true they dont run on enriched uranium. Currently operating RBMKs run on 2.4% enriched uranium up from 2% to improve safety. They didn't run on unenriched uranium but they could if modified a bit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RBMK
...
Dropping the ore grade 10 times makes it more than 10 times more expensive. It doesn't scale linearly (though their effect on the whole nuclear cycle scales less than linear).
There are different EROI calculations. The nuclear industry saying something like 93. Some greens (for example http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Nuclear-Energy-Recovery-TimeOct00.htm)say more like 13 with current ore grades.
The Storm van Leeuwen and Smith report on the EROI of the whole nuclear energy chain has been very controversial and discredited by the nuclear industry (it says ores below 0.02 have a negative EROI). But this paper cites "a more recent Life-Cycle Energy Balance analysis by the university of Sydney". They are not anti-nuclear at all, and they do criticize Storm and Smith. They use different values but they still conclude a EROI of 10. Even lower than the greens mentioned assume. And that is using Australia's present 0,15% ore grade average, an optimistic assumption.
What paper? Theres no quantitative data in the link you cite.
An energy return of 10 based on current ore grades is ridiculous, for the simple reason that it was obviously higher than this when the whole world used gasseous diffusion for enrichment with similar ore bodies.
read here.
http://www.stormsmith.nl/
Storm/smith has repeatedly been taken apart as a giant set of half truths, statistical misrepresentations, and outright lies.
If nothing else, the reliance on gasseous diffusion for enrichment is the most telling, when well over 65% of the enriched uranium is done by centrifuge enrichment today, and in a decade or two, none of it will be done by gasseous diffusion.
From the University of Sydney study:
i.e. the one order of magnitude overestimate for Ranger and the two orders for Rossing. Yet they still uncritically use van Leeuwen and Smith's formulas for the energy cost of mining uranium!
The University of Sydney study rather lazily uses the Storm/Smith report as both its alpha and omega, as evidenced by the fact that van Leeuwen's name appears 71 times. Paying such credence to such a discredited report is puzzling, but amply explains their equally erroneous conclusions. They also appear to indulge in some magical thinking when it comes to the co-extraction of copper at the Olympic Dam mine which is quite amusing.
A question I would wonder about is the impact of peak oil on the production of very dilute ore.
I presume big earth-moving vehicles powered by diesel are used to collect the ore now. A substitute vehicle would need to be created, or an assured supply of diesel fuel would be needed, unless this portion was to be done manually.
I would imagine peak oil could be an issue at other points in production also. For example, transportation of the fuel from the mine to the reactor would presumably require roads and some form of trucks, or would need a working railroad system. It would also be helpful to have law and order, and a working financial system.
If any of these things fail, there could be problems producing the ore that is available.
The amount of diesel used by uranium mining is positively tiny. And we will still produce, what, maybe 15-20 mbpd in 50 years...
If you really like you can electrify parts of the mining process.
You mean like electric draglines and shovels?
http://www.minepro.com/equipment/shovels.html
And you can allways synthesize diesel fuel for transport. This is not a significant component of the energy cost of nuclear power in any way.
The fossil fuel inputs to the Olympic Dam mine are given in this dated link http://hsecreport.bhpbilliton.com/wmc/2004/performance/odo/data/index.htm
As already mentioned the onsite electrolytic copper is an additional energy drain. Add to that the need for a desal plant and pipeline from the coast 300km away.If a nuke plant is built on the coast both the water supply and electricity for the mining machinery can be easily covered as well as contributing a surplus to the national grid.
Remember the next 10 years will be less oil and more coal.
Shush. Don't raise these annoying questions. These guys are having enough trouble raising money even when government assumes all the risks.
Also consider what the 70's oil shock did to the nuclear industry in the US, the peak of nuclear plant orders was in 1972 (35) and then collapsed to zero. Oil shocks (and those were temporary) brought higher interest ratios, recession, and less electricity consumption.
Current reactors were build when energy was plenty and cheap.
Can you predict interest rates over 40 years?
Yes. For a certain project that is very easy. Just loan the money (preferably with a government loan guarantee) at a fixed rate with 40 years of amortization.
Current reactors where built when energy was expensive, in 1970-1985.
"Bringing up Chernobyl is just childish or ignorant as it can't happen in anything but a RBMK reactor..."
The problem is that other claims have been made by nuclear proponents that are demonstrably false -- starting with the infamous "to cheap to meter" statement by, I think, Lilienthal. The Soviet engineers weren't idiots -- if it was so obvious in advance that the reactor type they were building was dangerous, how did it get built? What was the problem at Three Mile Island?
"too cheap to meter" was from Lewis L. Strauss, and he was doing speculation into the far future; It was not a promise made by engineers.
Well, when they designed it I assume they never imagined that a crew would deliberately remove all safety systems and cooling water, wait for xenon poisoning to take over and let a skeleton crew take over, remove manual control rods and then stick them in just when the reactor got too hot.
And having a graphite tipped control rod shows that the engineers were idiots, or at least not qualified to do nuclear engineering.
Dezakin commented the Chernobyl stuff, I'll just add that no RBMK would ever have been allowed to be constructed for civilian use in a Western country.
I believe the Americans had RBMK'ish reactors at their military site at Hanford, to manufacture weapons plutonium.
I guess this was why Edward Teller(?) initially opposed nuclear power, as he didn't want those beasts scattered all over the countryside.
As a side note, the RBMK design was also dual use, a power reactor which could be modified to generate weapons plutonium, for some insane reason. It was pushed by the Soviet military while the Soviet engineers pushed instead the good VVER design, much like our PWR's. There are about a dosen RBMK's left and about twice as many VVER's, with more under construction. All new Russian reactors will be VVER's.
Now to the main subject, Three Mile Island. That incident taught us several things.
1) The systems that protected nuclear reactors from meltdown where not at all as safe as had been thought. Especially man-machine interaction was bad. After TMI a global program to correct these errors was launched, and this pretty much gave birth to the academic discipline of man machine interaction. Due to the work inspired by the TMI incident nuclear reactors are about 100-1000 times as unlikely to suffer meltdowns today as compared to then.
2) When a meltdown happens, the effects where rather smaller than had been thought. At TMI no one was killed, no one was even hurt, and the tiny amount of vented radioactivity was so small that it posed a threat to no one. For example, fleeing Harrisburg by airplane would have given you a higher dosage than staying put as you would have recieved more cosmic radiation by flying...
We learned that containments really work, and that a meltdown results in the loss of a reactor, and nothing more. Except a humongous PR disaster.
The problem with engineers is always the same: they don't factor in the user, even if you want to call it user stupidity. But this is something that society can't overlook about engineers. Nuclear power is safe if you follow the rules. Right. But engineers cannot guarantee that the society in which these reactors operate will, going into the future, be able to properly sustain these reactors. And I think there is a very good chance society will not. To not at least take the possibility into account is very dangerous.
Well, that is what man-machine interaction is about, studying how you make sure even idiots can't ruin the equipment. Making stuff user-friendly.
And what TMI showed us is that even if the worst happens and you get a meltdown on your hands, it's not dangerous. It's safe. An exploding natural gas plant is a 100 times as lethal.
Teller didn't want all those beasts scattered around the countryside because he had a problem with the fleshy beasts that were running them, because in his opinion the fleshy beast wasn't even as smart as yeast.
Teller believed that boredom and simple human complacency were the biggest risks of all, i.e. the Homer Simpson Syndrome.
Why then did he change his mind and became the most forceful of nuclear energy's supporters, when BWR's and PWR's became the norm?
If I understand the circumstances correctly, a large RBMK was also substantially easier to build than a large VVER - particularly, the reactor pressure vessels for the VVER series tested the limits of the Soviet metal fabricating industry.
The RBMK was derived from plutonium production reactor designs; the USA's PWR (and I assume the USSR's VVER) was derived from nuclear submarine reactor designs. I've heard it argued that neither was appropriate for a large-scale power generating programme, for which the requirements were very different than the initial applications'. Certainly there are other designs (some with better track records than others), although as yet I don't see any as being obviously superior to the rest.
To achieve desired RBMK power output the core size was greatly increased, which made it harder to control the reactor. Ironically, the low power density of the RBMK made it safer in many accident scenarios (such as loss of coolant (LOC) with SCRAM); the "maximum design basis accident" considered a LOC following catastrophic failure of the largest pipe in the system. The dispersed configuration of RBMK fuel makes it more resistant to meltdown.
One important thing to note is that as in many industrial disasters, the operators in Chernobyl #4 control room did not realize the extent of the danger until it was too late. Some of the operating rules were routinely violated without obvious ill effect, and the possible consequences of violations were not stated. Thus it seemed aceptable to volate additional rules that really were of paramount importance and keep the reactor running in what was actually a very precarious situation. Some reports indicate that there was also strong pressure from supervisors to complete the scheduled test before shutting down.
"Among those damages currently not included in ExternE estimates are nuclear proliferation, nuclear security, security of energy supply, visual intrusion and risk aversion."
http://www.externe.info/faq.html
Furthermore, apparently the only data on solar PV that was available came from Denmark..
http://www.externe.info/faq.html
Ha!
I stand corrected.
But nuclear security I guess is terrorist attacks and such while they do include nuclear safety, meltdowns and LOCA etc.
edit:
Their project and methodology obviously are a work in progress. Valuing different damage is a tricky and politically sensitive business, after all - very subjective. Not something that you can whip up a study on in barely a decade or so.
And measuring the energy return we find uranium extractable at reasonable returns down to 20ppm from Serviors analysis.
This issue has been beaten to death!
As for the sunk cost of nuclear power, its just that: Sunk allready. We might have sunk all the money into wind and solar only to find they contribute little more to the grid than they allready do today with the slack being taken up by even more coal. Are we talking about the viability of uranium as a nuclear fuel or its competitiveness against less proven technologies? Shall we change the subject?
With the most relevant quote being:
The big problem I have with nuclear is that it requires a vast industrial and technological infrastructure, the very one that is threatened by the peaking of hydrocarbons. To replace any significant part of the hydrocarbon-supplied energy base with nuclear will require a many-fold expansion, vastly increasing the dependence on that infrastructure. Even so, nuclear will not readily replace oil for transportation without a very costly and inefficient conversion process. Even the mining and processing of uranium is heavily dependent on hydrocarbon energy.
So to make our future depend on nuclear is an immensely risky gamble, all the more so with the prospect that there is horizon on the availability of the supply. To embark on the nuclear rescue is to count on the nuclear rescue, because one can't scale back if ones needs the infrastructure to keep up the nuclear. But if, at then end of the day, it doesn't work and the infrastructure can't support it, we have bequeathed a monster to our heirs (our even ourselves if we're not old already).
Look this way, look that way, it seems to me that we are in the early stages of thrashing about, looking for some way to avoid the unavoidable -- scaling back the human footprint on the planet, eventually leveling off at sustainability. How gradual this process can be depends on how soon we start. Yesterday would have been good.
On the other hand, if we do not ramp up nuclear significantly how are we going to avoid a horrendous holocaust of a huge die-off? Even if we do not know that we can stave it off, is there any moral way that we can not even try? Someone up thread wrote about going to 2 billion people by 2040. 4.7 billion premature deaths in 33 years? Image the wars and environment devastation during that transition. Is that somehow more acceptable that trying to build a few thousand reactors?
Yes, by moving to renewable energy at sustainable rates. That is more moral than trying a solution that has no long term future and may not (according to the article above) have a short term future either. At some point, some generation is going to have to take firm action to power down and give some hope to the generations that follow. Does our generation have a better chance of bequeathing a liveable planet, than waiting another few years, decades or centuries for the limits to bite?
We have to scale back our needs AND build reactors AND develop renewable energy sources. The risks of an energy hard landing and GW make nuclear power risks look very small.
As I have stated on numerous occassions, the pro and anti-nukes will never see eye to eye on the nuclear issue. The nuclear opposition, myself included looks at the bigger picture. We look at the extremely controversial topic of low level anthropogenic radiation and its effect on health; we look at the proliferation issues (not just the fissile material for bombs issue but the simple enhanced availability of poisonous nuclides that no nuclear fission process can avoid); we look at the cost issues, the infrastructure and societal organization issues etc. etc. and come to the conclusion that it is not worth the risk. There may well be enough uranium, thorium and breeder plutonium to theoretically continue for quite a while but I am unconvinced that society will hold together and manage to stave off the negative consequences over such a timeframe.
In the meantime, with an implicit understanding that we have to live within limits, we have enough renewable power to do way more practically and theoretically than even nuclear can claim. For example, up to 20% wind can be readily accomodated at less cost than new nuclear can dream about. We have conc. solar thermal that already is in good areas about 1.5 - 2 times what new nuclear can be expected to deliver with very good reasons for parity as it scales. We have distributed con. PV that is threatening costs at the retail level less than what nuclear/coal/gas (centralized) + transmission/distribution can deliver. I can give several other technologies that are threatening to approach parity like geothermal in the near future, wave/tidal in the further future etc.
Remember this logic :- 400 miles X 400 miles of desert = All commercial electricity consumed by mankind. Now scatter this and distribute via several renewable technologies and the implications are clear!!!!
Miquel,
Thanks for this bringing this study to our attention. You definitely touched a few nerves! Which is precisely what we needed. Don't hesitate to do it again.
I don't doubt that critiquing reserve estimates will be a very necessary endeavor for some time to come.
People have already posted on Deffeyes' testimony on this - I just wanted to mention he makes a very clear case for there being plenty of Uranium in "Beyond Oil". I was concerned about the limits of uranium supplies until I read Deffeyes' book. But his account of the study he did and the numbers completely allayed my concerns on this issue. There really is plenty of uranium out there. One sure indicator of that is simply that the fuel costs for nuclear electric production are only a small fraction of their expenses, unlike the situation for fossil fuel plants. If we were actually close to any sort of supply limit for uranium, the price would have increased at least an order of magnitude from what it is now.
Authentic learning ends where faith begins.
From my perspective, the following observation hit the nail on the head: "Having lots of electricity makes it easier to maintain an effluent lifestyle."
So we fire up our magical nuclear energy machines, and continue exponential indiscriminate growth resulting in destruction of arable lands; in the depletion of potable water resources; in more strain and pressure imposed on the structures of our education, health care and justice systems; in wreaking environmental destruction; in the destabilization of economic structures; and in waging resource wars?
As Donella Meadows observed, growth is the obvious systemic leverage point. We just push on it the wrong way.
Growth over here in Sweden is exponential counted in $ or rather SEK but some parts are more linear, heavy infrastructure investments demand more money over time. I interpret this as a roughly constant need for value to build things while other non physical parts of the monetised economy grows and claosm a larger share of the moneys worth. Some of the physical parts grow too, all kind of freight is at an all time high as is physical industrial production.
I see this as a good thing since a very large part of this production is made with hydro and nuclear electricity and often use forest biomass as a major raw material. My propsed action is for us to increase the electricity production significantly in a bid to become even more of heavy industry workshop and biomass refiner and also export electricity. If this works out we can export much more stuff that other people need to live well while producing the goods with lower envoromental strain then coal fired economies. Adding to growth in a benign way. Now if ony those pesky coal mines could be closed wile transportation moves to electric power.
The payment I hope fore in return for hard goods is culture, the trickle of oil needed and even more heavy industry seeking stable conditions. I would like to see the nordic countries as a bastion of industrial stability for times when the global economy might wobble with post peak oil retooling or worse.
Exactly.
Better send a PM to Reinfeldt about it. ;)
I am doing that minus my home brew speculative economics in my comments to the "Vår tids arbetarparti" paper. The enviromental and resource parts can be significantly improved.
@Magnus Redin
Your's is an interesting view from the nordic countries. I also live above latitude 60, albeit at quite a different longitude.
From here, I see minimal effort on the part of American governments and businesses to discriminate in their pursuit of continued growth (emphasizing throughput and indiscriminate exponential growth) except on the basis of profits, profits, and profits; steep discount rates; and social/environmental costs displaced as future liabilities.
Having also lived in China and traveled reasonably widely, it's my perspective that this indiscriminate exponential growth model has spread like the 1918 influenza virus, and is wreaking havoc on local, regional, and global environments.
Just on the basis of scale, it's hard to imagine the nordic countries serving as a bastion of industrial stability on a global economy. They do serve in some respects as a good model in shift toward quality and thoughtfulness, though.
At this point, I believe that if we don't turn around the indiscriminate exponential growth paradigm at the same time we shift to higher quality alternatives to fossil fuels (to the extent we do), we should expect global results in alignment with the worst case scenarios.
Especially considering as the doubling impacts of exponential growth accelerate so rapidly, and constructive response usually involves so much delay.
Techno-fixes are a subsidiary problem to global scale, systemic, and systematic thinking errors.
--
"Authentic learning ends where faith begins."
The nordic countries can never be an equivalent to USA in 1950:s but you dont need that ammount of absolute and relative industrial might to greatly benefit the rest of the world while having your own area of relative calm.
Miquel, if you read this, we (AEREN- ASPO Spain) would like to contact you!
Pots enviarme un correu electrònic a santaferino ARROBA telefonica PUNT net
So far the discussion has not addressed some of the questions posed by the article:
1- Does anyone have a criticism of their bottom-up analysis and prediction for future uranium production for the reserve category considered?
2- Will the resources in the Undiscovered categories be exploitable at a high enough rate and at a low enough cost?
1 is the easier one. To 2, answers so far quickly bring the earth's crust as a possible resource. I don't believe at 20ppm nuclear energy would have a reasonable cost (EROEI discussions aside), but even if that's the case, I don't believe production rates could ever be increased to 3500mt/year. Tar sands, for example, can't be produced at any desired rate, even if the reserves are enormous.
Any answers to that?
I take it those earth's crust fantasies are the abiotic oil of the nuke business. Wow, what an eye-opener.
So you think the measured abundance of Uranium in the shallow crust has no bearing on how much can be produced? In spite of strong evidence that there are enormous quantities all around the earth, we know it is going to run out soon on the authority of Mr. 2001 Nuclear-Free Future Solutions Award Recipient.
Its obvious from not just this post but from many that are made that there appears a lot of ignorance on this topic. There has been an explosion of exploration activity on the U front in the past few years as the economics have finally been reversed from the devastating consequences associated with the Russian nuclear weapons stockpile reduction. If one even casually monitors their efforts one can determine that exploration companies are making regular significant discoveries of high grade ores throughout Canada, Australia, and Kazakhstan. To compare the discovery portfolio of U to abiotic oil is dishonest. (Yes I invest in U)
One must contemplate the advice that it is better to remain silent than burden everyone with opinionated ignorance. By constantly penning uninformed thoughts one detracts from the discussion. Very good advice for someone in a position of ignorance to remain silent unless you have a question or a reasonable comment.
Too bad you have not been reading the posts in this thread. Point 1 has been discussed numerous times above. There were several posts that pointed out that for each order of magnitude of ore concentration that you go down, you get a 300 fold increase in the resource. Is that shown in your analysis? The 20ppm cited is that last of the resource that we would use, thousands of year into the future. Today there are still enormous deposits at much higher concentrations.
There have been numerous post that show that since there is such a great abundance of Uranium in the shallow crust, distributed at different concentrations, that the article’s reserve predictions are clearly worthless. With this in mind, point 2 is also meaningless.
With respect to production rates, each reactor needs only 200 tons per year. The comparison with tar sands is also not useful given how much greater volume of that resource is needed to supply only a small fraction of oil demand.
It is very difficult to have a meaningful discussion if we don't understand each other and if people keep getting personal and upset.
Point 1 has nothing to do with your statement. The paper analyses the posible production curves for the reserve categories RAR and IR. Does anyone have an issue with those graphs?
Point 2 is answered by your answer to point 1, and I don't agree with your statement.
That is true today, but not when you use lower grade ores.
The calculation made in a thread above, was 200tons per year natural uranium for 1GW.
At 20ppm and 350GW capacity that means 3500mtonnes/year volume processed. That number is huge. And it is for current capacity. Of course, before anyone uses 20ppm uranium, there are a lot 0,01%> grade ores but that still leaves you with hundreds of millions of tonnes per year.
Have you ever heard the phrase "garbage in, garbage out"? The paper analyses production curves for reserve numbers that have no bearing in reality. Nuclear power could likely handle a two orders of magnitude rise in the raw fuel costs. Where does your post show a 90,000 fold (300 x 300) increase in the resource base? And if it does not, why not?
If I understand you right, you are saying that the reserve profile should be extended to include $500/kg U and $1000/kg U, perhaps even $10000/kg U.
If, in actual fact, raw fuel costs are only a very small portion of what it takes to run a reactor, you have a point. Hands down.
And the anti-nuke people need to address it.
Sorry that I took your abiotic post seriously.
If raw (unenriched) fuel costs are 1% and they increase 100 fold they would go to 50% of power costs at double the current price. Since reactors are cost competitive now, that is not an unreasonable assumption when we no longer have oil and cannot use coal.
Is Nuclear Power a Viable Option for Our Energy Needs?
The average cost of residential electricity was 9.86¢/kWh in the U.S. in March. That would be a raw fuel cost of 4%. So the same scenario as above is the price going up 25 fold to $2,500/kg. Then you need to account for about a 3,000 fold increase in the resource base.
So to cover the possible future range of energy price I think you would need to consider at least a $5,000/kg price, which gives around a 30,000 fold increase on the resource base. These are back of the envelope calculations, but you get the idea.
Well, in fairness, the abiotic quip was sincere. But then I clued in a little. Some of us are slow....and mouthy.
I have to admit I was seduced by that graph of French production and got lazy.
But, on your analysis, the time may arrive when they ramp up production again -- when the world price rises and puts their local miners back on the job.
I wonder if there is much discussion in France of this possibility. Since, I actually read french reasonably well, I think I'll go check it out.
BTW, a 100 fold increase in the price of the raw fuel would only cause a price for power that is 5 times as high as it is currently, like $15/gallon gas. We are going to see that price for gas in about 5 years. My previous analysis assumed that mining cost go up linearly with the inverse concentration of the ore. Economies of scale might come into place and bring that down. Finally, that computation assumes a once through of the fuel, which is very unlikely as the price goes up. Some of the posts up thread suggest that we could get several hundred times the amount of energy out of the same fuel as we do now through breeding and reprocessing. So I think the anti-nukes do need to explain the resource base at $10,000/kg, which should be 90,000 times what it is now.
Or, with getting all the energy out of the fuel, maybe even three orders on magnitude. That would be $100,000/kg Uranium and 27,000,000 times the resource base.
I rather doubt high grade ores will deplete fast enough to warrent opening mines in France any time soon.
Hello Asebius,
I would be careful with Dezakin and Sterling's assertions. They have been attacking the author of the article and at first I thought they were very knowledgeable. But when they have had to calculate something, Miquel has clearly shown that they really screwed up.
First Dezakin:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379#comment-171464
For 15ppm uranium ore he calculates 90000 ktonnes/year.
But you can do yourself the calculation: 1000000/15*200(per GW) = 13 million tonnes/GW/year, definitely comparable to coal. On Miquel's response, he changes subject and doesn't acknowledge his mistake.
And he says things like this:
Discussing cornucopian views won't take us anywhere, and that is exactly how statements saying any uranium ore can be extracted look like to me. Why do we even discuss it here?.
At http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379#comment-171896
Sterling does back of the envelope calculations to show the impact of higher uranium prices, and Miquel shows at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2379#comment-171929
that they are completely erroneous.
If they don't get even those basic calculations right, maybe they should rethink they blind belief in the numbers of the nuclear industry (they could be a bit more respectful too). In view of this I am even less convinced by their opinions.
Nice to see strawmen have their place still. 60-90 ktons per GW year is for breeder reactors that only consume 1 ton per GW/year and that was in my response. For the once through cycle of uranium you would be using 20ppm, then you 'only' have 1 trillion tons.
Take your man of straw and burn it if you want however.
You mean like relying on Storm/Smith data and making arbitrary assumptions for maximumum resource extraction?
- If you talk about breeders you need to clearly state it. A lot of people in the world, including me, won't accept a breeder solution even if it worked "cheaply".
- I haven't read any post relying on Storm/Smith.
- So what is your assumption for maximum resource extraction rate? billions of tonnes per year? (needed for your 20ppm) trillions? unlimited?
Now who's changing the subject! I thought we were talking about resource avaliability. Thorium is largely thought of as a breeder reactor fuel. Read between the lines here, specifically how the thread started, before you go spouting strawmen.
Its the title article of the page, specifically the paper from 'Energy Watch Group'
Oh billions on the low end easily. We allready do that with coal. I see no reason why we wouldn't be able to multiply that by several orders of magnitude, not that we'll need to any time soon.
Well, one thing at a time, Docimus.
We are talking uranium depletion here (that's what the head article is about). Even using Miquel's calculations shows that the whole reserves issue may need to be rethought.
i.e. We at least need reserve estimates assuming $500/kg and $1000/kg.
Some of Sterling's extrapolations have a SciFi-ish feel. But the main point seems to hold. (That reserves likely to be used may be substantially greater than those mentioned in the EWG paper).
The EWG paper tackles Assured and Inferred Resources.How can you make a reliable bottom-up prediction with a category called "Undiscovered Speculative"?. Specially since the most assured reserve category in the 3 biggest (and reliable?) nuclear countries France and the USA can be downgraded by 85%!!! Imagine that situation in the oil industry (hint;)
Of course some as yet undiscovered resources will be used, but the cost won't be the same. We have been told nuclear electricity production costs bear no relation to the uranium price. That is not true. But it is easy to say when you have 1% grade ore.
"completely erroneous"
That assumes that you buy his claim that you need to use wholesale production costs. He explained that to your satisfaction? Does he explain how he accounts for the non production costs that amount to about 60% of the price?
He also said that I did not redo the calculation for 4%, which is not true. That's where I come up with a $2,500 price and 3,000 fold increase in the resource base. I did the computation very quickly, because I have a job, but I do not think any errors have yet been pointed out.
Does he not give you the impression that the world Uranium resource might peak some time soon?
Does that not piss you off since it is so obviously completely untrue? Or are you only counting anti-nuke points and pro-nuke errors?
Sterling, is there any need to fight each other? Can we talk?
When you cite competitive technologies, you always use estimated production costs.
You cannot blame me for using your 0.37c/kWh. That is highly unfair. Your 60% quote is more or less correct, but you'll see the calculations don't change a lot (because your 0.37c/kWh was not the exact figure)
I wanted to reply in detail to the costs issue, but I am writing a full-blown article addressing some of the points you have raised. I hope we can then approach each other's position, or at least talk apples and apples.
Regards
Miquel
This is not about competitive technologies. The question is whether there is a scenario where the technolgy would be viable at a certain fuel price. We cannot assume that the 60% that currently goes to distribution middlemen is locked in stone. At a higher fuel price, the market might adjust to give them only 10%, for example. So I think the end user price is the right one to use. The next step is to consider the most competitive technology. A technology can be viable in the absence of competition but not competitive with what might emerge. There is a serious question here about whether there are any alternative technologies that can address the scale of this problem.
I think you need to consider the resource base with Uranium of at least $10,000/kg and prefereably at $100,000/kg when you consider running the fuel through more than once and reprocessing until every bit of recoverable energy is used.
I am sorry that this has gotten personal. But you have given a lot of ammunition to people who do not care what the facts are but want to kill nuclear technology at any cost. I think fission technology is the only energy source that scales adequately to sustitute for carbon based sources that we will no longer have, which has a low carbon footprint for GW purposes and which might allow the world to avoid a terribly destructive die-off. I think it is important that it be given a fair and object analysis.
Good luck with your full blown article.
Your figures are misleading. You are mixing consumer prices with production prices, and you make calculation with 1% and don't redo it for the cited value of 4%, which falsely relates to consumer prices. I'll recalculate it again for you. I had other cost estimates between 0.12-0.50, but I guess your 0.37 will do.
Here I go. 0.37c/kWh is 9,3% of the price of nuclear generated electricity (advertised with 4c/kWh). a 10 fold increase means 3.7c/kWh for a total production price of 7.3c/kWh(all else being equal). Fuel costs now amount to 50% of production costs, an order of magnitude earlier than you state. An we have nearly doubled generation price. If we accept the 300 greater reserves claim, new plant could be built, but electricity production costs nearly doubled. That changes the playing field quite a lot regarding the competition. If we now calculate the impact of another 10 fold increase (100 in total), fuel costs are now 37c/kWh or more than 90%. And production costs are now nearly 10 times as much as now, and more expensive than any other energy form (yes, including PV by then). So it is your 90000 greater reserves claim that is meaningless.
Extraction costs may be ameliorated by economies of scale, but they can scale greater than linearly. So at least linearly is a cautious estimate.
It still doesnt matter. If fuel prices rise tenfold, reprocessing, MOX fuel, and double enrichment or CANDU all become viable which multiply the LWR resource base by 8 or more, and these aren't 'future technologies.' They're in operation today.
And this is when we are economically recovering uranium ore today at 300ppm, which is a vast resource base. (10^8 tons) or so. And you're somehow attempting to suggest that we may be running out?
Your dogged determination to fudge numbers into the picture you want to paint isn't becoming.
Miquel,
I see two questions.
First, if fossil fuel must be phased out, and rewewables turn out to be inadequate, could we power our civilization with nuclear given sufficient lead-time?
I think you are saying that the answer is yes. An increase of $.037 per kwh is perfectly acceptable for a smoothly running civilization.
Second, can nuclear compete with other sources on price, and can it scale up quickly enough to replace fossil fuels, given the recent lack of investment in uranium mining?
I think you believe the answer to this is no. I think a real analysis of mining project lead-times and capacities would help here, a la the bottom-up analyses done for oil. Has anyone done that????
Hi Nick,
Sort of. The paper shows that RAR+IR resources are just enough (if production is increased aggressively) to power existing reactors through their life times. Expanding resources 300 times with lower ores as has been suggested would certainly allow us to power new reactors that substitute the old to just maintain capacity. If you want to "power our civilization" with nuclear power, capacity would have to be increased some 10 fold. Making the assumption you make of sufficient lead-time, and assuming nuclear production can be ramped up 20 times current production it can be done. It just won't cost the stated 4c/kWh to produce but maybe double the figure. That of course woudn't be the end of civilization, but there are cheaper ways to tackle the problem.
To your second point, the paper shows how an aggressive ramping of production capacity would allow to supply current 67kt once stockpiles are depleted. Scaling it up beyond a mere few % seems more difficult though. To replace fossil fuels (counting improved energy efficiency) you need 10 times current capacity. So nine times as much would have to be extracted from the lower ore reserves, which makes it more difficult. My answer is I don't know for sure. Nuclear energy would certainly have a higher price, which makes other solutions more compelling IMHO.
The paper I cite does just that. go to "Annex 7: Uranium Mining Projects (Planned or under Construction)".
Your argument that a 20 fold increase in nuclear production would double the prices relies on your reserve numbers, which I do not buy. But let's assume you are right. You think there are cheaper ways to achieve a 20 fold increase in the energy currently produced by nuclear? Assuming you are not talking about coal, oil or gas, what are they? What are you proposing that would produce the energy of 10,000 reactors in the next 50 years, for any price?
"What are you proposing that would produce the energy of 10,000 reactors in the next 50 years, for any price?"
At any price? Either wind or solar could do it, easily. Geothermal is pretty likely, but still unproven.
Now, solar is still largely uncompetitive (though it's not as bad as you might think, given that it's peak power, largely competing with retail prices, and is falling quickly), but wind is 3-8 cents per kwh in the US and falling (though a bit more slowly than solar). Long distance transmission costs might add another penny. Pushing wind past 20% of the kwh market to, say, 50% might have a cost of another 2 cents. That's a total of 6-11 cents, or in the ballpark of 8 cents.
OTOH, nuclear has external costs that need to be added in, and pushing nuclear up to or beyond that market penetration would also create additional marginal costs.
So, if the base cost of nuclear was 8 cents, wind would be mighty competitive.
The question is whether you can scale up those technologies to supply the equivalent of the entire current world's energy usage. I do not think you can in the timeframe I cited.
I can't imagine how nuclear can scale up faster.
According to the Nuclear Energy institute, wind is already the dominant form of new generation in the US.
Check page 8 of www.nei.org/documents/Energy%20Markets%20Report.pdf
keeping in mind that wind has less than a 2 year planning window, so only 2007 is reasonably accurate for wind.
You'll see that wind is already 44% of planned new generation in the US (adjusted for capacity factor). It could easily provide all new generation in 5 years, and start replacing coal & nat gas after that.
No nuclear plants will be built in less than 8-10 years, and by then wind will have fallen further in cost, and solar production will likely be reaching where wind is now.
Perhaps your question is about the overall wind and solar resources available?
The current estimate from Stanford researchers for the total wind resource for the world is about 72TW, versus current average equivalent demand of about 4TW. Sunshine provides about 100,000TW.
Here is an analysis for just one region of the US, the Mid-Atlantic: http://www.ocean.udel.edu/windpower/
February 7, 2007
Mid-Atlantic Offshore Wind Potential: 330 GW
by Tracey Bryant
The wind resource off the Mid-Atlantic coast could supply the energy needs of nine states from Massachusetts to North Carolina, plus the District of Columbia -- with enough left over to support a 50 percent increase in future energy demand -- according to a study by researchers at the University of Delaware (UD) and Stanford University.
Willett Kempton, Richard Garvine and Amardeep Dhanju at the University of Delaware and Mark Jacobson and Cristina Archer at Stanford, found that the wind over the Middle Atlantic Bight, the aquatic region from Cape Cod, Mass., to Cape Hatteras, N.C., could produce 330 gigawatts of average electrical power if thousands of wind turbines were installed off the coast.
The estimated power supply from offshore wind substantially exceeds the region's current energy use -- which the scientists estimate at 185 gigawatts -- from electricity, gasoline, fuel oil and natural gas sources.
I realy hope you are correct about the cost reduction of wind power. We need every cheap power source we can get and wind is not yet cheap.
I got the impression that wind power cost reduction is flattening out as the size has hit limits in available handling and erection equipment. We have lately had sharply rising costs for wind powerplants in northern Europe but that is probably mostly due to market reasons. There are reductions possible in new generator designs and more streamlined production but wind power would realy need a 50-75% reduction in cost. :-(
I have heard lots of complaints about grid performance in US. How much wind power can it handle? Its probably varies enourmously from region to region.
"but wind power would realy need a 50-75% reduction in cost."
That may be true in Europe, where capacity factors are significantly below 20%, while the US averages about 30%.
I think the best opportunities for cost reduction are offshore, where transportation is easier and cheaper, and capacity factors can be much higher. In particular, floating platforms present a big opportunity for cost reductions and power increases.
"I have heard lots of complaints about grid performance in US. "
I think they are exaggerated. I would estimate the US average grid availability as 99.95% (data, anyone?). That's astonishingly high for such a complex system. OTOH, there's certainly room for improvement, and it's very possible with reasonable infrastructure investments. I would note (for those worried about increasing complexity, vs. falling ROI) that marginal return on investment has not been dropping, it's just that there hasn't been that much investment.
The amount of wind that could be integrated does vary enormously, in part based on the level of long-distance transmission and hydro. It will require reasonable investments in grid flexibility.
Nuclear power can be expanded really fast. Sweden went from 0 % nuclear in 1969 to 50 % nuclear in 1985.
The French did it in a bit more time but they went all the way to 80 %.
If these countries could go from zero nuclear to a dominating role for nuclear in 15-20 years, then so can anyone. Including the United States of America.
The Swedish industry completed about one reactor per year, 9 BWR:s in Sweden and 2 BWR:s in Finland. In addition to those 3 PWR:s were imported. This were done by a 8 million pop country and producing nucler powerplants were not our main industry. It could have been but the market evaporated due to cheap oil and natural gas and an anti nuclear opinion paving the way for a large fossil fuel expansion.
Sweden and France were both much smaller than the US.
France is embedded in a much larger grid on which it depends. It sells surplus to other countries like Switzerland, which conserves it's hydro production and in effect sells it back during the daytime peak (at a premium). As a practical matter the % of nuclear in this case is very roughly 25% of the grid, which is not far from the US's current level of 20%.
Doesn't Sweden have quite a lot of hydro? IIRC, the US has less than 10%.
From the IEA statistics. France exports just over 10-14% of its electrical power (70000 GWh) and imports 8000 GWh. The 430000 Gwh from nuclear.
If we extract the imports and exports and say that all of the exports are nuclear. Then 368000GWh/486000Gwh = 76%.
http://www.iea.org/Textbase/stats/surveys/mes.pdf
Belgium is at 50% nuclear power electricity from the same PDF but are net importers of electricity.
Japan is 30% nuclear power and has no imports/exports and they are building more plants. Japan is the larger than France. Not many other bigger countries in terms of power.
Korea is at 36% and is building a lot more nuclear plants. No imports/exports.
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
Sweden has lots of hydro, about 2 MW of hydro for every 1 MW of nuclear. Hydro is much more flexible so when we look at production it is about half nuclear, half hydro. On top of this the Norwegians have about as much hydro again, and nothing else. On the other hand both the Finnish and especially Danish (20 % wind) power mixes drags down the flexibility of the Scandinavian grid.
For the EU as a whole 1/3 of the power is nuclear and another 1/3 is coal. This means that conservatively looking 50 % nuclear in Europe (or the US) should be possible (considering that coal is a bit more flexible than nuclear).
And as long as there is baseload gas-fired power plants in the US (the result of a 270.000 MW "dash for gas" insane building-spree) there is plenty of room for replacement by both nuclear and wind.
edit: And after they are taken away from baseload duty there will be an immense capacity for smoothing out wind power fluctuations and serving as peak load for a vast number of reactors.
I dont get why there would have to be any significant difference between nuclear and coal power flexibility.
Modern coal powerplants are run closer to the material limits of the steel with higher steam temperature then nuclear powerplants wich gives a higher percentage usefull power with the same heat power input. But the high temperatures and complex smoke cleaning equipment makes startups harder and idling the powerplant for quick power up harder.
Nuclear powerplants try to avoid any fast changes in temperature in the nuclear system to avoid wear and low output need to be followed by a pause before raising output to give neutron aborbants time to decay. But this should not be in the way for day cycle adjustments of power output.
I guess the main difference is that a nuclear powerplant has a higher capital cost and a much lower running cost. This makes it possible to run it with a profit during nighttime even if you sell the electricity realy cheap for pumping water uphill etc.
Regarding dispatchability. If you push the "power up" lewer at a nucler powerplant you have a 99% probability that you will get the power unless you powered down fast the last hour or so. If you do the same with a wind powerplant you have 20-30% chance for getting the power since it only delivers when there is enough but not too much wind.
This is a very large difference. That a grid should be able to handle equal ammounts of wind and nuclear power and still give the same 24/7 service must be false.
"If you push the "power up" lewer at a nucler powerplant you have a 99% probability that you will get the power unless you powered down fast the last hour or so. "
As you note, due to the negligible marginal cost of nuclear and wind, it is my understanding that system operators work very hard to avoid pushing the "power down" lever in the first place. Doing so would reduce capacity factor, and raise per-kwh costs. That suggests to me that describing nuclear as dispatchable is a bit misleading.
"If you do the same with a wind powerplant you have 20-30% chance for getting the power since it only delivers when there is enough but not too much wind."
That's true for an individual turbine, but not for a geographically distributed wind resource. As a very rough guide, you can assume that every time you double the number of independent random distributions (geographically distant wind farms) you reduce the ratio of variance to mean output by 29% (1-1/(square root of 2)).
Please note also that wind and solar have independent and complementary distributions.
Certainly wind is harder to accomodate than nuclear. OTOH, nuclear isn't easy, we've just gotten used to grids handling it without a problem. Wind isn't that much harder, as I've detailed in other posts.
Building a geographically distributed wind resource is essentialy the same thing as building wind powerplants as backup power for wind powerplants.
Since wind powerplants are among the most expensive powerplants to build per MW and you need more very long distance grid capacity it is a very expensive way to make wind power more reliable.
I regard wind power as a supplement whose economy becommes very bad when a grids spara capacity is used up. Oh well, at least it has positive EROEI.
"Building a geographically distributed wind resource is essentialy the same thing as building wind powerplants as backup power for wind powerplants."
hmmm. I've heard this idea before, but it's false.
The "geographically distributed wind resource" isn't a backup, it's a parallel resource which is synergistic. Each produces power, and the independent distribution of the power sources makes the whole more reliable than the sum of the parts. This means that average cost per turbine for system integration falls, and wind becomes cheaper, not more expensive.
"wind powerplants are among the most expensive powerplants to build per MW"
Wind costs about $1.10 per watt in the US, though current installation prices are $1.3 to 1.7, apparently due to overwhelming demand that has gotten ahead of supply (not higher energy prices), leading to temporarily higher prices for turbines as well as other construction materials. Even including roughly $.25 per watt for transmission (a cost which also applies to other forms of generation to varying extents, and which does not always apply to wind, e.g. for most off-shore sites), this is likely to be lower than coal or nuclear.
It is true that after adjustment for capacity factor that wind is more expensive per MW. OTOH, it has no fuel costs, absolute pricing certainty, and no external costs, something which nuclear and especially coal cannot say. If you were to include all costs it is likely that wind would be the cheapest per kwh, especially compared to coal. If you have different numbers I would be interested in seeing them.
"I regard wind power as a supplement whose economy becommes very bad when a grids spara capacity is used up"
This has been suggested by others, and I have replied to them with specifics as to why this is not true. Have you read them and considered them carefully? Do you have specific responses to that information?
I get the impression that we argue with exactly the same set of facts regarding how wind power works in a grid. But you describe the facts in a positive way and I describe the same things in a negative way.
The odd thing is that I am pro wind compared to most other older pro nuclear people who have rediculed wind power for 20 years. I acknowledge that wind power has a reasonable economical and technical niche in manny grids. If I were a man with influence I expect that to immediately be misinterpreted as "wind power can take the load" by pro wind people.
I know that focused arguing for one solution or product at the time is most efficient but it makes me weary since the world does not work that way, only a majority of the human minds. I dont want to maximise mindshare return on PR investment, I dont have any favorite technological or political solution that allways is the best regardless of the situation, I want to figure out how to build working infrastructure and communities.
And now I did not answer your post but started to ramble about people who have their favorite solution regardless of the situation, sorry. :-(
I know what you mean. It's very hard to come to an objective overall evaluation of something, and keep an open mind to new facts, such that you can change your entire view on a subject if the facts dictate.
You have to do it, to find the best way of doing things.
I try to do that. Clearly, you do too.
It's frustrating to try to have a dialogue with someone who doesn't. They don't really absorb what you have to say, and the dialogue goes nowhere.
One has to ask oneself some questions, like: What would it take to change my mind on this subject? and, What's really important here?
On the specific subjects of nuclear and renewables, I'd say that I'd agree that either or both could provide our energy needs. The least cost solution will likely be a mix of many sources, changing over time and location.
That said, I have to say that weapons proliferation seems to me to be a basic, important problem for nuclear. The other things, like waste disposal, seem much less important, just technical details. It seems possible to me that this weapons risk is tolerable, but it's not small, and it shouldn't be ignored.
I had placed some information on my view of nuclear weapons and proliferation farther down this thread.
Since you were speaking about let me reply here.
btw: I am open to new info for adjusting my opinion. Currently I am in favor of putting the most cost efficient filters (gas bag/electrostatic precipitator (ESP) combos, Dept of Energy has info on particulate health risks) to reduce the number of deaths from coal. Ideally the 50 dirtiest coal plants can be converted to natural gas or nuclear (something compatible with the boilers). The 50 dirtiest plants produce 4% of the electricity for coal and 45% of most of the pollutants. Ramp up nuclear, alternatives, conservation and efficiency.
Proliferation.
Proliferation has not killed anyone. The only nuclear bombs used were by the US. Any country that has gotten them since has not used them. Proliferation has killed no one.
Proliferation to who? 40 countries now have nuclear material and know how sufficient to make nuclear bombs.
200 million people were killed in wars and conflict in the 20th century. How many were killed by nukes?
It is taking Iran and took North Korea a long time to get their nukes. They have had the main know how since AQ Kkan told them in the 1980's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan
Plus there is deterrence. Iran/ North Korea or one of the minor nuclear powers uses their weapons by smuggling it in etc... Then they die.
Nuclear war is also overhyped. Tokyo firebombing killed 100,000 over a few days back in WW2. Over 2 years of operation rolling thunder in Vietnam, the US dropped 500 times the bombs that tokyo firebombing did.
People dieing from lung cancer, lung disease or heart disease caused by coal or by a knife, gun, bomb from conventional war are just as bad and far more common than nuclear weapons.
What are the real incremental risks from more nuclear reactors ? We are mainly talking about more reactors in the USA, China, India, Russia, S Korea, Japan. All places that either have nuclear weapons or can easily make them. All places that already have nuclear reactors.
Air pollution indoor and outdoor kills 4.5 million people per year. Research published in 2005 suggests that 310,000 Europeans die from air pollution annually. (world health organization stats) It seems like a mostly preventable situation. Plus if you add up the costs from sickness, death and lost productivity then a lot of the medicare and other program costs are impacted by coal pollution and fossil fuel pollution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_pollution
People should be aware of the deaths that are happening now each and every day and year. Less concern should be placed on how we might die in a war. If big wars start then people will die by knife, gun, bomb, chemical. Nuclear could happen too but the body count would not be much different than all out conventional.
So why should we not use nuclear as part of a major effort to save the millions who are actually dieing each year and as insurance against global warming and to get off of a dependence on a highly unstable region of the world ?
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
Brown Ferry One completing May 2007.
Nuclear plants can be up-powered.
28 applications for new plant licenses from now to 2009 in the USA.
Site license approved March, 2007.
As those plants get completed from now through 2020. The problems of coal energy and fossil fuels will not have been solved.
The scientists' estimate of the full-resource, average wind power output of 330 gigawatts over the Middle Atlantic Bight is based on the installation of 166,720 wind turbines, each generating up to 5 megawatts of power. The wind turbines would be located at varying distances from shore, out to 100 meters of water depth, over an ocean area spanning more than 50,000 square miles, from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras.
Those 166,720 turbines will not have been built either. We will still be using coal. So we should still build as much wind, solar, and nuclear as we can.
http://advancednano.blogspot.com
How many times do I have to say that those are not my reserve numbers? They are the official reserve numbers of the nuclear industry. Please go to Martin Sevior's post and compare.
I'll reply to your post above where you state your cost correction was correct in detail.
Reserves != resources. Come on now.
If your conclusion is that we might not have enough Uranium to expand nuclear power production, then either the numbers you are using or your interpretation of them is wrong. I think we have provided you overwhelming evidence of that.
I wonder why we don't build reactors with fast neutrons. We could use Uranium 238 and Thorium 232 as combustible. We would then be very far from a peak in combustible available. We could use as combustible the current wastes that we don't know what to do with, and then use the tailings before starting mining again. We would use 95% of the uranium instead of 5% now and the wastes from these reactors would have a much shorter life.
Could someone educate me as to why we don't do this option?
There is no need. The extra cost of having fast reactors far outweighs the benefits of having more nuclear fuel, as there is so damn much of it already.
But the day when uranium availability starts to become an issue, we could just build some fast reactors to supply fuel for our ordinary ones.
Give me a call in 20 years and I'll have a look at the resource base again.
If uranium availability was not an issue, its price wouldn't go up steadily every two weeks. Nor would the market care so much about the Cigar Lake flooding.
Most Financial Research that I read come with the same conclusion that demand in the future will never be met by mining output, that price may soften in 2008 when many mines come into production, but that the price should then continue to go up for very long.
There seems also to be a shortage of experienced staff in this sector that had been depressed for a very long time.
What is the extra-cost of a fast reactor? I read articles from the French scientific arena but they never mentioned the price of a fast reactor for being a hurdle.
Production is smaller than demand and hence price is rising. This will in turn increase production and bring price down, as long as the resource base is large enough, which it is.
Mining is a cyclical business. Right now we are in a boom which will last maybe 10-15 years. And then there will be a bust as production overtakes demand and the price of uranium falls. It will probably stabilize around $30-40 per pound.
And extra cost for fast reactor...
How does heat exchanger made out of liquid sodium sound to you? Tiny reactor vessel with the energy intensity of 200 electric space heaters in the size of a pint? Surrounded by several hundred tonnes of liquid sodium as a heat sink?
Not impossible, but expensive. And we would unlikely switch to breeders en masse, just build a few to generate fuel for the conventional fleet.
Of course, there are other kinds of breeders which make much more sense to me, like gas cooled high temperature reactors, or supercritical water reactors, or molten salt reactors.
But considering that the amount of uranium expands 300 times when we go down to a tenth of the current ore grade...
Even doing ordinary UREX reprocessing doubles the resource base with LWRs.
The ability of the nucleur power industry to contruct plants must also be taken into account. Assume a 40 year lifetime and that each plant takes ten years to build and that industry is capable of building twenty plants each year simultaneously. To build 1000 plants would require fifty cyles of building and 500 years. At the end of the fourth cycle the original twenty plants have to be decommissioned and rebuilt. The costs, not even including externalities, would be astronomical. There is even a question of whether it is possible. After the fourth cycle the rate of plant building would have to increase to take into account the decommissioning.
How could we ever have built the grid and other infrastructure if building capacity is fixed?
Regarding lifetime todays reactors are built for 60 years and I would not be suprised if heat treatment of the major components can extend that to 100 years. It will of course wear down about 4 turbines and lots of other parts during those years.
Well, I think that even twenty plants simultaneously is optimistic for the industry.
I agree that the current maximum is near your figure. But the capacity for building nuclear powerplants could be ramped up enourmously in 10 years. It do not have to be fixed, it could grow as running reactors provide energy and money flow.
The French alone built 8 reactors a year at their peak. They could have built even more but their market was getting filled and they started to ramp contrsuction rates down. 8 reactors completed at the peak year, 6 the year before, 6 the year after.
Mulitply for 5 for the US, or by 20 for the entire industrial world. 160 reactors a year, if we just get some lead time to ramp up.
It's just a matter of slapping steel, concrete and pipes together in a complex way.
Regarding lifetime todays reactors are built for 60 years and I would not be suprised if heat treatment of the major components can extend that to 100 years. It will of course wear down about 4 turbines and lots of other parts during those years.
Estimated lifetimes are currently from 40-60 years, so we could compromise and say 50 years.
Even at 40 plants simultaneously, it would take 250 years. After the fifth cycle, the rate would have to increase just to replace the decommissioned plants.
Team,
It is clear to me that the core of the debate is what do we define as "forseeable future."
The problem before us is what do we build to meet electricity demand today and over the next generation of humans, say the next 50 years - at least that is how I would bound the decision space.
Sure, someday, at some exponential growth rate, you'll exhaust uranium and then thorium supplies but is should be clear that that will be beyond the next half century.
As prices and energy costs for winning uranium from the earth's crust and seawater rise, we will have known options for improving the utilization. First, we'll recycle spent fuel assemblies. I think we'll do that sooner rather than later just to be good citizens.
After that, thorium and breeders will increase fuel supply an order or three in magnitude.
So how does today's cost of uranium impact the decisions in front of us? It seems clear to me that we'll have plenty of reasonably priced uranium for all the reactors' lives we could build over the next 50 years even with optimistic production rates for new reactors.
A lot of events can happen in 50 years but running out of uranium is not one of them.
With this line of argument, one has to wonder why do anti-nuclear keep harping on uranium supplies? The topic keeps coming up again and again, gaining headlines each time. Every time it surfaces, it is examined and is shot down as at best inconsequential for our current decisions. Yet, the steady drip, drip, drip of headlines, all eventually debunked, works on public perception.
Sure, the world will end someday. In the mean time, I'm working to keep my family feed and the lights on for my neighbors. I don't see that sense of duty for real accomplishments on part of the nuclear critics.
Joseph,
Please comment on why you think nuclear power is a viable energy source for helping mitigate Peak Oil? Before you even approach EROEI or fuel availability you MUST confront of the following problems:
1) Sites: Finding sites to build reactors will be a major problem. Decommissioning time is around 150 years in total for a reactor. In other words, for every site you have generating (for around 40 years), you will eventually have about 4 other sites in various stages of the decommissioning (i.e. 5x the number of sites required for an active nuclear program). Every reactor requires approx 120 million litres of water per day, so needs to be built near a water source. With sea levels predicted to rise, they need to be far enough away from the coast to avoid forseeable sea level changes over the next 150+ years. Fresh water tables are dangerously low in many industrialised countries through overuse - making inland water sources (rivers and lakes) likely to become too valuable to hand over to a growing nuclear industry. The land on which they are built must also be geologically stable, not just from earthquakes, but from land sinkage as well - a problem which some currect reactors are facing. Communities also tend to live near water sources and are reluctant to live near nuclear plants. New studies (in the UK) are showing soaring cancer rates in young people who live near reactors (thought to be from the standard low level waste emissions that plants engage in) and are pointing to them being major health hazards for those who live in their vicinty... So where do we put all these reactors? The issue is not a small one.
2) Waste: Most people just think of end waste, but there are other areas that need to be addressed too. (a) Let's start with end waste: The Committee of Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) ruled out possibilities such as firing waste into the sun and concluded that burying it was the best option. Problem: The NAS recommends 300,000 years as the minimum safe repository time. We cannot guarantee anywhere will be safe for that long. Nor should we reply on society in 1000 years to have the available energy, expertise to, or knowledge of the necessity to, move that waste should a chosen site become compromised through unforseen geological or other factors. (b) Radioactive waste from mining, refining and operation of a plant is rarely addressed with any seriousness and should be a part of nuclear arguments, whether for or against. (c) CO2 is not the most harmful greenhouse gas produced in the nuclear industry. Yes, less CO2 is produced in nuclear than for a coal-fired plant over its entire life (mining, refining, transport, operation and deconstruction) but other by-products such as fluorine also need to be addressed. Ramping up the nuclear industry will compound the problem of waste at all stages. Again, all waste issues must be confronted if you think nuclear is a viable future energy source that will help mitigate Peak Oil.
3) Accidents/terrorism: Routine transport of large quantities of waste to storage sites (if ever found) would be an easy target for terrorists. So are reactors themselves. It will only take one major incident of terrorism or neglect in the industry (worker boredom and carelessness is already a problem in the industry) to kill 100,000s of people and render the benefits of whole industry null and void. Chernobyl was tiny compared to what can happen. Why promote an industry whose benefits can back-fire so magnificently?
These are but a few of the problems that must be addressed. The debate is not one-sided, as much as pro-nuclear apologists would like it to be.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
NZ,
You want to divert the thread to specific issues that have been debated ad nauseum. Frankly, after 30 years of hearing baseless criticisms from people with propose no viable alternative, I'm pretty tired of wasting my efforts responding to people who seek only the thrill of imagining an impending catastrophy.
Water, terrorism, and NIMBYish are by no means unique to nuclear power. In fact, nuclear will probably help the water issue due to desalinization. Terrorism is funded by oil producers, not uranium miners. NIMBYism affects every energy and infrastructure project.
"Waste" is a function of uranium price - recycling and actinide burning will make "waste" go away as a major issue.
Sorry, but one's patience is limited.
JS,
Your first paragraph is a bit of an emotional tirade, but to address that:
1) Re: ad nausteum - all energy issues discussed here have been debated repeatedly. If you're sick of it, why post?
2) The concerns are questions of viability, and they are not baseless.
3) Here's a viable alternative: work towards a society that uses less energy through energy efficiency and fazing out ridiculously wasteful energy usage. Not a hard concept to grasp and there are innumerable ways of achieving it on a personal level.
4) Who said anything about "imagining an impending catastrophe"? If you refer to possible accidents or terrorism, these are legitimate concerns for the industry.
The rest:
1) Correct: issues with water and terrorism are not "unique" to nuclear power. I never said they were. But compare a major accident or a terrorist attack at a nuclear plant to the same thing at any other electric facility and you have two incredibly different
pictures. Why compare apples and freight trains!?! A major accident at a nuclear facility (and there have been a few near misses) could have a devastating effect, to which Chernobyl would pale in comparison. Water is admittedly an issue in most energy paradigms, but desalination is merely a way of increasing the pollution/environmental damage aspect of running a nuclear plant.
2) Terrorism is "funded by oil producers"? Ha! Was that a serious comment? Do you mean oil producers like the USA? Presumably you mean somewhere in the middle east... and I love the way you contrast oil producers with uranium miners in that comment, implying that uranium miners are the antithesis of terrorists and therefore nuclear is somehow good as well... nice one!
3) NIMBY: Yep, but I'd live next to a bunch of photovoltaic cells, or a hydro dam, but never a nuclear plant. And I suspect a lot of other people would be the same.
4) Waste: Yes, one way the US recycles its waste uranium is to fire it at foreign soldiers/civilians, but let's assume you're talking about a more constructive approach. Actinide and FP burning, and recycling will at best reduce waste, not make it go away. And you conveniently dismiss the fact that there is a lot of radioactive waste from mining, processing and general operation of a nuclear plant. That will not "go away as a major issue" either.
Yes I have diverted the threat slightly. But all of these dicussions loosely hinge around the subject of oil peak production and mitigating future energy demands: so how do you propose nuclear will help mitigate peak oil? The issues raised still need to be addressed. The current fleet of new nuclear facilities envisaged worldwide is hardly going to increase our available energy (adding less than 2% over the next 25 years). If you want to suggest proliferating this energy source beyond current goals you'd better address the issues seriously, rather than dismissing them with glib remarks about your patience running thin...
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
Let us compare possible deaths related to other energy sources.
-Coal over 1 million people die each year from air pollution from coal. Particulates from coal cause increased heart and lung disease. No accident needed. It is just happening.
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/01/particulates-from-coal-and-oil....
thousands more dead and sick from mercury and arsenic from coal. (that little issue of mercury in fish, perhaps you have heard about it with warnings about feeding children tuna). 27000 extra deaths per year in the USA which has cleaner plants than China and India.
5,000 to 10,000 dead each year in the coal mines.
Coal does not just kill it increases the sickness of people. Perhaps 25% increase in medical costs. (medicare problems made worse by coal)
40% of rail traffic is for moving billions of tons of coal. So 40% of rail maintenance is a subsidy for coal.
Also, the billions of tons of coal pollution includes thousands of tons of uranium and thorium. Instead of using it sensibly for nuclear power one would rather have coal industry dirty bombs. More radiation released from coal than from nuclear energy.
chernobyl, 50 people died and few thousand sick.
That is a regular half hour for coal. In a 30 minutes, coal has killed the one incident in 40 some years for nuclear. Toss in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Still less than 3 months of coal. 1952 london fog, 14,000 die over 2 weeks from weather that trapped coal pollution.
-Oil also contributes to air pollution. (plus some people die when people fight over the oil.)
Blow up a refinery that is located in a populated area. It would kill thousands.
-Hydro. Blow up one of the big dams. How many people get killed in the flooding.
2. Terrorists. An overhyped issue. How many dead from terroism including 9/11. Less than air pollution. Less than coal mining. Less than criminal murder in the USA. Less than traffic accidents. Why is terrorism driving policy ?
3. NIMBY. You don't want a nuclear plant. Yet do you go vacation in France ? It is the most popular vacation destination. You just got closer to the 58 nuclear plants around that nation. People move closer to nuclear reactors all the time. The existing nuclear reactors are beside all the high density population centers. People have extended vacations and move for work to places with nuclear reactors all the time. Often they look around and say, isn't this place nice. Clean air, lovely countryside etc...
East coast USA, California all have most of the people and most of the nuclear plants. Where do people move to work? The coasts.
Canada most of the plants in Ontario. Where are most of the people.
4. Waste. Once the actinides are handled what is left has half lives of at most 30 years and it is about 5% by weight. those materials can also be used for other purposes. But hold it for 90 years and their is only 1/8th of it left.
how long does coal waste hang around? What is the half life of mercury ?
5. Proliferation.
Proliferation has not killed anyone. The only nuclear bombs used were by the US. Any country that has gotten them since has not used them. Proliferation has killed no one.
Proliferation to who? 40 countries now have nuclear material and know how sufficient to make nuclear bombs.
200 million people were killed in wars and conflict in the 20th century. How many were killed by nukes?
It is taking Iran and N Korea a long time to get their nukes. They have the main know how since AQ Kkan told them in the 1980's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Qadeer_Khan
Nuclear war is also overhyped. Tokyo firebombing killed 100,000 over a few days back in WW2. Over 2 years of operation rolling thunder in Vietnam, the US dropped 500 times the bombs that tokyo firebombing did.
What are the real incremental risks from more nuclear reactors ? We are mainly talking about more reactors in the USA, China, India, Russia, S Korea, Japan. All places that either have nuclear weapons or can easily make them. All places that already have nuclear reactors.
The enrichment and the weapon making do not use the power generating reactors. It is why Isreal has nuclear weapons and no power generating reactors.
So the 20 years where people have not been seriously building more nuclear plants in the US has cost an extra 27,000 lives each year from coal pollution. 200 plants could have been built for less coal usage. Letting real people die in the tens of thousands each year in the US and in the millions around the world because we have screwed up sense of risk and irrational fears and beliefs.
We can turn this around and we should do it quickly. Filtering devices can be cheaply and quickly placed on all coal power stations. Then we can ramp up the nuclear and alternatives.
Terrorism/deaths: The potential issue here may indeed be lopsided when compared to the number of people whose lives are shortened by coal and other energy sources, however: 1) public reaction in the event of a terrorist attack on a nuclear facility would either cause huge problems for the industry, or more likely, cause a severe tightening on already strained civil liberties; and 2) I am not advocating coal as a clean energy resource either, and would prefer to see society develop along the lines of decreased energy usage, not increased usage.
Terrorism drives policy because it gives government an easy excuse to enact whatever policy it wishes on the pretext of protecting people. But that is another topic...
Waste: Agreed that waste products from other energy sources, eg coal, are a major problem. But also note that other products apart from the main actinides need to be addressed throughout the nuclear fuel cycle from mining onwards... See above - I prefer the notion of decreasing energy comsumption worldwide to help alleviate the problem of waste across all industries. Nuclear simply presents another chance for us to face another waste problem.
NIMBY: And many people living near nuclear reactors would probably prefer to be living near a hillside of photovoltaic cells instead. Recent polls in Australia over the nuclear debate show 66% opposed to living near a nuclear plant (25% were positive). You can of course argue this is just a lack of education, if you are pro-nuclear.
"Also, the billions of tons of coal pollution includes thousands of tons of uranium and thorium. Instead of using it sensibly for nuclear power one would rather have coal industry dirty bombs. More radiation released from coal than from nuclear energy."
If you replaced a large portion of coal derived energy with nuclear you would simply be lessening the problems from coal, while exacerbating those from nuclear - swapping one for the other. Either coal mining will continue, or uranium mining will substitute it... with substitution situations like those at Heathgate, using acid ISL mining, not treating waste properly and not rehabilitating the environment in order to ensure a profit are likely to become more common.
Ramping up nuclear and alternatives will add to systemic problems with the way we run our society. Not alleviate them. But that is perhaps getting into another discussion...
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
NZ,
My mistake was to respond to your post. We can and often do have logical debates on the arguments were we share our experiences and insights. I learn a lot and have, on ocassion, even changed my mind!
What you seem to be doing is engaging in "meme warfare." Keep bringing up the same issues over and over again, no matter that the questions have been answered to most people. By repeating a set of charges over and over again, most people will have tuned out to any rational rebuttal - it takes too long.
As to terrorism, I realized that I can't answer. While I'm on the "A-team" in the middle of the design process, I do not have any authorization to access site security information. This is a legitimate restriction on public knowledge. The government works with our assigned managers and designers and our designs and constructions have to meet the government's inspectors satisfaction or no license. It also means that there is no responsible way to publicly address this meme. That may be why it keeps coming up.
Your latest assertion about problems with uranium mining will just replace problems with coal mining must have missed that photo of the new German coal shovel. This machine can scope up a house in one bite. That one shovel could mine ALL the current demand for uranium by itself. The scale is just so different.
To give it numbers, burning one atom of coal yeilds about 2 electron volts (2 ev). Spliting one atom of uranium yields 200,000,000 ev. That's an eight orders of magnitude difference.
“But compare a major accident or a terrorist attack at a nuclear plant to the same thing at any other electric facility and you have two incredibly different pictures.”
This statement is not substantiated. A terrorist attack would be make more casualties at a classical civilian target rather than in a nuclear plant. If a PWR was to be detroyed (for external or even internal reasons) the released radioactivity would be much less than in Chernobyl, because PWRs operate with a Negative Void Coefficient (the nuclear reaction stops when the coolant water is removed). The only way to obtain a severe nuclear accident would be to attack a RMBK reactor...
“A major accident at a nuclear facility (and there have been a few near misses) could have a devastating effect, to which Chernobyl would pale in comparison.”
This statement is again not substantiated. The Chernobyl accident is about the worst possible scenario that can happen in a nuclear power plant (a steam explosion in a nuclear reactor with High Positive Void Coefficient and without containment).
“The NAS recommends 300,000 years as the minimum safe repository time. We cannot guarantee anywhere will be safe for that long. Nor should we reply on society in 1000 years to have the available energy, expertise to, or knowledge of the necessity to, move that waste should a chosen site become compromised through unforseen geological or other factors. “
The nuclear waste issue is solved. There are ways to keep highly radioactive material away from the food chain system until the natural decay will make any postulated leak unsignificant with respect with the background radiation level.
I invite you to read the relevant section of the book from Bernard Cohen,
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/
Excerp from Chapter 11 HAZARDS OF HIGH-LEVEL RADIOACTIVE WASTE — THE GREAT MYTH:
“Since the waste loses 99% of its toxicity after 600 years, it is often said that our principal concern should be limited to the short term, the first few hundred years. Some people panic over the requirement of security even for hundreds of years. They point out that very few of the structures we build can be counted on to last that long, and that our political, economic, and social structures may be completely revolutionized within that time period. The fallacy in that reasoning is that it refers to our environment here on the surface of the earth, where it is certainly true that most things don't last for hundreds of years. However, if you were a rock 2,000 feet below the surface, you would find the environment to be very different. If all the rocks under the United States more than 1,000 feet deep were to have a newspaper, it couldn't come out more than once in a million years, because there would be no news to report. Rocks at that depth typically last many tens of millions of years without anything eventful occurring. They may on rare occasions be shaken around or even cracked by earthquakes or other catastrophic events, but this doesn't change their position or the chemical interaction with their surroundings.”
todblog claims that 20 reactors could not be built simultaneously.
Interesting yet 28 are being built simultaneously now and the industry is not at full production. GE, mitsubishi and other makers are gearing up.
http://www.uic.com.au/reactors.htm
Plants are getting completed in 4-5 years.
We already made 443 reactors mostly from 1960-1980.
The claim that it would take 250 years to make 1000 nuclear plants is absurd.
They can't build that many. But they did and they are.
The new plants are getting completed over the next 5 years.
http://www.platts.com/Magazines/Insight/2006/december/2xu006120BO7J1U053...
Then they work on the next 64 that on order and advanced planning.
Current reactors can get up-powered by 50% using donut shaped fuel from MIT research.
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=20260
The current nuclear plants are filing for the extensions to 60 years of operation and most will file for extensions after that.
Production is ramping up.
http://www.uic.com.au/nip16.htm
The fleet expansion will be manpower limited for a decade or so.
The current US job market for engineers with experience is fished out. If you can legitimately put "nuclear" on your resume and you want to work and are flexible as to where, I'll get you a job.
BTW, it takes about 8 years in the US. Two or three years on the front end just for licensing so, yea, you can BUILD one in 5 years IF you have the permits and the steel forgings for the pressure vessel.
a plant in licensing phase is not tieing up construction capacity.
You do get your ingots ordered and in the pipeline and your forging slot reserved.
The licensing is largely manpower intensive.
We do hope to get better and faster at getting these plants on-line.
We'll need a supportive Congress to keep the rules square so that opponents can't use legal delays on standard designs provided by reliable suppliers.
I think you guys need to think in terms of a World War II scale mitigation effort where something like half of national income is devoted to rebuilding the energy infrastructure on a crash basis. If they threw trillions of dollars at you and said you could take or draft any resource you need and break through any of the legal and political barriers that are not needed to make it work, I think you guys could build a lot of reactors in parallel and in a lot less time that ever in the past.
That may be hard to imagine now but the alternative might be several billion people dying. It has been possible to mobilize nations like that in the past.
The claims of 10 years to complete construction is wrong. We can look at past and current actual construction times.
Some plants have taken about 6 years because of some project delays.
http://www.power-technology.com/projects/tianwan/
China is looking to get into plant construction.
the US will make over 20 plants over the next 25 years.
At least 20 reactors will be built and the USA will have over 120 operating reactors in 2032
200 reactors worldwide built and over 600 in operation by 2032.
http://advancednano.blogspot.com/2007/02/over-200-nuclear-plants-being.html
Canada* 18 now, 2 under construction 1.54 GW, 2 planned 2 GW
China 10 now, 5 under construction 4.1 GW, 13 planned 13GW, 50 proposed, 36GW
India 16 now, 7 under construction 3.2GW, 4 planned 2.8GW, 15 proposed, 11.1GW
Japan 55 now, 2 under construction 2.3GW, 11 planned 15GW
S Korea 20 now, 1 under construction 950MW, 7 planned 8.25GW
Russia 31 now, 3 under construction 2.65GW, 8 planned 9.6GW, 18 proposed 21.6GW
Wow!
So let's get this straight. Nuclear power currently supplies about 5% of the world's energy needs (435 reactors). In 25 years we'll have about 600 reactors up and running. An increase of about 1/3. So nuclear should supply about 6.7% of CURRENT energy needs in 25 years.
If we've hit Peak Oil now, that news is about as positive as a kick in the nuts :)
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
My indication was the bare minimum based on no new orders. Just the current in hand work. This is before anyone has turned to nuclear power as major part of the save the world from air pollution and global warming and enery crisis.
I did indicate that all of the water boiler reactors can be up powered by 50% by just making donut shaped fuel instead of cylinders. So an increase of 50% right there. The new reactors are bigger than the old reactors already and would also have the 50% power boost.
So it would be double current energy just from business as usual lower case.
If someone were serious about this and saying oh no Peak Oil, global warming or XYZ will wreck us. Then one would ramp up all alternatives, conservation/efficiency and nuclear power. Shorten up the licensing time to a month. Double up reactors at existing sites and co-locate at coal plants (they are already connected to the grid, have a lot of space) etc... Research into mass produceable designs with shortening build times. Kick up thorium and molten salt reactor projects.
That is where we go from 30 more reactors by 2012. Then add 100 more by 2016. Accelerated up powering by 50% completed then as well. Then add 300 more by 2020 (shortening build cycles from further design research work. Ramping up from concerted efforts to build the infrastructure. Research automation and training of the engineers and workers) Then add 800 more by 2024. Then add 1200 more by 2028. Another 1500 by 2032. Then you about 4000 reactors (some old ones retired) most averaging about 2GW. and you have 8000GW. Combined with ramped up alternatives, you have retired the coal plants and have handled peak oil. 3 million fewer people die who would have died each year from air pollution are saved. But this is just if one were to get serious about solving supposedly serious problems.
Assuming your scenario is possible - is it better to have a 10-fold increase in waste/pollution/etc. in the next 25 years from the nuclear industry ... or begin changing they way we live to a more energy efficient society?
Pro-nukes will argue for the ramp-up no doubt.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
We got three huge problems, peak oil, global warming and the need for poor people to get decent living conditions. We need to do both, its not enough to ramp up nuclear power or save power.
I'm sure there are plenty of individuals in the nuclear industry who see themselves working towards helping with some or all of those things, but by law companies are required to act in the best financial interests of their shareholders first and foremost. A 10-fold ramp up in the nuclear industry would cost in excess of $4 trillion for the US plants alone (that's over 10% of all investment $ across every industry for 25 years - a big ask), assuming projections for lower cost uniform designs and no cost overruns. Most of this incredible amount of money would have to come from investers who in turn have to be compensated. The nuclear industry would be beholden to them to return profits, above all else. Even if they give lip service to energy efficiency, the industry will ultimately push for greater overall power usage, not less.
"You can never solve a problem on the level on which it was created."
Albert Einstein
It is a good thing to increase the use of nuclear electricity for heating and transportation when that displaces oil and natural gas. And nuclear power could eat coal powers lunch.
I hope the nuclear industry can make a good profit while doing this. The profit is needed for the industries expansion and some of it could also be invested in for instance mass installation of ground source heat pumps.
Complete lists of nuclear reactors. When they started construction, When they were completed and how much power they generate
US
http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page.pl/pris.powrea.htm?country=US&sort=&...
Canada
http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page.pl/pris.powrea.htm?country=CA&sort=&...
China
http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page.pl/pris.powrea.htm?country=CN&sort=&...
France
http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page.pl/pris.powrea.htm?country=FR&sort=&...
Japan
http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page.pl/pris.powrea.htm?country=JP&sort=&...
Russia
http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page.pl/pris.powrea.htm?country=RU&sort=&...
Slovakia
http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page.pl/pris.powrea.htm?country=SK&sort=&...
India
http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page.pl/pris.powrea.htm?country=IN&sort=&...
Taiwan
http://www.iaea.org/cgi-bin/db.page.pl/pris.powrea.htm?country=TW&sort=&...