One wonders why there would be so much gnashing of teeth about a uranium shortage if people who are deathly afraid of the element are seeking to stop nuclear power.
If they are right, nuclear power will stop itself and there will simply be NO energy on the planet.
The problem is solved is it not? No uranium, no nuclear power no?
Why all this crying and whining then?
The element-that-must-not be named will disappear from the earth, and people who are terrified of radioactivity will only have to worry about the 500 billion curies of K-40 in the ocean.
Pathetic...
Here is my opinion of the whining and crying and scare stories.
People have been predicting the demise of nuclear power for thirty years. The same people have been predicting the imminent appearance of a solar nirvana for 40 years.
Not one of their predictions have been remotely true.
Zero. Not one. Zip.
Now if 40 years of religious chanting about solar nirvana and impending nuclear demise have not been realized, why should we believe that there is any credibility whatsoever about a rather fantastic (and clearly wrong) prediction that evokes what
allegedly will happen in 72 years made by exactly the same people?
When and if the price of uranium rises to $1000/kg, it will still be the equivalent of gasoline at less than 2 tenths of one cent a gallon. Plutonium will then become competitive, U-233 will be competitive, and actinide recovery will be competitive.
$0.0015 = $1000 kg^-1/<(1000 grams/238 grams mol^-1) * No * 190 MeV/atom * e * 121 MJ/gallon of gas>
The same calculation shows that at $60/kg ($28/lb) the price of uranium is the equivalent of gasoline at 1 ten thousandth of a cent for gasoline.
In fact as I have shown time and time again, the cost of extracting uranium from the ocean, where there are
billions of tons is competitive at less than $200/kg.
There is a time to throw bullshit after bullshit and then there is a time to deliver on a prediction. Predictions that have no connection with results, trends, or actual outcomes are called
soothsaying. Predictions that are connected with analysis of data, the laws of physics and mathematics are called
science.It always was so, and always will be so.
Back in the 1950's everyone was concerned with uranium exhaustion, and so they designed breeder reactors, reactors that, it turns out, will not be needed for many decades, speaking even now in the early 21st century. When they
are needed the exercise of building them will be trivial in any country with a sufficient technological base. (Probably the US and other theocratic states will not qualify by then.)
Of course, it was acceptable to not understand the basic geology, chemistry and physics in the 1950's, because no nuclear reactors had been built or operated. No one had investigated the problem. No one had ever even looked for uranium, except to make pottery glaze. (No one is looking for uranium now either, but only because the world is flooded with it.)
Today we have many thousands of reactor-years of experience with the logistics and operations of nuclear power plants - including the fact that zero reactors among the 440 now operating have ever been shut because fuel was unavailable. By the end of the next decade, reactor years of experience will be accumulating at the rate of
over 1000 every two years.
Every time since the 1950's that people have "responded" to a predicted shortage of uranium, the effort has been proved financially un-viable because there is so much nuclear fuel.
In fact, there is so much nuclear fuel that the thorium from monzanite deposits, which are worked for their rare earth metals (used to make television tubes), is thrown away.
As William Stacy remarks in the preface of "Nuclear Reactor Physics" Wiley 2001 page xxv, "Nuclear reactor physics is now a relatively mature discipline, in that the basic physical principles are well understood, most of the basic nuclear data needed for nuclear reactor analysis have been measured and evaluated, and the computational methodology is highly developed and validated..."
Given the rise of religious fundamentalism, including the anti-nuclear movement, it is very unlikely that humanity will survive. If however, it does, when breeder reactors are needed the appropriate teams of engineers will simply build them.
In the case that humanity survives global climate change and the massive ignorance that accompanies it, or even if just a core of humanity survives, the issues of fuel physics are well worked already. In fact, there is a huge
international effort known as the Gen IV program that is basically solving all of the design issues well before they are likely to be needed.
Here is the scientific agenda of a meeting of representatives of these teams from just a few months ago in Belgium:
http://www.jrc.cec.eu.int/gen4-workshop/program.pdfHere is an overview of the program, one of many hundreds that are readily available on the topic.
http://www.engr.utk.edu/nuclear/colloquia/slides/Gen%20IV%20U-Tenn%20Presentation.pdf
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
