Bye Bye Oil Crisis, Hello Uranium Crisis (UK commentary)

[jpak]

http://www.thefridayproject.co.uk/hi/tft/politics/002127.php

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After all his tossing (on the high seas, obviously) the Prime Minister has professed his love of nuclear power as everybody knew he would - all that joining CND crap was just him playing hard to get. The Government's Energy Review released this week announced that a new generation of nuclear power stations is to be built. 'Switch off the mind and let the heart decide' as Thomas Dolby once sang in his song - get this - 'Windpower'. It's a line that sums up nearly every decision Blair's made from waging wars to doing his Holly Golightly impression around millionaire lobbyists and party donors (we all know what those $50 bills were really for. And unlike Holly, Tony *always* puts out).

'Energy security' was a big element of the energy review. The term is actually code for not having to rely on unpredictable swarthy foreigners for oil (like most New Labour projects, the democratisation of the oil-producing nations in the Middle East is waaaaaaaay behind schedule) and an increasingly volatile Vladimir Putin - with his Cold War nostalgia - for our gas. The majority of the uranium needed for nuclear energy production comes from nice white, trustworthy western liberal democracies - most prominent among the producers being Canada and Australia. However, election-rigging, bribe-taking, prisoner-torturing Kazakhstan is coming up on the inside in the uranium production stakes and is predicted to become one of the biggest producers in the next ten years. Expect it to be diplomatically fellated in the years to come just as brutal-but-oil-rich Saudi Arabia has been.

The contradictions in the replace-oil-for-uranium-and-bingo! argument seem to have been overlooked somewhat by mainstream commentators. The point nobody seems to have made this week is, like oil and gas which it is expected to largely replace under the plans in the Energy Review, uranium is a *finite* resource. It was an issue studiously avoided by the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Sir David King, in his it's-nuclear-or-nothing scaremongering in The Independent yesterday. As with oil and gas, what happens when the uranium runs out? Some estimates suggest that current global reserves will be exhausted in as little as fifty years. The rate of consumption of uranium will only increase if more nuclear power stations are built in order to reduce our reliance on oil and gas-generated electricity, meaning those reserves may be depleted even faster. That makes declarations of nuclear power as a herald of future energy security and stability sound a bit over-optimistic.

The Fast Breeder Reactor, a power station that produces more material than it uses, is still very much experimental technology (the UK actually cancelled its research programme in 1994). There is a process that extracts uranium from seawater which is rich in the element, but the energy needed to do so (the process requires electricity) coupled with the high costs involved currently makes it the economic and technological equivalent of trying to turn lead into gold. Future technological advances may come to our aid (and there are many, many people keeping their fingers crossed) but we're still very much at the blind faith stage. Building new nuclear power stations starts to look a bit like buying a record player just as the record companies phase out vinyl.

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[Terry in Austin]

1. Oh, no!! Uranium is finite?

But, but, but -- You mean we'll just barely get through saving the world and our non-negotiable lifestyle with lotsa reactors, and then have to go through another "peak" thingie?

Say it ain't so!

There's supposed to be oceans of the stuff, literally.

> but the energy needed to do so (the process requires electricity) coupled with the
> high costs involved currently makes it the economic and technological equivalent
> of trying to turn lead into gold.

Now you're saying that the cornucopia ain't quite outta beta. Darn.

My faith is shaken. Time to go light some more candles and kill another chicken.

[jpak]

2. The concentration of uranium in seawater is 3.3 micrograms per liter

The US alone would have to process >7000 cubic kilometers of seawater per year to satisfy its current uranium requirements - that's more than 10 times the annual discharge of the Mississippi River or ~100 times the volume of Chesapeake Bay.

And nobody has ever extracted more than a few hundred grams of uranium from seawater - let alone the ~25,000 metric tons of uranium oxide consumed by US reactors each year.

And nobody has verified the claims of those Japanese researchers.

If people wish to delude themselves - that's perfectly OK too - it's a free country....

:)

[Massacure]

3. You assume too much.

How much would that be reduced if breeders or reprocessing were to displace sea water extraction?