 | Dysviz is a 61 year old guy from Okanagan, British Columbia, Canada. |
- Jul 2, 4:07pm
- This stark problem, if one reads many papers on uranium resources produced by the nuclear industry, is an issue that is recognised but seldom explored. It was highlighted in OECD research six years ago, which noted that if the nuclear option were adopted without a radical change in technology then known uranium supplies would only last 'about a decade' [OECD 1999]. The recent MIT study briefly acknowledges the matter but, perhaps due to the USA's large indigenous uranium reserves, discards it. Others have acknowledged the short term problems of capacity in the uranium industry, especially the problems that might arise if mining capacity does not expand before the military inventory is exhausted [Del Frari 2001/Connor 2003], but do not look to the longer-term lifetime of the resource. A very few portray a wholly unrealistic scenario, that forecasts hundreds or thousands of years of nuclear energy [Price 2002]. This is because they do not take into account the need for the nuclear industry to grow massively in order to displace fossil fuel use, or that a significant part of the globe's entire theoretical supply of uranium may be unusable (because its extraction and use would take more energy than it would provide).
Conclusion
To make a significant contribution to energy supply nuclear energy would have to expand by such a scale that the lifetime of the uranium resource, along with issues such as the management of radioactive waste and the control of fissile materials, are always going to be problematic. Unlike plant safety or the emission of radioactivity, which can be controlled through better engineering or management, the basic issue of how much energy can be produced from nuclear sources is limited by physical laws and the scale of current global energy demand.
There are clear shortcomings in the current methodology for assessing uranium resources because they are based entirely on the economic costs of production, not the net energy value of the resource once the costs of extraction and use are taken into account. This has important implications, which vary according to the selection of the fuel cycles and reactor technologies used, on the lifetime of the uranium resource. Until the net energy value of the uranium resource, and different fuel cycles, is taken into account we can have no clear understanding of the productive future of the nuclear industry. It is also difficult to assess the environmental implications of the nuclear option as each technology creates varying environmental impacts.
It would be unwise to advocate adopting the nuclear option when we have no realistic idea of how long the uranium resource will last. Clearly the 'once through' cycle has no future - if the world were to adopt the 'once through' option the world's uranium resources would be exhausted in a few decades. We would very quickly shift from shortages of oil and coal to shortages of uranium [Mobbs 2005]. The principle solution to the problem of the 'once through' cycle, adopting a more 'closed' cycle using fast breeder reactors, is itself fraught with dangers. There is no tried and tested fast breeder technology. In addition the scale of the increase in nuclear capacity required to displace fossil fuel is such that the lifetime of the resource would still be a matter of decades, not centuries. For this reason it may be that the longevity of the uranium resource, quite apart from the issues of waste or radioactivity, could be more significant to the future viability of the nuclear industry.
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