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Uranium Supply Update
Posted by Gail the Actuary on July 8, 2011 - 4:16am
Will uranium supply be adequate for planned nuclear electricity? This question has seen sharply differing views. The purpose of this post is to give an update, showing where we are now.
The supply situation is recently looking better, partly because of an increase in uranium supply from Kazakhstan and partly because of cutbacks in plans for new reactors in response to the Fukushima accident. Reactors are very long-lived, however, and providing sufficient long-term uranium supply when oil supply is declining due to peak oil may be a challenge.
Background
Figure 1 shows a history of uranium consumption and uranium mined. The reason that supply from mines can be less than current uses is because some of the supply is from previously mined uranium. Back in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, far more uranium was mined than was needed for peaceful purposes. A large part of this excess uranium was used by both the United States and the Soviet Union to make nuclear bombs. Some of it was stockpiled as well.
Since governments don’t normally give out details relating to strategic materials, not all of the details are known regarding the uranium mined during the early period. For example, we don’t know precisely how much uranium was mined by the Former Soviet Union (Figure 1 shows one estimate), and we don’t know how much excess military inventory Russia has today.
We do know that a large amount of this previously-mined uranium has made its way to the uranium marketplace. Starting in 1994, the Russians entered into a 20 year agreement called Megatons to Megawatts to sell recycled nuclear bomb material to the United States, for use in nuclear power reactors. Since this program is scheduled to end in 2013, one question that has been raised is whether the marketplace will be able to create enough increased production soon enough, to meet the market’s needs.
Several studies were done that came to the conclusion that there likely would be a gap of some kind–too slow ramp up of new mines, or concerns about inadequate reserves, or “peak uranium.” One of these was a study in 2001 by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Another was a study by Energy Watch Group in 2006. The Oil Drum ran a series of four posts by Michael Dittmar in 2009 that also forecast shortages.
Individual commenters have questioned whether these studies were correct. The huge overhang of excess inventory depressed prices. With so much supply flowing into the marketplace from recycled bomb material and other inventory, there wasn’t a need for a great deal of current production. Perhaps the relatively low reserve numbers simply reflected the low prices of the day.
Now that we are getting closer to the 2013 date, we can see better what is actually happening in the market place. We know that 2013 is not an absolute cut off. Russia may still continue to sell some recycled bomb material, although it will no longer will have an obligation to do so, and the prices will likely be higher. The United States also has a considerable amount of excess inventory that with reprocessing could be used by nuclear reactors. (See 2008 report and 2009 presentation).
We can also see from Figure 1 that for the year 2010, uranium mining is producing 78% of current use–a big improvement over the situation a few years ago. US legislation passed in 2008 placed annual quotas on Russian imports, presumably to try to help markets function more normally.
Uranium Supply and Prices
Recent uranium production is higher because of increased production from Kazakhstan. Apart from Kazakhstan, production is flat or slightly declining. Kazakhstan claims that it has the ability to eventually ramp up production to 30,000 metric tonnes per year, but indicates that it is planning an output plateau of 20,000 to 25,000 metric tonnes a year. Its production was 17,803 metric tonnes in 2010, so it is not too far from its planned plateau.
If Kazakhstan were the only source of new supply, there would likely still be a gap between demand and current production, because even at 30,000 metric tonnes, Kazakhstan wouldn’t by itself make up the shortfall, although it would come close, if no new reactors are opened. Besides Kazakhstan, there seems to be other new supply planned. From Australia we read:
YELLOWCAKE export out of Port Adelaide is poised to increase almost sevenfold over coming years.
About 5000 tonnes of uranium oxide, or yellowcake, is now shipped out of Port Adelaide, but a combination of new SA mines, the Olympic Dam expansion and new West Australian mines will lift exports to about 37,000 tonnes a year in about 15 years.
So the uranium / nuclear plant balance doesn’t look as bleak as a few years ago. Uranium production is now rising because of supply from Kazakhstan, and more production elsewhere is planned. One thing that is helping supply is higher prices.
Prices are clearly substantially higher since 2008, and these higher prices seem to be stimulating supply. (Spot prices are now $54.25, or a little higher than recent average contract prices. Most uranium is sold on long-term contracts.) It takes several years for new mines to ramp up, so some of the higher price effect is not yet being felt.
At its current price, the cost of uranium is only a small share of the price of nuclear electricity. According to the World Nuclear Association, as of March 2011, uranium costs amounted to the equivalent to 0.77 cents per kWh, which is less than one-tenth of the typical sales price of electricity. Because of this, there would seem to be “room” for uranium prices to rise further, without being a major obstacle to electricity sales.
In the United States, uranium production has varied (Figure 4). Even at the higher production levels since 2006, uranium production is still very low compared to the amount used by the United States (Figure 5).
Demand for Uranium
Clearly, the adequacy of uranium supply depends partly on demand–how many reactors are being built or being taken off-line.
Figure 6 shows that electricity from nuclear power plants grew rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s. The number of new plants tapered off after the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, although ones in the planning stages at the time of the accident were still built. Since 2004, nuclear electricity production has been on a bumpy plateau. Because of the lack in growth in nuclear use, there has not been much need for new uranium production, except to offset the longstanding shortfall in uranium mined compared to current use.
Now, following the Fukushima accident in Japan (March 11, 2011), many countries are again rethinking their commitment to nuclear power generation. Germany has closed eight of its older nuclear reactors permanently and is making plans to close the other nine by 2022. A referendum in Italy has rejected a plan to generate 25% of the country’s electrical power from nuclear by 2030. Switzerland has said it will not replace its five nuclear power plants when they reach the ends of their useful lives.
In the absence of changes because of the Fukushima accident, the World Nuclear Association information shows that a large number of nuclear facilities are under construction, planned or proposed. If all of the nuclear power plants that have been proposed are actually built, nuclear generating capacity would more than double from the 2010 level. Just adding the reactors that are under construction or planned would increase world nuclear electricity capacity by 62%.
The countries that are building new capacity include many non-OECD countries. The country with the largest number of planned facilities is China, with 26 reactors under construction, 52 reactors planned, and 120 reactors proposed, for a total of 198 reactors. If all of these were to be built, China would have approximately double the nuclear capacity that the US has today. (The United States is currently the world’s largest producer of nuclear electricity.)
The two countries behind China in adding new reactors are Russia and India. Russia currently has 10 nuclear power plants under construction, 14 planned, and another 30 proposed, making a theoretical total of 54. India has 5 under construction, 18 planned, and 40 proposed, for a theoretical total of 63 new reactors. The list of countries planning new reactors is very long, and includes many from the “Emerging Markets,” including Bangladesh, Pakistan, Turkey, and Vietnam.
What seems likely to happen is that some OECD countries will scale back their nuclear power plans, and even take some off-line, after the Fukushima accident. It is not as clear that the rest of the world will take similar actions. Electricity use has been rising much more rapidly outside the OECD than in the OECD. As a result, many of the countries outside the OECD see a pressing need for new sources of electricity, and few other good options. I would expect that many of these countries will go forward with their nuclear plans if they can figure out the financing to make these plants feasible. They may find ways to cut corners (like putting them next to the ocean, with once-through cooling with sea water) to keep costs down. If planning is not good enough, short-cuts can raise accident possibilities, though.
We will have to wait and see how this all works out, in terms of implications for needed nuclear fuel. The situation doesn’t look as bleak as it did a few years ago because of new uranium sources, but adequate supply is not entirely a “done deal” either. In their 2001 study, “Analysis of Uranium Supply to 2050,” the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) showed the graph I show as Figure 7 as their forecast of future uranium production. (The IEAE is now saying Latest Data Shows Long-Term Security of Uranium Supply, so it has backed off from the 2001 assessment shown in Figure 7.)
Figure 7 shows the shape of curve a person would expect uranium supply to have–rising to a peak, and then declining, since it is a finite resource, like oil, or like copper. New sources of uranium supply will be helpful, but eventually mines will begin to deplete, and we will be faced with finding new sources. Instead of talking about finding “new Saudi Arabias of oil,” we may someday talk about the need for “new Kazakhstans of uranium.”
Besides finding additional uranium supply, there may be other “work arounds.” With nuclear energy, there is at least the possibility of reprocessing spent fuel, but suitable reprocessing facilities need to be built in advance, if this is the plan. There is also the possibility of thorium being used in some of the yet-to-be-built reactors, if the details of making thorium work can be figured out.
One question those building nuclear plants should be thinking about is, “What impact will peak oil have on uranium availability?” Theoretically, uranium production can go on as before, if there is sufficient oil for essential services (extracting the uranium, maintaining the roads, raising the food that the workers need to eat, and transporting the uranium to where it is used, for example). Whether or not this whole process can go on for the 50 or 60 year lifetime of reactors now being built is an open question. Adequate oil supply will also be needed during the period of decommissioning, and for servicing spent fuel, after the reactors close.
Previous Estimates
Back in 2009, Michael Dittmar and Brian Wang made a bet regarding how world uranium production would progress and how nuclear power generation would progress, with Michael Dittmar betting on the low side, and Brian Wang betting on the high side.
For the year 2010, it looks as though Brian Wang won both bets. Brian Wang bet that uranium production would be above 50,500 metric tonnes. World uranium production was 53,663 metric tonnes, so Brian was the winner.
With respect to electricity generated from nuclear energy, the dividing line between the two bets was 2,630 billion kWe. Actual generation was 2767 billion kWe according to BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy, so again Brian is the winner.
There is no actual money changing hands with respect to this bet. The only prize I remember hearing about was a possible bottle of wine for me.
This article originally appeared on Our Finite World.
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Note that if Fig 2 applied to all liquids oil production it would be comparable to production rising to ca. 100 kb/d 2008-2010. Nothing I ever read about uranium extraction suggested to me that it would go over some kind of cliff in the early 21st century; certainly not from becoming over dependent on stocks, as per the Mt-Mw program. Miners seem to be a bit more adaptable than all that.
With the market price for yellowcake at $50/lb, what does translate to in $ per MWh of electricity generated? Assuming modern but not cutting edge reactor design. I would be very surprised if it was more than a few percent of the wholesale price of electricity.
I think it is reasonable to assume that the global resource of Uranium will be similar to other heavy metals, a small resource of high grade ores, and a much larger resource of low grade ores. I have read here on TOD that there are large areas of the planet that have not been prospected for uranium ores, because there has been up to now no anticipated supply and demand imbalance. If we do face shortages of uranium in the medium term it will be because of inadequate planning or geopolitical issues, not geological constraints.
The pro/anti nuclear debate that has been simmering in many OECD countries for 30 years is hotting up, as fossil energy resources feel the strain of exponential growth in global demand. Many green campaigners are turning pro-nuclear on the basis of the necessity to curtail fossil, especially coal, consumption to reduce damaging climate change. However, nuclear is currently a tiny percentage of global electricity production, and even if the most optimistic expansion plans of China etc. were realised, it would not reduce global demand for coal in a BAU economic model. electricity demand would continue to grow faster than nuclear plants could be built. Thoughts of it replacing coal and so cutting global CO2 emissions are pie in the sky. China has the policy of building every possible form of power supply, coal, gas, nuclear, renewable, but in the west argument is too often nuclear verses renewables, on the basis that we can't afford both. What the pro-nuclear green campaigners do not see is that nuclear does not scale any better than renewables - there is NO BAU solution to climate change, and in practice there is no BAU solution to energy security at all.
In a world were BAU is not going to happen, the fewer active nuclear reactors that require functioning engineering and economic infrastructure to avoid radioactive meltdown the happier I will be.
Yep, what he said.
"Insanity, is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
To me at least, there seems to be a huge disconnect between all projections for future energy generation from any sources, be they coal, oil, nuclear etc... and the simple reality that they all depend on the continuation of BAU.
What makes the disconnect even more glaring is that often the people making the projections are fully aware that a continuation of BAU is impossible.
Recommended reading or watching:
A SHORT COURSE IN THINKING ABOUT THINKING
Edge Master Class 07
DANIEL KAHNEMAN
The 'Cognitive Dissonance' it runs deep among us...
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it."
--Upton Sinclair
That may indeed be true. However what Kahneman is talking about is something very different, it's worth a read.
The BAU scenarios assume that the world can continue to extract huge amounts of coal, oil and gas and dump the combustion products as they will. Nuclear scenarios are explicitly not BAU.
An extreme non-BAU scenario is a complete nuclearization of the USA using fast-breeder reactors. Producing 100 quads/yr of thermal energy from fission of plutonium requires approximately 1310 tons/yr at 76.5 trillion BTU/ton. Plutonium is bred from U-238. The USA already has approximately 470,000 tons of elemental uranium in inventory as depleted uranium (mostly as UF4 and UF6).
Such a scenario puts limits of energy supply literally a century or more into the future, eliminates environmental issues of energy extraction, and eliminates issues of CO2/GHG dumping.
Engineer-Poet
The BAU scenarios assume that the world can continue to extract huge amounts of coal, oil and gas and dump the combustion products as they will. Nuclear scenarios are explicitly not BAU.
While I agree with most of your statements further down about nuclear power, your definition of BAU seems at odds with the real world. Sure most energy in most countries today comes from coal, oil and gas, both renewable and nuclear provide a significant proportion in many countries. Surely transitioning from FF to nuclear and renewables is just as BAU as transitioning from wood and coal to oil was a century ago!
If most people continue to live and work in similar houses , and at similar jobs(ie manufacturing and service oriented, rather than farming or in the energy industry), I would call that BAU. Will it really be a big change that oil and coal workers are replaced by nuclear and renewable workers, or that people drive electric rather than ICE vehicles, or that homes are heated with electric heat pumps rather than natural gas?
Some non BAU scenarios popular at TOD are a complete collapse of tje financial system, the electricity grid, long range transport, mass migration out of cities, to a subsistence rural lifestyle. Replacing coal-fired power by nuclear reactors or gasoline power vehicles by electric powered doesn't really sound too different from BAU.
Wait just a minute there. You're saying that my definition of BAU, which uses nuclear for a minority fraction of electric generation and almost nothing else (industrial or transportation), is at odds with the real world?
'There's glory for you!'
'I don't know what you mean by "glory",' Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. 'Of course you don't — till I tell you. I meant "there's a nice knock-down argument for you!"'
'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'
'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'
Engineer-Poet
Wait just a minute there. You're saying that my definition of BAU, which uses nuclear for a minority fraction of electric generation and almost nothing else (industrial or transportation), is at odds with the real world?
I was referring to the assumptions:
The BAU scenarios assume that the world can continue to extract huge amounts of coal, oil and gas and dump the combustion products as they will.
Many countries are assuming big reductions in CO2 emissions by 2050, including the phase out of coal fired power generation and a significant replacement of oil used for land transportation. Generating 15% electricity from nuclear, 15% from renewables and 70% from FF, as the world does today isnt that different from generating >90% from nuclear plus renewables, and replacing all cars and light trucks that use ICE with similar vehicles that use electric power isnt really going to be a big change( unlike the massive shift from rural small scale farming to urban living that occurred in the last century ).
Now if you are saying that replacing virtually all FF with nuclear is going to require most people to relocate where they live, change the type of work, live in a different type of housing, abandon private vehicle transport then I would agree with you that;
An extreme non-BAU scenario is a complete nuclearization of the USA using fast-breeder reactors.
Perhaps I am missing something, but will most people notice the replacement of coal and gas fired electricity generation by nuclear or renewable energy? And will changing from ICE vehicles to EV really be a life changing experience similar to changing from horse to ICE transport?
Maybe I'm too tired - but BAU to me is simply continuing to burn all the fossil fuels we can economically extract while ignoring the long term impact of accumulating CO2 - which is an egregious failure of civilization to address the long term common good.
A nuclear build-out which displaces coal and gas to the degree necessary to prevent our goose being cooked seems unlikely at this point and thus is not business as usual, and in fact will require a lot of work by a lot of good people to make happen.
It is often ignored that gas has a collectively huge carbon impact - a world filled with gas backed windmills I think will put us in the same place as coal, but perhaps a little slower.
There is a reasonable baseline scenario with a lot more buildout of nuclear power. This is the stated plan that China has put forward.
China is indicating that they will build to 80-120 GWe of nuclear power by 2020 and more by 2030. Perhaps 300 GWe or more.
Also, China has indicated that they will start exporting nuclear reactors by 2013. Then China and South Korea will both be exporting nuclear reactors that are about half the cost of reactors from Japan and France and the USA.
China is well under way with its pebble bed reactor and with more breeder reactors. Russia is working with China on breeder reactors.
China, South Korea, Russia, India is where the nuclear power growth will be coming from.
Middle Eastern and other countries will buy their reactors from China, S Korea, Russia and India.
China will use nuclear to blunt and reduce the usage of fossil fuels.
China has passed the USA in total electricity usage already. China is growing energy usage that by 5-8% per year. The USA is at flat energy usage to 1-1.5% growth. This is why the new construction of any new energy is mostly in China and then will also be in India. Asia is where the bulk of the economic growth is and that is where the new energy construction is. All the US and Europe are doing is replacing what gets to old or breaks. With occasional build in the states and regions with some growth (like the Texas the Southern US states.)
this is the baseline or business as expected case for 2011-2030.
This will change the economics of many related things (especially in transport), with follow-on effects on infrastructure, etc. This is not BAU. BAU is "drill baby drill" and promoting the SUVization of personal vehicles running on liquid fuels. BAU is assuming that liquid-fuel-dependent vehicles will be widely useful and used for the duration of the planning horizon.
You have a different definition of "big change" than I do. Absent a radical improvement in battery energy density that I do not expect, electrification means big changes in transport patterns, infrastructure or both. I could go on at length about some likely results of the collision of a forced shift back to inner-ring suburbs with the Mexicanization of the population and culture, but that's OT for this thread.
You seem to have a very particular scenario in mind when you say "non-BAU", as if someone had a trademark on it. Non-BAU™ will have plenty of surprises regardless of what road is taken. That's the nature of change.
No, and that's the point. But they will certainly notice when they change their commuting patterns because they can't afford the extra payment for a long-range battery in their Volt and they can't fit gasoline into their budget except for emergencies and special occasions. They'll notice when every major road has streetcar tracks, and most of the delivery and garbage trucks use them too. There'll be lots to notice even in a nuclear scenario.
Engineer Poet
You seem to have a very particular scenario in mind when you say "non-BAU", as if someone had a trademark on it. Non-BAU™ will have plenty of surprises regardless of what road is taken. That's the nature of change.
I did ask what you meant by BAU and if you are saying that a world with many surprises and lots of changes is non-BAU then this would imply that over the last 100 years most people have been living in a non-BAU world.
My own definition of BAU would be a world where the rate of change in the next 100 years is about the same as occurred in the last 100 years, so a significant shift of mass transport back to trams for people living in Sydney is only going back 50 years. As I recall, it involved a lot more walking to tram lines or train stations(up to 3km) so for many the cost of a battery capable of moving a vehicle the 6km round trip(1-2kWh storage) is going to seem insignificant even at today's battery costs. In fact in Australia most vehicles purchased are <$10,000 above the lowest cost vehicle so I conclude that most people are prepared to spend what would be required to have daily personal electric transportation.
Would it really be a terrible world when gasoline is only used in emergencies and for special occasions? Isn't this how we now use kerosine lamps(camping and during electric power interruptions) when 100 years ago kerosine lamps were used daily?
A lot of people appear to think that non-BAU™ = hardship (and non-hardship = BAU™). I expect consumption to have to be pared back for necessary investments to be made, but anything much beyond that doesn't seem to be necessary (though it may still happen if policy does not change to address the problem, and the required shift gets bigger the longer we delay).
For the oil companies and OPEC. I'd like to see that as a national goal.
Regarding the cost at $50 /lb, in the article I quote a price of .77 cents per kWh. It would be 1000 times this per MWh, or $7.70 per MWh.
I would agree BAU is unlikely to happen for the long term. It is hard to see that we will have the foresight to close down nuclear reactors in advance of the end of BAU. One way BAU ends is by political changes--by revolution, or by splitting of a country into parts, as with the Former Soviet Union. These could happen very quickly.
Fully utilized, uranium at 76.5 TBTU/ton, $110,000 per ton and 33% thermal efficiency would cost about 1.5 milli-cents per kWh (1.5 cents per MWH).
It has long been argued against nuclear power on the basis that it "requires" BAU. What strikes me is that noone defines exactly what they call "business as usual" and how exactly they envision it to end, how the next state will look like, in what timeframe etc etc.
This is critical IMO. My gut feeling is that if the society falls in disarray nuclear power plants will be pretty much the last thing to worry about. What we should worry about is the preservation of basic utilities of the industrial civilization - food and water supply, personal security, healthcare and critical medicines etc.
For a very recent example, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the 90-ties, Russia experienced almost a complete economic and societal collapse - with hyperinflation, mass poverty, petty crime, dramatic shortening of expected lifespan etc. During that time no significant problems have been had with their 15 operating reactors, some of which are still from the more dangerous RBMK (Chernobyl) type. I attribute this to the fact that societies don't fall apart overnight and the infrastructure to support complex operations such as NPPs does not simply disappear overnight during a collapse... it's a gradual process that can last years. I guess at some point the infrastructure may deteoriate to a point we no longer can maintain a certain technology but then abandoning it is again a gradual process and nothing catastrophic should be expected there.
A notable exception to that is a huge natural or man made disaster that has the capacity to destroy the whole infrastructure overnight as recently evidenced by the Fukushima accident. So, yes if you are worried about megaearthquaekes, tsunamis, asteroid impacts and nuclear wars, you could be worried how the NPP would fare, but I wouldn't worry too much how they would go through an end of BAU (however it takes shape). It won't happen overnight and won't be filmed on TV, I'd rather expect a cascading collapse lasting many generations.
Any fossil-fired plant requires regular deliveries of fuel to operate. A coal plant may have a fuel stockpile good for weeks; a gas plant is only as good as its pipeline.
A light-water reactor can continue operation at least until its next scheduled refueling outage, probably longer. A stockpile of fresh fuel is easy to store and would allow operation for years. Such plants, providing electricity 24/7, would likely form centers of organization from which a collapse could be fought and reversed. They'd be the energetic equivalent of the medieval abbeys full of monks keeping the ancient texts alive through copy and study.
An Integral Fast Reactor could be started with all the fuel required for a 60-year lifespan already in the hot cells.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWcdDwECZU0
the hydo dam generators failed though.
As Gail says, cheap oil is needed for both keeping nuclear reactors going (via uranium mining, processing, & movement) AND shutting them down safely.
As cheap oil is set to go bye-bye shortly, we will have NO economic or physical means to properly shut down these aging, increasingly non-functional nuclear reactors.
So what then? Well, with increasing climate chaos, grid instability and the 2nd Law of Thermo, they will -- one by one -- be 'shut down' Fukushima style.
Key equation: REACTOR - ELECTRICITY = DIRTY BOMB
Tally ho! 'Dirty Bomb Nation', here we come!
I'm sorry, I have never bought this sort of blanket argument. For mission-critical industries oil can and will be made available. Either crude or biofuel. It is all too easy - and lazy - to look at a (realistic) global decline chart of all liquids and just move to the conclusion that every sector of industry will be equally affected. If push comes to shove then oil will be available for a long time hence for these critical industries. Given that the uranium is there then it will be mined if needed.
I will place a bet (that neither of us will be around to see honoured) that there will be some kind of internal combustion engines slurping diesel/bio-diesel in 100 years time. Heck, even 200 years time. And as I have repeatedly said, even monetary concerns such as 'price' will not matter. If need be the engineers, mechanics and other skills can be assembled with only the 'cost' of three square meals a day, a few litres of water, a shirt for their backs and somewhere to lay their heads at night.
"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." A. Einstein. We shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that all the skills and kit mentioned above have to be 'paid' for with the current system. Maybe from a North American perspective mentioning the Commune-ism word still irks, but there is no reason that if need be - and the populace were fully aware of the need - a form of consensual communism could not happily run the most important industries.
I think you are right about the internal combustion engine. It will be around for a very long time.
I do not think nuclear reactors will be. They demand too high a level of education and heavy engineering overhead.
It takes at least 20 years to train a nuclear engineer to the point where they can start to be productive - say from age 5 to 25. They will have a
peak period of maybe 20 years productive work, and then maybe 10 -15 years when they are still useful to have around. How many engineers does one plant need, to design, build, operate, maintain, and decommission? How many people will one nuclear plant provide electricity for, to an OECD standard of lifestyle? What proportion of that number will have the intelligence potential to become nuclear engineers? What proportion of that number can be identified, trained, and persuaded to work in the industry?
And when it is no longer possible to support an OECD lifestyle, what goes first? university education?
Out of 9 billion people, there wold be about 200 million with IQs over 130. So finding people with the intelligence potential to be trained as nuclear engineers should not be a problem.
Lots of occupations require 20 years or more of education and training, e.g. master plumber or electrician.
Most engineers are good for more then 20 years. Heck I know of one nuke chemist that retired at age 78. He was pissed because he still had 1200 hours of sick leave built up that he could not use.
The average world median IQ is not 100 if you assume England as reference (IQ 100, S 15). It is about 90 for all countries. So the percentile is 99,5 or only less than 0,5% of the world population have an IQ over 130 (Mean IQ 90, standard deviation 15). So there are only about 30 million with IQ's over 130.
does it really take 20 years to train a nuclear engineer?
Can't imagine many 5 year olds getting to grips with advanced nuclear physics in between finger painting and nap time.
A tad spurious to include basic education in the length of time needed. And there were plenty of good schools pre-petroleum.
It is hard to educate just a handful, for a handful of selected occupations, and make sure that things don't fall through the cracks.
As long as we are using some petroleum, we are going to need petroleum engineers, and we are going to need all of the other people that keep the production and supply of petroleum happening. If we are still using natural gas and coal, we will need the people going. And we will need the people to maintain nuclear facilities, and probably the wind facilities. We will need physicians to keep at least part of the people well; and we will need someone to grow food for everyone.
If you only pick out a few to take care of, it seems like there is a chance of revolution.
the first nuclear power plants took coal plant operators and gave them a few weeks of training and converted them to nuclear plant operators.
Now it is a 1=2 year training period for nuclear operators.
Power plants - Job training consists of 12 to 25 weeks of classroom instruction, including practice in operating power plants
Nuclear specialties have training programs that last 1 year or more, covering all aspects of nuclear power plant operations.
http://www.michigan.gov/careers/0,1607,7-170-46398-64608--,00.html
China has one or two apprentices following every plant operator, so that after a year or so they have double to triple the staff.
As an ex US Navy reactor technician I can assure you that very good operators can be trained in about one year from top level high school graduates. The Navy has a very good safety record.
Design engineers require more training, however five or ten thousand of those should be able to do the entire development for the nuclear portion of power plant design. The tens of thousands of engineers required for general plant and facilities work building, and maintaining power plants throughout the US need not be as highly trained as design engineers.
Several comments here refer to training people how to function under normal conditions. That's a walk in the park. There is another question:
How do you train people to do what is being done right now in Fukushima? How do you train people to manage in a crisis of such proportions -- including a CEO or a Prime Minister?
I'm not worried about our children training technicians to operate a humming nuke. I'm wondering how you find expert people willing to risk their lives, or worse, risk a painful death from radiation consequences, just to reduce the horrible damage already done, with no end in sight?!
This time around we have bunglers, cowards, unsung heroes, experts, Monday morning quarterbacks, and regulars living in sheer terror, as we speak. How will these people be recruited next week, next year, 50 or 100 years from now?
How often will this be repeated? Will we ever figure out how to shut down unruly nukes before untold damage is done? We are 0 for 3 so far. No Red Adair has shown up yet, near as I know.
Nor do we have conscientious policy-makers sufficiently courageous to look the problem in the eye, nor sufficiently numerate ("trained," if you will) to grasp the risks we face right here and now. Will such leadership emerge?
The navy and the US power reactors do not train their operators to run a reactor that always runs normally. they drill drill drill. Remember in war things get blown up. They are in a sub so everyone pulls together or they all sink together. Apparently the Japanese did not drill enough and perhaps this may explain why we won the war and sunk their battle ships.
That is an excellent point. Success-oriented planning (like several disastrous battles in the Pacific) is a weakness when things inevitably go wrong.
0 for 3? Was Harrisburg PA abandoned without anyone telling me? And I could have sworn that a host of plants, including Shippingport and Big Rock Point, had been decommissioned and all the hot sections removed without incident.
If the anti's could be persuaded to shut up or marginalized enough to end their 40 years of obstruction, the USA could resume its nuclear development program. The US taxpayer has already paid to develop technologies which could radically improve both uranium/thorium efficiency and waste volume, but political opposition has killed them before commercialization. One of these technologies, the Molten Salt Reactor, is as easy to shut down as turning off the circuit breakers and walking away. We know this, because it's what the operators at the MSRE did on Friday evening before they left for the weekend.
You wrote: "It is all too easy - and lazy - to look at a (realistic) global decline chart of all liquids and just move to the conclusion that every sector of industry will be equally affected."
Indeed, when resources get scarce & expensive it's always the most complex, easily-broken, expensive-to-maintain stuff that goes out the window first.
There is nothing more complex, easily-broken, and difficult to maintain than a nuclear reactor.
You can't hope away a ticking (dirty) bomb.
You need to defuse them before they blow.
Can't help but ask: Do you know much about nuclear reactors? Do you know much about how ionizing radioactivity works? You seem to be very certain of your stance, but you don't say anything of worth. Just simplistic anecdotal sentences.
Yes I do. PhD from MIT. The rub is that I also understand things other than nuclear reactors.
What's the PhD in?
dan old chum, not sure you fully took on board the point I was making.
You seemed to be saying that it would not be possible to mine uranium because of peak oil. I was saying that if mankind really needed to mine uranium then the resources would be there to accomplish such a task way, way, way into the future. Even if it would mean a different social contract about how those resources were dished out.
And I could list a hundred other things which are more complex than a nuclear reactor with out pausing for breath ;)
OK Ok. :-) Not the most complex thing. One of the more complex human-made things. How's that? Complex enough that it breaks way too easy & takes way too many ever-scarcer resources to keep it functional and secure on the century scale.
I just don't think we will NEED to mine uranium enough to use ca. 3:1 EROEI (or whatever small ratio it dwindles to before it tanks) fossil energy to do it. i.e. At some point in the not-too-distant future the problem of feeding ourselves will almost certainly consume large amounts of our remaining resources. We won't have the cheap energy slack to mine uranium to run toasters or electric cars or whatever. Or probably even for NH3.
...And I think the mid-century social contract in the US will almost certainly amount to this: feed me! (see my ag essays @ energybulletin)
(to guy above, organic chemistry...am i smart enuf now?)
Only if they are necessarily complex. If you look at the inherent simplicity of molten-salt reactors, they make powdered-coal systems with their pulverizers and gravimetric feeders and various draft fans and whatnot look like Rube Goldberg affairs.
Oh, if we are talking about this ...
"...way, way, way into the future."
Then I think the only possible outcome is green energy. I say this tongue in cheek of course, because I mean chlorophyll. :-) Is there really another option several hundred years into the future of this present society? Several thousand?
Regards,
Cooter
Mining shovels and other mining equipment are often already powered by electric cable, not directly by diesel motors. Hello small modular reactor. Dump trucks have on board diesel generators, but if they had to be powered by electrical cables, it's not a major stretch. Like dieselectric locomotives, they're actually powered by electric motors.
The issue is not so much the technical feasibility of having sufficient oil or biofuel based fuels for certain critical activities. There will always be enough for them in a strictly theoretical sense. The real issue is systemic breakdown brought on by deep economic recession/depression. I see no evidence whatsoever that any government anywhere in the world is moving away from the BAU growth based model we have been on since the start of the industrial revolution (and before). This depends on an ever increasing exploitation of resources that are simply not there. Global growth is finished, but we remain misled by regional and quarterly growth that allows TPTB to think it can somehow all be better again (think PIGS, UK, US). We simply have no idea how to run either a steady state (as Herman Daly suggests) or contracting economy in such a way that people are still housed, fed, schooled and looked after from a health care perspective. As we all know it only takes 24hrs of no food to turn a law abiding citizen into a so called criminal. So it all comes down to economics and psychology. How will people behave as the economy declines? Government, already strained in many parts of the world, will not be able to support all the services they currently do. How do they choose between police , education, healthcare, transport etc etc. I personally would like to see policing the last service cut but others will no doubt think differently. And I certainly see no possibility at all that nuclear can be safely managed in a contracting economy.
A good example of this is the two party political system that seems to have become the norm around the developed world. Mostly these are so called centre left and centre right "parties" that in essence say and do pretty much the same thing. The political divide used to be between socialism and capital. That is no longer the case, though most, even on this site, may think differently. The real political divide is now between those who want to maintain BAU (mostly at any cost) and those who accept BAU is finished and are desperate to find another way. The latter are attacked by both the main parties because they rightly see them as a threat to the cosy post war system they have so much invested in. So they are called "socialists" or worse, communists. Their problem is that many of the resources in question (air, oceans, biodiversity etc) are "commons". As such they require a collective response and thus the non BAU crowd are successfully attacked as being "red", socialist etc.
My take on all this is that we as a species are not clever enough to cooperate. We may have the theoretical intellectual and technical capability to manage our way back from overshoot, but we do not have the emotional or political ability. As population pressure increases against a decreasingly able global economy the most likely reaction will be social breakdown and conflict. I sincerely hope otherwise though.
Against this backdrop nuclear is very much a BAU system. Renewables can be run at any scale and in fact are often better at individual, family and community levels. As a non BAU person I would far rather see investment into community level resilience in food, energy, water, police etc than into nuclear, military and other "nation" level ideas.
+10
To make matters worse as BAU collapses, these people who are most invested in the status quo still hold enormous power and they will attempt to wield it, much like fatally wounded cornered rats, they are still extremely dangerous.
To make matters worse as BAU collapses, these people who are most invested in the status quo still hold enormous power and they will attempt to wield it, much like fatally wounded cornered rats, they are still extremely dangerous.
What do you mean by BAU? If you are implying that BAU means that US motorists will continue to drive vehicles with fuel economy of <30mpg for virtually all trips, including those that are within walking or cycling distance, will continue to live in poorly insulated homes and continue to use >11,000kWh/person/year, it would seem that this cannot continue for very much longer.
If however BAU could include a mix of high mpg vehicles or EV and PHEV using almost no gasoline, a change in lifestyles including more walking and cycling, living closer to work and retail distribution, a substantial improvement in home insulation, use of high efficiency heat pumps, improved energy efficient appliances and lighting, then BAU would continue well into the future in a post peak oil world.
That would already be quite a far cry from 'BAU'. Though not quite up to my own working definition.
A rabidly growth oriented, corporate controlled political system and a global economy that pushes artificially created wants over true needs, while actively working to subvert dissemination of the scientific truth, that it is impossible to continue on such a path.
All of those upgrades involve an immense amount of material, energy to manufacture it, and electrifying all things fossils means doubling electricity demands. Sure, heat pumps are more efficient, but they are afterall a power hungry refrigeration unit. Many areas already experience all time electricity demands in the early AM, but replacing fossils with electric will ensure most areas all time peak demands will be in early AM winter mornings rather than hot summer afternoons. You know, when solar isn't providing anything.
No one is fatally wounded. They are rich and plan to be the owners of the new energy systems. They will own the PV farms, the CSP farms, the Thorium reactors, the wind farms. They will do just fine. Their interest is not BAU it is just staying on top of the social pyramid. If some of the base dies off that is not a problem for them.
One observation that a commenter on Our Finite World made was that it is possible that at least some of Kazakhstan's uranium came from previously mined uranium that had been stored in Kazakhstan as an out-of-the-way place to store old inventory. I really doubt this. It seems seems like something someone could check on Google Maps-- are there a reasonable number of mines in relationship to Kazakhstan's uranium sales?
As a complement of information there is this interesting paper about the world production of uranium in the foreseeable future.
Spoiler warning: It does not look good.
http://xxx.lanl.gov/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1106/1106.3617v1.pdf
I notice the paper is by Michael Dittmar, one of the authors mentioned as forecasting declining uranium production.
It looks to me as though his analysis is based on a mine by mine analysis. This approach doesn't work very well for oil, because it is easy to end up missing new facilities, or new types of mines /oil extraction, that have not been widely reported to the press.
I think that we do need to keep looking at both sides of the story, though. It is pretty clear that outside Kazakhstan, we are not doing very well in ramping up uranium production. One success is not by itself enough to save the world's uranium supply.
Gail - thanks for the informative article.
Have we ever had an article, or series, on thorium reactors? pros and cons etc.
The energy debate here in the UK is hotting up in the mainstream press. Whenever there is a discussion about it someone always just throws the thorium issue on the table and pronounces that the problem is solved 'as there is enough thorium in the sea yada yada yada...'
I would love to see an expert article on thorium reactors, and a constructive discussion. I feel slightly under-educated in this issue.
Another speculative question about nuclear is the whether we can build a fleet of reactors that use fast neutrons. And assuming so, could we build and fuel them fast enough to make a difference. Some fast-neutron designs could use the uranium-238 already mined and refined for the bulk of their fuel -- the US and Russia together have on the order of a million tons of the stuff in storage. But each fuel load needs enough fissile material (uranium-235, plutonium-239) to start things off.
Some reactor designs will, over the long term, breed enough excess fissile material from a fuel load to provide the "spark plug" for more than one additional load. If the separation technology exists and has been deployed. But if the economies in the countries that could build such tech are sliding downhill, it is not clear that they can deploy it on a schedule that would stop the slide.
you're talking about fast breeders, correct?
Neat little history -- the site happens to be just down the road from me. They spent MILLIONS, if I remember correctly and then one day, (I remember it clearly, because some folks lost their jobs in a bad time) they just upped and shut'er down; and it was "Project Over!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinch_River_Breeder_Reactor_Project
One old friend mentioned to me not long ago that they should not have done that (shut'er down). Sometimes presidents make bad decisions, says he.
when you are talking about u238 or thorium you are always talking about some kind of breeder reactor. You can use solid thorium mixed with the normal uranium fuel and it will breed u233 and work just fine right along with the u235 in a normal reactor. You can mix plutonium mixed with u235.
If you use a molten salt reactor one of which is a LFTR(liquid fluoride thorium reactor). The fuel being u233 is dissolved in a fluoride salt. The thorium is around the outside and is breeding replacement u233. one of the main advantage of this type of reactor is the fission product poisons are chemically removed all the time. These poisons prevent the full burn up of the fuel in a normal reactor. Because of this there ends up with no spent fuel to store. The end product needs to be stored about 500 years instead of 100,000 years.
Thorium is a byproduct of lots of mining activity (rare earths being one of them)so there are tons of it laying around in mine tailings. So, you would not see any thorium mining going on any time soon.
One consequence of this is a spent-fuel stream which contains lots of U-232, which has highly radioactive decay products (Tl-208). This makes it impractical to fabricate the reclaimed uranium into new oxide-based fuel pellets, as they would have to be handled in a hot cell (enriched natural UO2 can be handled with gloves).
The only practical thing to do with spent thorium-based fuel rods is to convert the oxides to fluorides and use them in molten-salt reactors. This gets rid of the spent solid fuel and provides the starting fuel charge without mining anything new.
The CANDU design can burn a wide variety of fuels including natural uranium. It is a heavy water moderated reactor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU
A guidebook to nuclear reactors
By Anthony V. Nero
http://books.google.com/books?id=O0YB-T9usjIC&pg=PA282&lpg=PA283&dq=%22f...
The CANDU Reactor System: An Appropriate Technology
http://www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/data/energy/pdf/se107800657.pdf
They just had a fire sale:
http://www.embassymag.ca/page/view/aecl-07-06-2011
A Fission-Fusion Hybrid Reactor in Steady-State L-Mode Tokamak Configuration with Natural Uranium
Abstract continues in the PDF.
Accelerator-driven neutron sources are simpler than fusion devices, and are available off the shelf.
Yes, we can. Efforts in the USA, France and Japan have run afoul mostly of political issues, not technical problems (the Integral Fast Reactor was killed by anti-nuclear zealot Hazel O'Leary, and a minor sodium leak in the secondary coolant loop in the Monju plant was cause to re-design the thermocouple access points, not scrap the effort).
That depends how big something has to be to constitute "a difference". The USA has enough inventory of transuranics in spent nuclear fuel to start around 40 GW of fast-breeder reactors today. The spent fuel from the current and future LWR fleet will allow further starts over the next 40+ years. Unfortunately, the FBR fuel cycle only allows the system to grow itself at about 2%/year. That's a 35-year doubling time, so growing FBRs in the USA to equal the generation of the current LWR fleet would take roughly until today's newly-built LWRs are decommissioned.
The thorium fuel cycle is amenable to much faster self-driven expansion. Breeding ratios can be as high as 1.07, fuel inventories below 1 ton per GWe and fuel consumption of 0.8-1.0 tons per GW-yr. This suggests that expansion could be upwards of 5%/yr, doubling in 14 years or less.
The Thorium page from the World Nuclear Association web site.
This is the one story I remember on Thorium reactors, a guest post by Charles Barton, and I was involved with it.
The Liquid Fluoride Thorium Paradigm
Wikipedia has some related discussion under the title Molten Salt Reactor.
I think a problem with any new technology is that it seems to take many years to go through all the development and testing stages. Furthermore, even after it is tested, it is not ready for mass replication until costs can be brought down to a reasonable level, and until people can really see that the units don't have unanticipated problems. So it is hard to see very many thorium reactors in the next 20 years.
There is an excellent gaggle of links in this forum post (scroll down to irongamer's post for paydirt) ...
http://www.chrismartenson.com/forum/thorium-energy-solution/43994
I have this saved because I do pay close attention to MSR and I have not gone through all the resources listed.
Regards,
Cooter
http://energyfromthorium.com/
http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/
Chinese and Japanese thorium reactors http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/02/chinas-thorium-reactor-and-japans.html
"A private company founded by Kazuo Furukawa, designer of the Fuju reactor, called International Thorium Energy and Molen-Salt Technology Inc (iThEMS) aims to produce a small (10 MW) reactor within five years."
I wrote up this comment as an article
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/07/what-will-happen-with-uranium-supply.html
I am not sure why anyone would cite new work by Michael Dittmar for a uranium forecast. As we know his 2009 forecast out to 2018 was wrong before 2009 had completed. He forecast uranium mined to not exceed 45000 tons. It has already been exceeded by 19%.
the latest paper from Dittmar is saying maximum uranium at different dates will be
Dittmar 2015 58 ± 4 ktons
Dittmar 2020 56 ± 5 ktons
Dittmar 2025 54 ± 5 ktons
I say the 62000 kton max in Dittmar latest forecast will be passed in 2013 or 2014. In 2012, it should be very close to being passed and might get passed if the situation at the Australian mines get fixed.
Dittmar looked at about 20-30 mines.
The Royal bank uranium study looks at over 70 uranium mines.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/06/uranium-market-outlook-from-royal-bank....
Pages 17-18 of the RBC report looks at the mines, including 15 of the Kazakhstan mines
http://www.scribd.com/doc/56595065/Uranium-Market-Outlook-Q2-RBC
Langer Heinrich is an African mine which Dittmar is expecting to peak at 2000 tons. RBC indicates that mine will go to over 4000 tons and sustain it through 2020.
Other big new mines that will be coming online in Africa.
Azelik, Imouraren (both in Niger)
Husab
Mkuju River
Randfontein
Trekoppkje
Ezulwini
New Australian mines
Valhalla/Ska
Yeelirrie (BHPB)
Four Mile
Canada
Midwest (McClean)
Midwest (2nd zone)
Aurora
There is a new phosphate process for uranium extraction that is three times cheaper than past methods.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2011/06/new-uranium-recovery-from-phosphate.html
PhosEnergy process can deliver low operating costs estimated at $20-25 per pound U3O8 and uranium recoveries estimated at 92% with improved environmental outcomes and reduced waste, the company claims. The PhosEnergy process is designed as a "bolt-on" that can be added to existing phosphate processing facilities. A fully integrated and process controlled demonstration plant that fits into two 40-foot (12-metre) shipping containers has been built in Australia and is now undergoing final commissioning before being shipped to the USA.
Worldwide, more than 100 million tonnes of phosphate rock is processed into phosphoric acid annually, with major producers in North America, northern Africa and Asia. According to UEQ this could represent potential uranium production of 20 million pounds U3O8 (7690 tU) per year.
The demonstration plant will go into operation at the US fertiliser producer's site in the second half of 2011 where it will operate for 5-6 months. Cameco's investment will underpin the planned operation of the demonstration plant and an associated pre-feasibility study, according to UEQ. The operations will provide cost and design data to enable the construction of a full-scale commercial facility.
====
The Phosenergy process could completely replace the megatons to megawatt uranium. Estimates of the amount of uranium in the world's phosphate rocks range from 9 to 22 million tonnes of uranium. In the past, recovery of uranium as a by-product from the processing of phosphate rocks has contributed some 20,000 tonnes to world uranium production, but the process became uneconomic in the 1990s and was discontinued. China could choose to just produce uranium from phosphate if there is not the need for the fertilizer. It would cost more without the offset of fertilizer revenue but it could scale up to 70 or more times. 100 million tonnes of phosphate rock is processed now. If phosphate was on the scale of coal just for the uranium then 7 billion tons per year worldwide, that would be 580,000 tons of uranium. About 17- 38 years.
In page 12 of a 2005 presentation, China nuclear planners talked about using 246,000 tons of uranium per year in 2050 but getting a conversion to breeders and offsite processing to close the fuel cycle (transition starting in 2030 and going for a few decades). Other studies from China indicate that they plan to fully tap the uranium in Phosphate after going through the cheap regular uranium.
http://wwwsoc.nii.ac.jp/aesj/division/recycle/gl2005pr1-5prof.xu.pdf
While phosphate is being used on a large scale there is the conversion to breeders and reprocessing (70 times the efficiency). There will also be time to perfect uranium from seawater (4 billion tons)
For those who don't know, "advancednano" is Brian Wang.
Gee, Langer Heinrich. Haven't heard that name in years.
In '79 or '80 I worked for Dept Water Affairs in SWA/Namibia (as it was then called). They had the responsibility of supplying water to Langer Heinrich mine, if it ever opened. (The ore body was known, but wasn't mined yet.)
My job was to prepare a report assessing the chances of the mine opening within our long-term planning horizon. I took a look at the uranium market, and concluded -- no chance.
Looking at the top graph, I'm glad to see I got it right. World production declined gently for seven or eight years, then dropped off a cliff, presumably as military uranium displaced freshly-mined uranium.
Hi Gail,
Thank you for this article. It looks like mine output is down despite higher prices. That is not a good sign! Unless China has a bunch of uranium deposits they have not revealed, it looks like their new reactor buildup is going to do to uranium prices what their new auto industry has done for oil.
The EROeI of nukes is quite low at about 5:1 and thus will be very sensitive to a rise in uranium prices. Life cycle energy and greenhouse gas emissions of nuclear energy: A review, Lenzen, 2008
Dittmar's paper is quite interesting (though your criticism stands). One fascinating claim he makes is that the Rossing mine may not be quite as low ore concentration as is often claimed. He states that small high concentrations of ore are scattered through the lower ore body. I have found support for this view. The mine measures the radiation level of each truckload from the ore body. Only if the level is high enough is the truck diverted through to the crushing and further stages. Rossing has always been an outlier on the energy vs ore concentration curve.
Mined uranium is up 10,000 tons since 2008. An increase of over 20%.
Only in Kazakistan, everywhere else is down. See the graph up thread. Now, maybe they can reverse that trend. Price have been rising for 5 years, but it takes time to bring mines on line. But mines also deplete and decline.
I do not understand the point of removing Kazakhstan. It would be like removing Russia when it emerged as a major player in oil. If there was not a big new supplier then there would have been higher prices, other projects, or a release of material from DOE stockpiles
Hi Brian,
One thing I feel we are trying to understand is whether production is down due to low prices (which has been claimed for a long time) or depletion. High prices + falling production is a good symptom of depletion and is showing up in most regions. Kazakhstan will eventually peak and decline, and so cannot alone supply the new / current reactor fleet.
Prices are already 5x over the prior 20 years. Higher costs of mining don't help because it drives the EROeI down even lower for nukes.
Australia had an accident at the Olympic Dam mine.
THE failure of a hoist at BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam copper and uranium mine last October that sent a full skip of ore plummeting hundreds of metres was caused by a computer braking system fault and could cost the company more than $US200 million ($228.6m) in lost profit
This took out a 75% of the Olympic Dam production out for about a year while they fixed it.
The Ranger mine also had some issues.
Canada had a flood of Cigar Lake which delayed bringing that mine online for about 7-8 years.
Full scale construction began in 2005 with production originally planned for 2007, but the mine experienced a catastrophic water inflow in October 2006, which flooded the mine. A second inflow occurred in 2008 during the first attempt at dewatering the mine after sealing the initial inflow. As of December 31, 2009, the mine has proven and probable reserves of 557,300 tonnes at an average grade of 17.4% U3O8. (209.3 Million pounds U3O8)
This was and is expected to product 9000 tons per year.
If Cigar Lake and Olympic Dam were working then Kazakhstan might not have seen as rapid a rise as they did. However, the uranium is still there.
There were increases in Africa.
So the production delays were screw ups and accidents.
The impact of the rise in uranium is far less than for other energy because raw uranium is only a small part of the price.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html
Uranium: 8.9 kg U3O8 x $146 US$ 1299
Conversion: 7.5 kg U x $13 US$ 98
Enrichment: 7.3 SWU x $155 US$ 1132
Fuel fabrication: per kg US$ 240
Total, approx: US$ 2769
At 45,000 MWd/t burn-up this gives 360,000 kWh electrical per kg, hence fuel cost: 0.77 c/kWh.
More of the cost is from paying off the plant construction and the financing.
EROEI will be going up for nuclear because of more efficient enrichment.
Laser enrichment will reduce energy used a lot.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/06/gas-centrifuge-versus-laser-uranium.html
http://www.scribd.com/doc/55081161/5/Fuel-Cycle-Energy-Return-on-Investment
...and clean-up & mitigation. Accidents, spills, leaks and meltdowns, evacuations, genetic damage and loss of land/water for long periods of time = more $
I was under the impression that most of the additional costs you list are picked up by the taxpayer, its the only way to make nuclear affordable.
The costs are picked up by the rate payer not the tax payer. Even the spent fuel which the government is supposed to take ownership of is paid for out of a fund paid by the rate payers. So, when the government shutdown yucca mountain the utilities sued to get this money back because the government is not serous about fulfilling the waste obligations.
"Canada had a flood of Cigar Lake which delayed bringing that mine online for about 7-8 years.'
Such events are going to become more frequent.
In a number of ways, the extreme weather events and conditions that GW will make more frequent are already affecting the output and reliability of both nuclear and ff sources of energy, and these effects will not become less prominent in coming years--quite the contrary.
It is looking like we are looking at increasing instability at every level--climatic, economic, political, agricultural and in energy.
In such circumstances, is it wise to continue much less ramp up sources of energy such as nuclear that become regional and global threats in the absence of stability (and even sometimes while these areas are still relatively stable)?
I think this should read "a flood at Cigar Lake" rather than "of Cigar Lake". Cigar Lake is the name of the mine site, IIRC they hit a vein of ground water the pumps had no hope of keeping up with, and the mine flooded. Stopping the leak after the flooding was very difficult. I think this had more to do with the particular geology they were driving a shaft through rather than climate.
speaking of "instability"...
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/15/arkansas-earthquakes-2011-frack...
I'm sorry, but this is crazy talk. Nuclear plants use a fraction of the steel and concrete of wind farms, and wind farms have EROeI of over 20:1. If we assume uranium costs $60/lb and the entire cost is due to buying coal at $3/million BTU, that's about 20 million BTU per pound of uranium; the energy yield from uranium at 1% fission efficiency (99% in enrichment tails or remaining in spent fuel) is about 350 million BTU/lb. The overhead for gas-centrifuge enrichment is a fraction of a percent of generated electricity (about 1/3 as much thermal output).
In practice, the inputs for mining uranium are largely oil for diesel-powered machinery. The cost per BTU is much higher, and so is the EROeI compared to the all-coal scenario.
The study is a summery of dozens of peer reviewed EROeI studies of the nuclear industry. Nukes need lots of high tech precision equipment, high strength & high temperature materials that are not needed for wind farms. The mass may be high, but the systems are simpler and that means the energy intensity is lower. Other factors are the waste production that must be stored for thousands of years. Or the reprocessing of highly radioactive wastes that would push the cost (& energy needs) even higher due to complexity of handling.
The peer reviewed studies show a very low EROeI. You don't have to like something for it to be true, but it is dam* hard to do good engineering if you are not interested in finding the truth. Pretty much guarantees failure actually as the truth always wins. I recommend you go read the paper and the papers that underly it.
They use Storm and Smith as a source. That's enough to discredit them.
They do. But they also examine the methodolgy of storm and smith, validate some parts of thier findings with other studies, and make corrections in other areas. Storm and Smith claim nukes are below 1:1. This result is 5:1. Those are substantially different results. There are many studies cited here including quite a bit of new data from Austrailian ore mining compared with storm and smiths model.
I highlight these studies so that those who are interested in actually mapping a sustainable path forward can find a way to do so. Current nuke designs generate long lived pollution and have a low EROeI. As long as those are both true, they will not support civilization long term, and thus are a dead end technology.
Jon - a study is only as good as its assumptions - the 2006 paper you cite appears to assume enrichment by gaseous diffusion - thus the paper's result re EROEI is already obsolete due to the very large amount of energy reguired by this method of enrichment. Please quote an EROEI that assumes centrifuge enrichment or even better, laser enrichment if we are discussing plants to be built in the future.
From my reading the paper builds a regression using both diffusion and centrifuge. The way I read it, the baseline scenario assumes Australia (no enrichment plants) purchases 25% gas diffusion / 75% centrifuge. Now, in the US we have to use gas diffusion until another plant gets built. They do show the centrifuge is at least 10 times as efficient. They do cite a study on the laser enrichment that is only slightly better than centrifuge (see pg 39).
The USA has already shut much of its GD capacity, and it's safe to say that another GD uranium enrichment plant will never be built. Not in the USA, not in Australia, not anywhere.
Any assumption that anyone would purchase GD enrichment gear shows a refusal to face facts. Any projections based on that assumption are ridiculous. GD requires 40 to 60 times the energy of gas centrifuges (~2500 kWh/SWU vs. 40 or so), so the result of the assumption of a 25% share for GD is to multiply the projected energy use by 10 to 15 times.
Why would anyone do this? The obvious reason that an ideologue would do it is to make the numbers for nuclear energy look much worse than any realistic projection. Nobody else would.
That detail is useful as a flag, however. Go over all assumptions from the same source with a fine-toothed comb; you're bound to find more of a slant.
Where are you getting "5:1", this?
If so, you're missing the conversion from thermal to electrical energy. Comparing apples to apples makes it 1:15.
Only if the nuke plant is harvesting and using all the thermal energy to do work. Now this points to a place that nukes (and all other combustion plants) could invest in squeezing more useful work out of every BTU. But today, that is not what happens.
Now, this fits in with engineer-poets discussion of a molten salt reactor so safe you can turn it off over the weekend. It may be possible to put such a plant in a city or town and harvest the waste heat. Such a reactor may end up with a higher EROeI than a conventional plant, even if the electrical power generation is less efficient.
It would be more efficient. The MSR is amenable to ultrasupercritical steam or a supercritical CO2 cycle, either of which can achieve 45%+ thermal efficiency at likely MSR temperatures.
I have speculated on this before. I think the idea has possibilities, but given issues like handling of waste heat during the summer (when you want it anywhere but in populated areas), I'm not sure that it's a winner. It would depend on the particular site.
You start with 1 unit of heat energy, which could be converted to 0.3 units of electricity.
Instead you use it to make 15 units of nuclear heat, which can be converted into 5 units of electricity.
You can say the Energy_out : Energy_in is 15 : 1 (heat), or 5 : 0.3 (elec). Saying it is 5 : 1 is invalid, because it ignores the qualitatively increased value of electricity over heat.
Just because it's different doesn't mean it's correct.
That's an assertion for which I've not yet seen convincing evidence (though the EROeI is lower than the technologies I'd like to see replace LWRs). However, given the history of dishonesty of those making that assertion and the obvious political motivations of many others, I demand a very high standard of proof before I'll believe it.
Let's take those uranium-mining energy figures from page 39 of the PDF. It ought to be obvious that no enterprise can pay more for its inputs (equipment and energy) than it gets for its product and remain in business. This allows a sanity check on certain energy claims. If uranium is mined using energy from diesel fuel and a gallon of diesel fuel costs $2.50, a pound of uranium ($55, give or take) can only require the energy of 22 gallons of diesel to produce. This is about 3.08 million BTU/lb or roughly 6800 GJ per tonne. It follows from this that the last 2 columns of Table 3.2, which give calculations for ore of 0.01% and 0.1% concentration, do not correspond to any mine in the real world. The 0.2% column is questionable.
If anyone is consuming 600 TJ/ton U (top right corner, Figure 5.3), how on earth are they paying for all that energy? That's the basic sanity check that I DON'T see being done in a cursory overview of that paper (I don't have time to read and check the whole thing, you'd have to pay me for at least 40 hours of work to read and check references).
My calculations indicate that fission of uranium (just what fissions) yields about 8e16 J (80,000 TJ) per ton. Roughly 1% of uranium input to the enrichment process for LWR fuel is fissioned (enrichment to 4% U-235 with a 0.10% tails assay has 15.9% yield, and perhaps 5% of the total uranium is fissioned, either as U-235 or U-238 bred to Pu-239 and fissioned). This would yield under 800 TJ/ton of raw uranium. If someone is using 600 TJ/ton for mining and milling, where are they getting the energy? This goes back to the absurd assertion made by anti-nukes in the past, whose numbers claimed that the Rossing mine had to use more energy than the entire nation of Namibia in which it lies.
Now look at Kazakhstan. It produced 17803 tonnes of U in 2010. This is roughly 1/4 of total world uranium production. I'm not having any luck finding 2010 energy consumption data for Kazakhstan, but seriously... is it the least bit realistic for that tiny backward nation to have consumed 18000 tons * 600 TJ/ton in the mining sector alone? That's 1.1e18 joules, or about 1 quadrillion BTU. I calculate that to be the equivalent of roughly 160 million bbl/yr or 440 thousand bbl/day. Kazakhstan consumed only 241,000 bbl/day in 2009. This doesn't pass the laugh test. These claims for energy required for uranium production are patently absurd.
Do you understand now why I assume that the nuclear "skeptics" are dupes or liars until proven otherwise?
That's projection. Since the 1970's, I've been watching ideologues reject nuclear power even as GHG emissions rose to the top of their stated list of concerns. I've watched as James Lovelock and Patrick Moore publicly stated that nuclear power was the best (perhaps only) solution to our current energy conundrum... and the remaining ideologues either condemned them as traitors to the cause (whatever that is) or treated them as unpersons, unworthy of comment.
Meanwhile the USA is sitting on a DU inventory capable of giving us 300+ years of energy at our current rate of consumption, and thorium reserves several times as large. The technologies which would bring this energy to market have been killed by political maneuvering at least twice in my lifetime. If they couldn't work, the opposition would have to do nothing: let the proponents try them, and capitalize on the failure. Instead we have a hysterical political movement, apparently financed by laundered fossil-fuel interest money, to prevent any such trial.
What you think is a "psychological attachment" is me smelling the same rat since the 1970's.
Now that I will agree with, especially things like Tc-99. On the other hand, it's one hell of a lot easier to keep Tc-99 out of the environment (by isolation or transmutation) than it is to deal with GHG emissions from burning fossil fuels. If transuranics are reclaimed as fuel (which they ought to be), the actual fission products become less radiotoxic than the original nuclear material in 500 years or so. Our current CO2 emissions will hang around in the atmosphere for at least twice that long.
I apologize for the personal comment. It was out of line and I removed it. (should have put in an edit to that effect). I am sorry.
I think that if you doubt the energy consumption of some part of the paper, it is worth digging into the details before rejecting it out of hand. I know it is time consuming, but sadly, engineering is time consuming. Quite a few studies from different fields are right on the line energy vs ore quality line. But some are also off, such as the Olympic Dam, which produces uranium as a side effect. In a future where all power comes from nukes, the fossil subsidy for other mining won't exist.
Thank you.
K.
Please tell me something I can't relate in hours of war stories from my own personal experience.
You've put your finger on one of the reasons to pursue LFTR and FBR: rare-earth mining and refining often produces thorium, and the historical uranium enrichment program (Manhattan project through the end of GD enrichment) has produced almost half a million tons of elemental U in the USA alone, most of which is still in inventory (gas-centrifuge plants around the world produce more every day). This fuel is close to "free", both in cash terms and in environmental impact.
If you look at Figure 16 you have to wonder about the critcs of "foreign dependence on oil" touting the virtues of nuclear energy.
In the EIA's calculations, nuclear energy is always considered to be of US origin, regardless of where we get the fuel for the nuclear reactors. I guess they don't consider the source of fuel to be important.
the US nuclear industry needs about 19427 tons of uranium per year.
Unallocated U.S. Highly Enriched Uranium: 32.5 million pounds U3O8
U.S.-Origin NU as UF6: 13.4 million pounds U3O8
Russian-Origin NU as UF6: 32.3 million pounds U3O8
Off-Spec Non-UF6: 7.5 million pounds U3O8
Depleted Uranium from Historical Enrichment Activities: 67.5 million pounds U3O8
So not including the Russians that is about 60,000 tons of uranium in US stockpiles. 3 years of fuel supply.
21.9 billion barrels of oil would be a 3 year supply for the US. The US has the equivalent of a 21.9 billion barrel strategic supply of uranium. This is about 30 times bigger than what the actual strategic oil reserve is.
Sevenfold increase in yellowcake exported out of Port Adelaide? There's a slight problem here, it all has to be powered by solar panels. The Olympic Dam mine currently uses groundwater and electricity comes from the South Australian grid. A site on the coast about 300km from the mine was chosen for a desalination plant next to a marine reserve. It was near the apex of a gulf with elevated salinity and poor circulation so they couldn't have chosen a worse spot. The desal plant is on hold.
The mine expansion will also need about 700 MW new power supply. The green tinged State government can't countenance a nuke so where this power will come from is a mystery. Tomorrow's national carbon tax announcement may include cash for converting a 250 MW coal plant to gas. That coal plant is near the mothballed desal. Away from OD but in the same granite belt a much smaller in-ground uranium leaching operation may get power from a pilot geothermal plant. That's if they can solve the bugs but this cannot meet the power needs for hard rock mining and crushing. Strangely radioactive decay the source of geothermal heat seems to be OK but not nuclear fission.
BHP Billiton have a Plan B to run the mine on less energy; send the concentrate to China for metals extraction. The concentrate will be railed north to Port Darwin not south to Port Adelaide. That gives the Chinese first dibs on U3O8, copper, gold, silver etc plus profits and jobs. Some politicians want a local uranium enrichment industry which creates an even greater need for increased baseload power.
At present it appears that the Olympic Dam expansion either won't go ahead or the processing will be outsourced to China. The loss of future jobs and contracts is upsetting the locals but politicians seem to be paralysed with fear like rabbits in a headlight. Maybe a change of State government is needed.
Thanks for the update.
People seem to think that as long as they move the source of the electrical use elsewhere, whatever electricity source is used is OK. The loss of jobs is a real problem, because of the multiplier effect, with all of the support jobs going with them. China picks the jobs up, and gets the multiplier effect itself. So then it uses even more coal and nuclear.
It seems to me that we (OECD countries) would be a whole lot better off if we could stop shipping the jobs offshore. It seems like regulations should be set up to encourage generating the electricity at home in as an environmentally safe way as possible, and using it as frugally as possible, rather than shipping all of the decisions and profits to China.
Perhaps we should be taxing goods and services that are made in other countries, to get things back into a better balance.
Sorry I can't find or recall the news story that predicted the increase in Australia's diesel consumption due to the Olympic Dam project but it was surprisingly significant - on the order of doubling annual national consumption - which if true should also be added to the 'energy in' concerns.
In light of the seriousness of recent nuclear accidents and "events" one would think (hope) uranium supply would be a moot point.
I always thought that it would be issues with decommissioning/maintaining ICBM/nuclear weaponry over geologic time, not the much more immediate problems with existing peaceful nuclear installations as we run into money/energy problems....
A person has to wonder what the "emerging market" nations are thinking of, adding nuclear power plants. China has built its nuclear power plants right in populated cities--many of them don't have enough land to do anything else. It also helps with transportation for workers. I would be willing to bet that some other of the poorer countries will do the same, and will cut corners on building the plants to keep costs down.
We know that there is at least a small chance of accidents when the power plants are built well, by what we think of as responsible countries. There is no doubt a greater chance of worse accidents, when corners have been cut, and people live practically next door to the plants.
This is a picture of a coal fired power plant I took in Xian, China. If you look closely, there are buildings close by. This one was right next to the expressway, in a large city.
Desperate people do desperate things. Starve millions now or risk radiation poisoning millions in the future. I and the Chinese pick future risk over present cost.
Hi Ed,
This is worth stopping to think about in detail because it is the short term view that actually causes the civilization to collapse.
Would you build a house you could not move on a frozen lake will thaw in the spring? Even if the "land" made up of the frozen surface was free? It would seem really cheap (short term) but end up being very expensive (long term). So expensive it would have been better to have never built the house because you lose it all when the ice melts.
The strategy of favoring the short term only works when the benefit now is much larger than the long term cost later. If the cost / benefit function works the other way, long term cost is higher than short term benefit, then you have created a situation that will lead to costs mounting long term until growth is extinguished and even maintenance is impossible. Civilization will then collapse.
The made up example, cheap land short term, no land long term just helps get our intuition around the problem. But there are many real world ones:
*Using irrigation to grow more crops short term, while causing the fields to salt (long term) is one very clear example.
*Pumping water out of aquifers faster than they can refill is another. Lots of cheap food now, no food later.
*Over fishing. Lots of cheap food now, no food + power plant clogging jellyfish later.
Current nuclear technology falls into this category because the waste has such a long life. You get power for 40-60 years and then you have a waste issue for 25,000 - 250,000 years.
For long term sustainability (low or high tech) I think we need to follow nature’s example. Everything decomposes and recycles. Nothing is introduced or created that is a long term waste product. All metabolic wastes are short term, they break down completely, and they reenter the economic cycle.
I'm comfortable saying a lot of Chinese are already being killed or having their lives significantly shortened by a long list on non nuclear related elements and compounds. Elements and compounds that are more difficult to manage and sequester than spent fuel for one reason or another.
While so many are worried about being radiated, they're being exposed to mutagens of a non radioactive variety. I always direct folks to the EPAs Superfund site to get an idea of some of the real elephants in the room. Most of those sites haven't a thing to do with radioactive wastes, and I don't think even one of them has anything to do with spent fuel.
Not even 1% of the half million people in my town know their local landfill is leaching toxics into the aquifer below it, and it's just getting started. The US has hundreds just like it.
Hear, hear!
There are coal fired plants in cities in the United States.
Placing nuclear plants in cities has a number of advantages:
1. Transmission losses between the generation plant and the purchasers of power are minimized.
2. Rejected heat can be used for district heating and other purposes.
3. The risks are borne more equitably by the people who benefit from the power generated (instead of the risks being disproportionately borne by small cities and rural populations).
4. The plant is likely to be watched more closely and run more carefully (important politicians with more power will urge regulators to due their duty and avoid problems during the politicians' tenure in office, rather than safety suffering from the current "out of sight, out of mind" syndrome until it is too late).
The issue is that if the plant should have an accident, you lose the city. The EROeI on that is ultra low, consuming far more energy than it ever produces, and thus it is better to never have built the nuke.
District heating is good, but there is a pollution induced cost of locating even combustion plants in high population areas. Co locating power gen & manufacturing is a lower cost strategy.
Until Fukushima I was very confused as to the big fuss about storing spent uranium in long term deposits (e.g., Yucca Mountain). Now I have come to understand that the spent fuel needs to be kept in a heated incubator of some kind indefinitely. Mountains apparently won't do. And, in the absence of grid electricity, idled nuclear power plants are run on diesel -- after the batteries go dead, that is -- or else they misbehave. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.)
Fast forward a few decades, and we have hundreds of shut-in nukes running their incubators intermittently on grid and on diesel? Help me with this, please. Given peak oil concerns, do we need to leave strategic reserves of diesel fuel for our grandchildren so they can keep from having melt-downs upwind from their villages? If so, how large would these reserves have to be? Or, stated differently, how much power is needed for how long to keep spent nukes hospitable? How does this affect their EROEI?
Stated differently, how do we explain this to our grandkids? Do we open up savings accounts for them now so they can buy this diesel fuel (since we are the ones using the nuclear power, not them)? Or do we just leave them an instruction manual? "Spent rods must be maintained at a temperature between x and y for z centuries. No diesel fuel today? Be creative. Or, look it up on Google. Once you figure it out, teach your children well."
Does France keep spent fuel on site like Japan does? Do they have a strategic diesel reserve? Should we leave instructions for their grandkids in English or French?
I hear we have X years of Uranium left. (X depends on who you read.) I'm not all that familiar with the future. Can someone explain to me what happens after X years?
Thanks!
Someone posted a link to a youtube video a while ago about Onkalo, a Finnish waste repository, I think it was called "into eternity". I believe you need to store the waste in actively cooled environment for a short period of time (tens of years), then store in a geological stable environment for 100k years. This second part doesnt require active temperature control, *just* dig a big hole, dump the waste, lock the door, walk away whistling.
The video was worth watching, a quick search on youtube should locate it.
I highly recomend seeing "Into eternity", it shows the right mindset for handling nuclear waste.
http://www.intoeternitythemovie.com/
I recommended it before the Fukushima 1 accident. I am pro nuclear power but this is serious stuff that cant be handled with short term thinking or smile and dont worry PR.
The heat problem is that the radioactivity in the spent fuel heats it and this heat needs to be carried away. As the readioactivity decreases so do the heat and after a few decades is the radioactivity and heat production so low that it can be carried away by the bedrock in an underground repository withouth damaging it.
You're still left with the questions:
Who is going to want this stuff in their back yard?
What language are you going to put the warning labels "Don't dig here" in that will be understood by people for 100k years?
(Note, here is the first three lines of "Beowulf" written in the English of a mere 1000 years ago or so:
Hwaet we Gardena in geardagum
theodcyninga thrim gefrunon
hu tha athelingas ellen fremedon.
People who have not devoted considerable study to the language can understand maybe two words of this ('we' and 'in').
That's what language change does over 1000 year periods. We are talking about periods orders of magnitude longer.
Of course, if, as seems to be mostly the case, we don't give a flying f about anyone in the future, I guess we don't have to think about such technical details.
> Who is going to want this stuff in their back yard?
Apparantly thousands of people as there were a competiton between two municipialities for getting the final repository.
The "language" question I find most interesting is if generations far into the future who dig 500 m down will have general scientific understanding of radioactivity and so on.
http://www.quizland.com/hiero.mv
Here's your Online Hieroglyphic Translation of... "You are screwed":
I think the three vultures kinda get the point across pretty well >;^)
Do Vultures still exist in 2000 years? Or 5000? Or 25000? And does the population at that time still know what a Vulture is and what it stands for? Those are serious questions raised in Into Eternity.
Teach your children to forget about Onkolo, Yucca Mountain, Gorleben, Asse, Mol, Pinawa, Bure etc so they won't start digging there out of curiosity for the next 2000 generations?
First, in few hundred years, all the medium level stuff (Cs, Sr) will be gone, having half lives around 30 years.
The high level stuff (Iodine, etc) will be gone before the stuff is even buried.
So you are left with the long-life and hence low-activity waste. Which will be less radioactive than some ores.
So if someone does dig this up 500 years hence it's very unlikely to hurt them; you could handle the stuff without any particular issues. Accidentally hitting a H2S contaminated natural gas deposit would pose a much greater risk.
But I suppose it has the 'Nooklear' catchet, which is even worse than the bogeyman.
Solar, spent Uranium fuel from solid core reactors of the PWR, (Pressurized Water Reactor), and BWRs, (Boiling Water Reactor), types need the long storage time because of the Plutonium, and other transuranics produced with this fuel cycle. The Uranium fuel cycle was first selected because it could produce copious quantities of Plutonium for weapons. Later some in the government suggested the Fast Fission Reactor to produce both power, and weapons grade Plutonium in the same plant.
When first removed from the reactor spent fuel produces a lot of heat from decay of fission products. Solid fuel reactors require an active cooling system to circulate cooling water around the core elements, heated “incubators” are definitely not needed. Failure of this cooling system is what caused the reactor melt downs in the Fukushima accident.
One type of reactor eliminates almost all of the major problems of nuclear reactors. LFTRs, (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor), use no water or Zirconium in their construction, so produce no hydrogen if over heated. Cooling in accident modes is by natural convection with no power needed. In fact at the one test reactor built at Oak Ridge National Laboratories the scientists would just turn off power to the reactor control systems, and go home for the weekend leaving the reactor protect its self. The Thorium fuel cycle produces almost no Plutonium, or other transuranic s, so need a much shorter 300 years of spent fuel isolation.
At the present time no US company will risk the billions of dollars required to finish development of a LFTR type reactor with the anti-nuclear bias of our government and public. We may have to just wait until China does the development, and then import them.
I don't really understand what people are saying here.
Are you guys saying that there will be a larger supply of uranium in the future compared to the demand of uranium? And there fore push the price down?
I don't understand the point in advancednano posts.
At one point, many people thought we were going to run into a uranium supply shortage in the fairly near future. Now things look better--for the near term, we will likely have enough uranium for generating electricity, especially if some of the OECD countries (Japan, Germany, Switzerland, etc) close facilities and don't build new ones.
For the longer term, advancednano still thinks we are OK with respect to uranium supply, and maybe we are--but we really don't know. One of the issues is that it takes oil to run the economy, and to run the equipment that extracts the uranium. Unless we really save our oil for this purpose and for related purposes (growing food to feed the workers who will work with uranium and with the reactors, and maintaining roads needed to transport the uranium to where it can be processed and then finally used, for example) it may be that we cannot really produce enough uranium for the long term.
There is also a good chance that our low oil supply will interfere with our ability to decommission (take down) the nuclear plant at the end of its life and to take care of the spent fuel. We know from the Fukushima accident that spent fuel which is not kept properly cooled can melt down and cause radioactive fallout. The chance of problems such as these, even if we can find enough uranium to keep the plants operating for quite a few years, makes it worrisome to have nuclear plants.
Why can't the equipment be run with electricity, generated via nuclear?
We can.
But the problem is that Nuclear power - especially breeders of various sorts (Thorium and Uranium) - offers a practical solution to our energy and environmental problems. Not a perfect solution, not a solution without some risks, but a solution.
Unfortunately, some people seem quite wedded to the idea of a catastrophe or societal breakdown of some sort, and hence simply refuse to believe that any solution can exist. Hence the relatively uncritical acceptance of poor quality anti-nuclear arguments.
An unintended consequence of Fukushima:
http://www.miningweekly.com/article/paladin-approached-on-investment-opp...
I remember reading that the spot price of uranium was about $70 at the time of the accident. It has been generally down since then. The article quoted is right--it would tend to discourage new production.
And of course, low demand is expected to lead to lower prices.
Dittmar's thesis required prices to be high even in a low-demand situation. The futures markets proved just how wrong he was even before he wrote; it was a huge mistake for TOD to give him a forum for his grossly erroneous (I would say "propagandistic") views.
How do we measure a nuclear plant's complexity? Is a plant more complex than, eg a plant that manufactures weed killer? Or less?
Much of a nuclear plant is no different than any other large power plant. Much of the complexity, it seems to me, is due to the redundancy required to safely run some very old core designs.
Sometimes complexity decreases with experience, eg a 7 step manufacturing process may be replaced with a 3 step manufacturing process that produces a better product. Sometimes a tool with many parts is replaced by a tool with few.
I think the problem with nuclear plants is the issue of the fuel rods (including spent fuel rods) can melt down and cause radioactive fallout for many years. This can get into our food and we can breath it, and it cause cancer.
The problem is not so much the complexity of the operation, but the complexity of preventing adverse outcomes of this type from happening. We think of scenario (1), (2), (3) and (4) that might be problems and plan for them, but we forget about scenarios (5), (6), (7) and (8).
One problem that those building nuclear reactors did not think of was peak oil. They assumed that the electric grid would be operating 24/7/365 for hundreds and thousands of years into the future. It is not at all clear that this will be the case. Even the so-called renewables (like wind and solar PV) depend on oil for their production and maintenance. We also need oil to maintain our electric transmission lines, and to maintain the roads leading to these transmission lines. So we cannot count of the electricity need to keep the spent fuel pools cool. This means we too could have blow-ups like Fukushima, once oil supply is down somewhat.
Actually spent fuel assemblies can passively cool in air two weeks after shutdown. Spent fuel pools were designed with widely spaced racks sufficient to allow air cooling if the pools went dry, without damage or release of fission products.
The governments failure to uphold its commitment to take the fuel resulted in the high density racks that require water cooling.
Nonsense. We could dump all the spent fuel into the deep ocean, away from seismic/volcanic activity, and it would gradually be buried by sediment. It would cause less risk than a single high pressure gas line running through a residential neighborhood.
A more politically correct solution would be to bury it under the seabed.
In the past Taiwan put its nuclear waste in 55 gallon drums took it out to sea and threw it overboard. I do not know if this is still their practice. If you live on a medium sized island you do not want to bury it in your backyard.
This comment is very much off-subject and offers to start a long exchange between the outraged and the oblivious. Please remove it and its replies.
I think Bill's information is very useful. It is very much on topic.
the subject of spent fuel is on topic of nuclear energy and uranium.
Best solution would be to burn all the actinides in various sorts of reactor (Breeder, fast, etc), and process the medium life products (Cs, Sr) into Heat/Power sources - ideal for the ultimate UPS. If you were a hospital manager, for instance, the idea of a zero-fuel power plant giving a continuous supply of hot water and electricity should appeal.
Throwing useful stuff away is so 20th-century..
QOTD.
Japanese designer has big plans for thorium reactors
"The plan calls for a Mini-FUJI Reactor R&D investment of $300 million over a 6 year period of time, with sales beginning in the 5th year. By the 7th year sales are anticipated to reach the level of 50 units a year, and that is expected to reach 200 unites a year by the 10th year. Mini-FUJI reactors are expected to produce 10 MWe and sell for $60 million. The initial manufacturing cost is anticipated to be approximately $40 million, and that figure is expected to drop to $30 million as production rises. Sales are anticipated to reach $12 Billion by the 10th year, with an assumed gross profit from sales of 30%. Thus the potential after tax income of IThEMS would run to $2.5 billion. And this would be before IThEMS brings its major product, the 200 MWe FUJI reactor to the market.
Power from the Mini-FUJI is expected to cost $0.061 per kWh to produce, with an anticipated retail cost of $0.11 per kWh in the United States, and $0.22 per kWh in Japan. It should be noted that the mini-FUJI is a micro scale nuclear generation unit that is not intended to produce base load electricity for the grid. The FUJI is intended to produce base load electricity, and can be expected to sell for considerably less per kWh than the Mini-FUJI, yet it still could make a very large profit. Projecting sales figures out another decade, IThEMS could have $200 billion a year in sales, and profits as high as $60 billion, making it, if everything goes according to plan, the largest energy business in the world."
from http://nucleargreen.blogspot.com/2010/11/more-on-ithems-business-plan-fr...
Nuclear power plants have two parts the heat source which is nuclear and the heat engine, the turbine, which is exactly the same as a heat engine in a coal fired plant. The turbine is a complex piece of technology. The nuclear heat source is simple. The one hard part is it must always be cooled. Now in a molten salt reactor that can be done in a passive fail safe kind of way. In the current generation of high pressure high temperature water reactors this is hard (impossible?) to do.
Looks like $200 per pound adds 1 cent per KWhr. So I wonder how much uranium is available at $800 per pound?
According to the British weekly publication, The Economist, nuclear cleanup costs are astronomical. In the March 17, 2011 issue the author wrote,
"At the Hanford [Washington] site, which sprawls across a sagebrush plain in the south-east of the state, none of the 53m gallons (200m litres) of highly toxic waste stored in 177 ageing and leaky underground tanks has been mopped up, even though the last reactor was shut down in 1987. That must wait until 2019, when a unique waste-treatment plant—described as the largest and most expensive nuclear clean-up project ever undertaken—will begin transforming radioactive leftovers that could poison the nearby Columbia river into still-radioactive glass logs more suitable for long-term storage. If all goes well, gunk-to-glass processing (“vitrification”) will continue until at least 2047 and cost about $74 billion, more than the annual budget of America’s Department of Education."
But, there's a good reason why we don't see more nuclear plants being built in the U.S. Recent cost estimates put the price tag at $10 billion per nuclear reactor. No insurance company will even touch covering the potential damage that a Fukushima, Chernobyl or Three Mile Island catastrophe could cause. No private company would be willing to take that monetary risk. Yet all the cheerleaders for nuclear power often point to France where 60% of their electric power is supplied by nuclear. In pushing for nuclear in the U.S., however, those same adherents fail to acknowledge that the government funds the building and the regulation of those plants -- heresy in the U.S.
We all know there are millions of barrels of oil in the Canadian oil sands and millions more from shale which requires tremendous water pressure and heating process, called fracking, to release the natural gas and oil from underground wells, often thousands of feet deep. Heck, why not just frack those lucrative natural gas fields in the Grand Canyon and Yosemite?
How much do we thirst for this expendable resource and how much commitment are we willing to make to develop alternative energy from solar and wind?
Judging from the hysteria every time some Middle East country sneezes the oil speculators on Wall Street go on a frenzy to bid up the price of oil and pressure politicians that if we don't "drill here, drill now" we will end up paying $5 per gallon at the pump. That's all it usually takes for the gluttonous politicians to once again exempt huge oil companies like Exxon Mobile to get another free ride in the form of taxpayer subsidies.
Recently, during the massive flooding in the Pacific Northwest, electricity generated from wind turbines (a large investment and incentives encouraged by the government) had to be shut off due to over-production and lack of adequate transmission grids that were unable to handle the excess loads that were pouring into the generators of the hydroelectric plants.
We have all seen the ads run by the petroleum industry lauding the jobs that can be created if only we would divest ourselves from the bleeding heart liberals who are concerned with our air and water quality and preserving our precious resources. Big deal, so Fukushima isn't cleaned up but yet it could still result in releasing radioactive material into the atmosphere. Or, another BP rig explosion that gushed thousands of gallons of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico, or the oil spill due to ruptured Exxon oil lines that allowed thousands of gallons of oil to leak into the Yellowstone River in Montana. Perhaps Texas Republican Joe Barton can apologize to Exxon for allowing that bad river to get in the way of their oil pipeline and cut into their bottom line.
There is a lot more at stake here than just short term profits. Most of us don't have shares of Exxon and fat stock market portfolios that ebb and flow at the whimsical click of a mouse by commodities traders who have no interest in how or where we get our energy.
What most of us want is less monopoly by a few behemoth oil companies and more attention to alternative, affordable energy in a downsized economy in which millions of Americans are unemployed.
Whatever shares in Exxon they might have had in the past and whatever meager savings they had in their 401Ks were spent years ago just to make ends meet.
Most Americans are tired of being held hostage by the sheikhdoms in the Middle East and the bloated oil tycoons at home who are cooking up the next oil "crisis" as we speak. That's still no justification for building nuclear plants where $8.00/hour security guards who work late night shifts must stay awake if something goes wrong as it did at Chernobyl.
Did the article note that Hanford's work was done for nuclear weapons, that the tanks of wastes were generated as effluents of extraction and purification of plutonium from special breeding rods, and there is no relationship to the commercial nuclear power industry?
No?
Then it was a propaganda hack-job, not to be taken seriously.
What's the cost of an economic collapse, a climate catastrophe, or both? $10 billion sounds cheap compared to either of those, let alone the two of them.
The real issue is that cheaper, safer technologies have been developed (using taxpayer money!) and then suppressed by powerful interests in and out of government. None of the cost or risk scenarios apply to what we easily could have done by now, and could be doing in a decade or two. We only need the anti's to get out of the way and let us get started.
Yes, $10 billion may be a pittance to you but every nuclear plant that has ever been built uses several reactors, usually around 6. Simple math of course comes to $60 billion (not counting cost overruns which are inherent in almost any private contract), still less than the $74 billion final cleanup of spent nuclear waste that is contaminating underground water supplies in Washington and still threatens to eventually leach into the Columbia River.
The Nevada Yucca Mountain planned nuclear waste dump became more controversial once studies revealed that spent fuel which presumably would remain sealed for 10,000 years in underground cavities would be vulnerable to earthquake activity. Excluding Hawaii which is number 3 in earthquakes and Alaska which is number 1 as reported by the USGS, Nevada has the second most earthquake activity behind California in the 48 contiguous states.
You are playing off public safety in favor of constructing a highly dangerous technology that has caused enough concern for some, Germany for example, to abandon building more nuclear reactors. A coal mine may collapse killing dozens of people. An oil rig may explode and gush oil for months but both will recover and the costs in human life and permanent pollution are miniscule compared with the high cost of making hundreds of square miles uninhabitable for 100s of years with a nuclear catastrophe.
The "antis" as you call them, only want to see development of alternative energy sources which, in spite of slow progress due to vested interests in perpetuating the dependency on coal, oil and environment-destroying technology (fracking), are succeeding in ways that are bringing dividends today.
The Nissan Leaf is far from perfect as well as is the Chevrolet Volt, both of which have limited range and no infrastructure in place for recharging, at least in the U.S. But their time is coming as battery and range improve and major cities make recharging stations more available.
Wind and solar power are coming and even hydrogen if the costs can come down. Nuclear is becoming less a viable alternative as we have seen recently with the Fukushima Daiichi debacle which, by the way, was designed and built by General Electric. Fort Calhoun nuclear plant in Nebraska became surrounded by flood waters which, had they risen much further, could have compromised the safety of that plant and the surrounding communities.
Please, stop bashing those who only want clean, safe energy, not trillion dollar technology that is highly vulnerable to human error, sabotage and sophisticated terrorist activity. It's too high a price to pay and human life is worth more than than the few cents saved on a kilowatt hour.
Environmentalists are not the bad guys no matter how much propaganda is spewed out by the profiteering nuclear lobbyists.
Please realize that I'm responding to you for the hilarity.
You mean, like Big Rock point (1 reactor)? Diablo canyon (2 reactors)? Vermont Yankee and Maine Yankee (1 reactor each)?
Here is the EIA list of operating reactors. You can count the sites with more than one; none in the USA have 6.
You're not smart enough to read and understand what I said about the weapons-program legacy hours before.
You can't even get that right. Earthquakes weren't the issue, it was groundwater leaching materials out of fuel canisters after they (presumably) corroded. Tc-99 might be carried a few miles before it decayed away, possibly causing a few tens of cancers in the next hundred thousand years... if people lost the technology to track radioactivity, which would also probably preclude them from living in arid areas in significant numbers, so they wouldn't be pumping groundwater either.
Germany has some kind of neurosis on the issue. The Greens claim they're going to generate all the energy they need using wind and solar, but the issue of storage is conveniently left for others to handle. You can use electric vehicles to buffer the national electric grid for seconds to hours. You can use compressed air to buffer the grid for minutes to a few days. Beyond that, you need storage densities which only chemical or nuclear energy can supply.
Those are the same interests pushing wind (with 70% gas backup) to replace existing nuclear plants today. You are in league with the fossil-fuel industry.
When they stop, they'll need energy to recharge within hours, perhaps minutes. Are your "alternatives" going to supply on-demand energy regardless of season or time of day?
Recall that I have done the net-energy analysis for this sort of scenario, and I am skeptical that it's feasible to do. You have what, exactly?
And the plants were first-generation (designs updated before any were built in the USA) and probably would have been decommissioned and replaced already... if the anti-nuclear political forces hadn't frozen the technology and prevented new construction for decades.
Nuclear IS clean, safe energy. Even Three Mile Island Unit 2's failure hurt nobody. It failed because the brand-new NRC demanded that a bunch of un-tested features be added to it, and the water-level indicator didn't work right. TMI Unit 1, completed before the anti-nuclear NRC got into the act, is still chugging along.
The prohibitive expense and intermittency of "green" electric power, which will jepoardize everything from hospital care to food safety, is too high a price to pay for ideological purity.
Anti-nuclear activists are not environmentalists. James Lovelock is an environmentalist. Patrick Moore has recently become one. You are not.
Please attack the arguments, not the poster, please.
Best,
K.
Maine Yankee was decommissioned to greenfield status using funds set aside during is lifetime. It was within budget. Google "Maine Yankee Decommissioning Overview". There is so much erroneous info quoted re civilian nuclear power it is unsettling.
Youtube "Nuclear Power Plant RPV Removal" for an 8 minute video showing removal of Maine Yankee's pressure vessel. It is advertising but interesting nonetheless.
This should help settle that civilian cleanup costs are not astronomical as the costs certainly were not in this recently decommissioned civilian nuclear power plant.
EROEI appears to be substantially better than has been estimated in the past, as extremely energy intensive gaseous diffusion enrichment is being phased out in favor of much more efficient methods (simply google uranium enrichment methods for details), and a relatively recent greenfield decommissioning (in the US of all places) was accomplished under budget using money from ratepayers set aside specifically for that purpose.
Sufficient EROEI will, I suspect, ultimately result in sufficient fuel availability.
Yes, Maine Yankee was successfully decommissioned, but if this is the industry's "poster child" it's not terribly impressive:
- The plant was built in four years at a cost of $231 million.
- Its decommissioning took twice as long and cost twice as much.
- It ran for less than 25 years of its 40-year licensed lifetime.
- They STILL don't know where to put the spent fuel.
(based on info on Wikipedia, link.)
Japan is just completing the decommissioning of one of its first power nuke reactors, a Magnox design from the early 1960s at Tokai. The original decommissioning schedule was supposed to take 17 years from the start of the process in 1998 when the reactor was shut down and defuelled for the last time but I understand that the target date for the final stage of dismantling the reactor and its containment has been set for this year. Whether this actually happens I don't know -- there's been little detailed news about the decommissioning which is probably on balance a good thing, indicating that operations have probably been going ahead with no drama or major hiccups.
Any reactor decommissioning process will start with a period of five to ten years delay to allow radioactivity to decay to make the handling of metal and ancillary materials easier and safer. There are other operations that can be carried out during this time such as removing fuel, demolishing turbine halls, control rooms etc. There was consideration given to an eighty to hundred year delay to make the radiation problem negligible as in the UK's plan for the two Magnox reactors at Trawsfynydd but I believe the cost and complexity of site stewardship for that period of time were the deciding factors in favour of the shorter period in the case of Tokai no. 1 reactor in Japan.
From what I've seen of the newer EPR1000 PWR designs they would allow quicker removal of the radioactive reactor vessel during decommissioning as getting access to the reactor vessel does not involve demolishing the secondary or the primary containments. Indeed it may be possible to replace the reactor vessel within the containments allowing a mid-life kicker to keep a plant operating beyond even the forty or fifty-year expected lifespan of a newly-constructed reactor complex. Given the cost of the containments and assuming they do not suffer damage as did the Fukushima reactor containment structures that might well be a financially beneficial option.
The cost in real dollars was not twice as much - whether you use US Gov inflation stats or John William's Shadowstats, costs were closer to equal. Apply a net present value calc and construction is a good deal more expensive.
I dont think Michael loose the bet.
Because something is incorrect with the Kazakhstan uranium numbers!
Look: http://www.wise-uranium.org/umaps.html
11000t + production in only 3 years... sorry but i cannot believe this!
It is not easy to add a hole australian uranium production in only 3 years.
Kasachstan is a pseudo dictatorship and a former sowjet union state both indicates that this kind of uranium boost is impossible.
So i prefer that the Kazakhstan numbers are political numbers.
M_B_S
http://www.wise-uranium.org/upkz.html
Your position implies, among other things, that the buyers of this Kazakh yellowcake are getting counterfeit material. You would think that they'd notice.
This is like the assertion that uranium mining takes as much energy as the uranium yields; it fails the simplest sanity checks. When you have to retreat to such conspiratorial thinking, it's a sign that you're wrong (or worse, disconnecting from reality).
Would one buyer notice if the Kazakh government would claim false sales to other (possibly unknown) buyers? Iow, do you have purchase, or even better: delivery, data from the various buyers of Kazakh yellowcake? It seems no counterfeit material is needed to fudge those numbers.
Believe me, the IAEA would be all over that in a flash. Any "unknown" buyer is most likely to be a government pursuing nuclear proliferation.
Michael Dittmar admitted that he lost.
The Oil Drum declared that he lost.
The World Nuclear Association numbers for generation and uranium all indicate that result and they were cited as the source upon which to judge the bet.
Most of the Kazakh mines have foreign partners.
11000 tons of uranium is about $11 to 25 billion dollars (depending upon the price)
You will also notice the first chart in this article.
Between 1955 and 1960 - 35,000 tons of mined uranium per year was added.
Between 1975 and 1980 - 30,000 tons of mined uranium per year was added.
There was an excess of uranium mined versus what was used for nuclear power.
You can check but I think there was some kind of nuclear arms race going on during the years of 1945 through 1987.
The overproduction of uranium is similar to the undermining from 1988 through 2011.