If you don't mind a somewhat off-topic question... What's your take on the long-term viability of nuclear fission? From what I've read, we simply don't have the fuel reserves to use it for more than a couple dozen years, but I have no clue how they came to that figure. For example, they could be calculating at present fuel prices while, from other things I've read, nuclear fission would still be economical at several times present fuel prices.
MR. SPEARS: Do we know what the supply lifetime of uranium is? Some estimates are as short as 50 years for uranium, at our current consumption rate. MR. SIMMONS: This guy was actually part of a company in Saskatoon, Canada, our largest supplier. The reality is we don't have a clue, but we haven't explored for uranium for about 40 years. REP. BARTLETT: I get widely divergent estimates of how much fissionable uranium is left in the world, from 30 years to 200 years. Before we can really have an effective dialogue about how to address this problem, we need to have an agreement on what the problem is. And there is just so much difference of opinion out there, and I talked to the National Academy of Sciences. They would be delighted. We need to find the money for them. We need an honest broker somewhere that tells us roughly what the truth is because we have widely divergent opinions now as to how much fissionable uranium is out there. MR. DEFFEYES: I suggest you look at the Scientific American for January 1980, Deffeyes and MacGregor, on the world uranium supply. REP. BARTLETT: And how much is there, sir? MR. DEFFEYES: Every time you drop the ore grade by a factor of 10, you find about 300 times as much uranium, so that going down to the ore grade of - going down through the ore grades continues to increase the supply. But just about the time we were writing that Scientific American article, these enormously rich deposits, and big deposits in Australia and Canada sort of blew away our early estimates and we had to quickly increase the estimates. There are deposits in Saskatchewan so rich that the miners can't be in the same room as the uranium, where the uranium is being mined. They mine it by remote control. So at the moment we're swimming in uranium, but the Deffeyes-MacGregor piece, which comes out with a Hubbard-like curve, says that, no, we can go on down, and specifically we don't need a breeder reactor. REP. BARTLETT: If we don't need the breeder reactor, that's good news because if you had to go to the breeder reactor you would borrow some problems that you don't have with fissionable uranium.
MR. SIMMONS: This guy was actually part of a company in Saskatoon, Canada, our largest supplier. The reality is we don't have a clue, but we haven't explored for uranium for about 40 years.
REP. BARTLETT: I get widely divergent estimates of how much fissionable uranium is left in the world, from 30 years to 200 years. Before we can really have an effective dialogue about how to address this problem, we need to have an agreement on what the problem is. And there is just so much difference of opinion out there, and I talked to the National Academy of Sciences. They would be delighted. We need to find the money for them. We need an honest broker somewhere that tells us roughly what the truth is because we have widely divergent opinions now as to how much fissionable uranium is out there.
MR. DEFFEYES: I suggest you look at the Scientific American for January 1980, Deffeyes and MacGregor, on the world uranium supply.
REP. BARTLETT: And how much is there, sir?
MR. DEFFEYES: Every time you drop the ore grade by a factor of 10, you find about 300 times as much uranium, so that going down to the ore grade of - going down through the ore grades continues to increase the supply. But just about the time we were writing that Scientific American article, these enormously rich deposits, and big deposits in Australia and Canada sort of blew away our early estimates and we had to quickly increase the estimates. There are deposits in Saskatchewan so rich that the miners can't be in the same room as the uranium, where the uranium is being mined. They mine it by remote control. So at the moment we're swimming in uranium, but the Deffeyes-MacGregor piece, which comes out with a Hubbard-like curve, says that, no, we can go on down, and specifically we don't need a breeder reactor.
REP. BARTLETT: If we don't need the breeder reactor, that's good news because if you had to go to the breeder reactor you would borrow some problems that you don't have with fissionable uranium.
And if the above is wrong, we always have breeders which multiply the resource base 60(!) times over, and then torium which multiplies it another 3 times over, and then we probably can extract the infinite uranium reserves in the sea for a quite facile price.
Don't worry, be happy. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
This has driven the price of uranium from $7 to $41 per pound in a few years. Fortunately exploration is booming and new mines are coming online. Hopefully we will avoid a uranium shortage in the mid 2010:s. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Program Status: * 269 metric tons of bomb-grade HEU, recycled into * 7,868 metric tons of LEU power plant fuel, equivalent to * 10,748 nuclear warheads eliminated. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
*
269 metric tons of bomb-grade HEU, recycled into *
7,868 metric tons of LEU power plant fuel, equivalent to *
10,748 nuclear warheads eliminated.
The Russians are a fickle bunch.
Under a 1993 U.S.-Russian agreement, Russia will convert 500 metric tons of HEU from dismantled warheads to LEU by 2013. However, Russia will still be left with more than 550 metric tons of HEU. The United States, which possesses more than 740 metric tons of HEU, plans to convert or dispose of 174 metric tons that it has designated as "excess to its future military needs." But this process will not be completed until 2016 or later, after which the U.S. military will still retain some 570 metric tons of HEU.
Highly-enriched uranium from weapons stockpiles is displacing some 10,000 tonnes of U3O8 production from mines each year, and meets about 15% of world reactor requirements.
