[JR: About 20%.]

T

The World Nuclear Association has issued a possition paper on Uranium Sustainability which states:
The uranium resource is sustainable, with adequate known resources being continuously replenished at least as fast as they are being used. The essential dynamic is the strength of market forces when the market is constantly evolving
through advances in human knowledge and the technologies of exploration, mining, and resource utilisation. Depletion of today’s known uranium resources will be more than counterbalanced by replenishment from new discoveries, technical progress and possible substitution.

In addition, a huge increase in efficiency is readily possible through the technological step to fast neutron reactors. This option – unique among mineral resources – offers the nuclear industry a special kind of insurance against future resource shortage.

It may therefore be fairly concluded that uranium supplies will be more than adequate to fuel foreseeable expansions of nuclear power. Indeed, in addition to its other noteworthy virtues, An abundant fuel resource will remain a crucial advantage of nuclear power.

The world faces many challenges in achieving a global expansion of nuclear energy to fully realize the technology’s clean-energy potential. A limited supply of uranium resources is not among them.
http://www.uic.com.au/WNA-UraniumSustainability.pdf

In fact Uranium resources from conventional sources compare very favourably with most other resources. Virtually no exploration for conventional uranium sources has been undertaken during the last 30 years. Most of the world’s land surface has yet to be explored for uranium. It is economically possible to extract uranium and thorium from phosphate ore and mine tailings, but this is not done because of the abundance of conventional supplies. This source alone amounts to millions of tons of both uranium and thorium.

For example Chattanooga shale of Tennessee contains about t 6 million tons of recoverable U3O8.

The Conway granite of New Hampshire;contains uranium and thorium deposits estimated to be of the order of tens of millions of tons.

Other unconventional sources of uranium include coal fly ash which contains significant amounts of uranium and thorium, and sea water.

The Japanese have demonstrated that it is technically economically possible to extract Uranium from sea water using low energy techniques:
http://www.ans.org/ pubs/ journals/ nt/ va-144-2-274-278
For discussions see here:
http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/ 2006/ 01/ 207-uranium-from-seawater-part-1.html
and here:
http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/ 2006/ 01/ 208-uranium-from-seawater-part-2.html

There has been virtually no world wide exploration for Thorium, because there is no market for it. Standard references on Thorium state: “Present knowledge of the distribution of Thorium resources is poor because of the relatively low-key exploration efforts arising out of insignificant demand.” Still 2005 IAEA-NEA “Red Book” reported a probable Thorium reserve of of 4.5 million tons, but also acknowledge that there was insufficient data for much of the world to even estimate Thorium reserves. An Australian government reports states “The potential for thorium resources, particularly in types of deposits other than placer, is underexploredin Australia.” http://www.ga.gov.au/image_cache/GA10954.pdf
Yet Australia has the largest reported thorium reserve in the world. Thorium is known to be 3 to 4 times as common on the surface of the earth as uranium.

Your argument that we are running out of Uranium/Thorium resources, amounts to an appeal to ignorance, since you are arguing in effect that undiscovered resources do not exist, and that textbook accounts of proven reserves are always the end of the matter.

Currently uranium market prices are depressed by the effort of the US government to burn up the U235 and Pu239 left over from cold war weapons. Until that stock is drawn down their is virtually no need for new uranium. The only US uranium enrichment plant currently in operation, operates at far less than full capacity. In fact. it only operates at all because a US government owned utility, TVA buys enriched U235 from it. This arrangement has probably been made for national defense purposes. Until the weapons stockpiles are burned up, there is no incentive for more uranium or thorium explorations.

You criticize Storm and Smith for being paid by the European anti-nuclear lobby but of course the material you cite is paid for the pro-nuclear lobby. If the only data is partisans, then we will have to look beyond the partisanship of the authors.

You also dis Storm and Smith for not publishing in peer reviewed journals, but your citations don’t appear to be peer reviewed either.

One of your links above a broken and so not useful:
http://www.uspatentserver.com/686/6863812.html
I presume the last link is supposed to be
http://www.uic.com.au/nip75.htm
If you are citing that as an example to reassure on U supplies, I wonder if you have read it. The primary data there are low values from the IAEA, when I have been using the highest values from the IAEA to make my point.

Note also that the UIC once predicted a 1000% reserve increase for a doubling in price. Since that prediction, prices have increased by a factor of 6 to 8. Do you think UIC’s own numbers show a 1000% increase in reserves (after all prices have far more than doubled)? Not even close. The reserve increase does not even seem in line with the IAEA’s “speculative” “prognosticated” numbers that I have used in the past.

Since you sometimes cite thorium, here is another take on supply. Aldo v. da Rosa’s textbook has energy available from reactor potential materials as
U235 2,600 EJ
Th232 11,000 EJ
U238 320,000 EJ
If one adds U235 and Th232 and divide by half of the 900 EJ/a energy rate projected for 2050, then you get 30 years.

Your argument in the past has been to go for breeder reactors to turn U238 from munitions into fuel. I understand that point well, but breeder reactors have issues that you simply gloss over. What good are breeder reactors if they are politically unacceptable because of proliferation issues?

In your first reference above, the author uses a recent Australian study as the primary point of comparison with SvLS, but that study, while half the GHG emissions, still shows very high emissions. If construction/decommissioning are not included, the numbers are much closer. The author of your cited reference writes, “SvLS (2005) is just one attempt to the estimation of the energy intensity and associated CO2 emission from the nuclear energy chain, whose merit is to raise the issue of the assessment of energy expenditures in mining low-grade uranium ores that may need to be exploited in the long-term, pessimistic scenarios.” From that comment, I would infer that other authors have not addressed the low-grade ore issue, but that issue that is appropriate to address. Indeed the ore issue is how I found the SvLS material in the first place; if others are not addressing it, and SvLS have but are too harsh, then we have a lack of data.

Finally, let’s compare the energy in sunlight striking Earth’s land masses to the above numbers. In a single year we receive 1,000,000 EJ of energy from a nuclear fusion reactor in the sky (at a safe distance I might add) that will continue to arrive for billions of years. 320,000 EJ from U238 kind of pales in comparison to that annual supply.

Storm van Leeuwen and Smith were paid for their “research” by European anti-nuclear lobby. There was a good reason why their research was was never submitted to a peer reviewed publication. Most of the studies they referred to, were over thirty years old and have been long since overtaken by more recent research.

I have in the past linked you to references that demonstrate Storm van Leeuwen and Smith’s errors, but you either have ignored my links. Storm van Leeuwen and Smith have been described frauds. In one of the sources I linked you to, Roberto Dones, of the Paul Scherrer Institute, in Switzerland states:

vLS guesstimate relatively high to very high energy requirements and hence corresponding CO2 emissions for the electricity of nuclear origin, the highest to be found in the literature circulating in Internet, especially when low grade uranium ores are considered. The main explanation for SvLS’ high figures lies in their extreme assumptions (often rough guesses, as the authors admit themselves) and partially flawed methodology.
————-
However, because of ideological connotations of the opposition to nuclear energy, often the quotation of (SvLS 2005) is not accompanied by citation of and comparison with the tens of other relevant technical studies that have been and are being produced on the subject, with different results although prevalently converging to relatively low GHG emissions. An opponent to nuclear energy likely chooses the reference that best matches his presumptions, without undergoing the process of critically analyzing and comparing its assumptions and results vs. other studies.,
————–
The problem is that SvLS (2005) often convert costs into energetic terms using generic factors, not reported in the text, lacking critical consideration of cost components, and lacking use of technical match to compare with real energy expenditures…. Furthermore, SvLS (2005) add thermal to electric energy directly to give “total energy”, which is certainly not recommended practice.
—————
ISA (2006) uses data from U-production in the Ranger and Beverly mine/mills, with 0.15% ore grade (in U3O8). The energy intensity is approximately 0.45 GJ/kgU. The direct application of the formula in (SvLS 2005 Chapter 2, #5) would give instead 2.0 GJ/kgU and 4.7 GJ/kgU, respectively for soft and hard ores.
—————
Another example of flaws: SvLS (2005) estimate of Olympic Dam for uranium mining & milling energy uses is 70,209 TJ/a against 1,230 TJ/a predicted by the University of Melbourne vs. 5,477 TJ/a actually measured at the mine.
—————
In SvLS (2005, Chapter 4, #8) the volume of radwaste from NPP decommissioning is guesstimated at 93,900 m3. Official estimations by Swiss operators gave for the 1000 MW-size PWR and BWR 7,000 m3 and 14,000 m3, respectively.
—————-
SA (2006) apparently uses the factor 290 kWh/SWU for centrifuge, same as in (SvLS 2005). This electricity intensity had been taken from very old references and does not correspond to modern technology. Recent literature and reports on/from Urenco give values in the range 35-62 kWh/SWU,51 and the trend is towards further decreasing it.

Since you persist in referring to discredited, logically and scientifically flawed, ideologically tainted sources, to support your arguments, and have ignored my past attempts to call your attention to the problem, I can only conclude that you are Ideologically biased and not interested in the accuracy of the sources that you use.

Similar conclusions were arrived at by researchers in Australia, but I have not been able to locate the original report, only summaries of it.

The costs for that solar plant in Arizona is also to pay for development. I think few people would advocate building these solar plants if they didn’t expect costs to decrease. Some have used the example of wind energy, which had costs of 30 or more cents per kilowatt in 1980 to as low as 4 and 5 cents per kilowatts recently. We’ll see if the same thing happens with CSP. Some say it can get down to 5 cents per kilowatt for center tower CSP systems.

If nuclear didn’t have a military use which spent hundreds of billions of dollars to develop it, we may not see economical nuclear either. Solar didn’t have a military use, (except for PV on satellites) so no need for the research or development.

Transmission costs for solar is sometimes criticized because the transmission lines are not filled at night like that are during the day. But you only need more power during the day. That would be like criticizing gearing up for more transmission in the summer than in the winter. How much electricity that the transmission lines will carry will not be more than the demand requires. More demand is required when the sun shines.

California needs 45 000 megawatts during the day in summer but only 26 000 during the day winter.

http://www.caiso.com/

France does have all those nuclear power plants, but I’ve read that they couldn’t get any built now. France has been putting in wind.

I do think some to the non- acceptance of nuclear is more that from just rational criticism. But nuclear still has to overcome that. No matter how many rational arguments a person makes, whether accurate or not, there is the world wide fear of nuclear bombs and radiation that it has to over come.

But also maybe rationally you could explain to me that using dog or cat meat is an acceptable meat form for humans to eat, you would still have to over come some heavy cultural bias against it. I wouldn’t accept that either. For some people that’s the same with nuclear.