The glitches highlight how an unexpected challenge is holding back a global effort to revive the nuclear industry: an acute shortage of skilled manpower. Finnish regulators noticed a few months ago that panels of the steel cage that will encase the reactor were being welded together with a gap of seven millimeters (about a quarter of an inch), instead of the five-millimeter space required by design specifications. The mistake meant France's Areva SA and Germany's Siemens AG, the companies in charge of the project, had to conduct strain tests to make sure the welding would hold, causing delays and irritating regulators. "Areva should have detected the wider gaps," says Jukka Laaksonen, director of Finland's nuclear-safety watchdog, Stuk. "You can't play with specifications in the nuclear sector." A long string of technical and regulatory problems have overrun the project's schedule and budget. Completion is expected 18 months after the original mid-2009 deadline.
Finnish regulators noticed a few months ago that panels of the steel cage that will encase the reactor were being welded together with a gap of seven millimeters (about a quarter of an inch), instead of the five-millimeter space required by design specifications. The mistake meant France's Areva SA and Germany's Siemens AG, the companies in charge of the project, had to conduct strain tests to make sure the welding would hold, causing delays and irritating regulators.
"Areva should have detected the wider gaps," says Jukka Laaksonen, director of Finland's nuclear-safety watchdog, Stuk. "You can't play with specifications in the nuclear sector."
A long string of technical and regulatory problems have overrun the project's schedule and budget. Completion is expected 18 months after the original mid-2009 deadline.
Then second a discussion of a potential lack of supply of uranium ore, and the impact of hedge funds in getting into this market in anticipation of rising prices, making money as the prices have soared. The article suggests that demand will outrun supply for quite a while and that uranium could go to $200 a pound.
I'm curious if you see these as real issues for the industry, or if MSM has it wrong once again. (It's interesting to me that these two articles appeared--I've been surpised as I have commented before that the dramatic run-up in uranium prices has received so little coverage.)
Not only for the nuclear industry but for oil, gas, coal mining, all other mining, welders, engineers and so on.
It's like none have been trained for 20 years. Everyone went into stock broking and marketing instead. Whoops. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
The uranium ore question is moot. Ore cost has a negligible impact on total kWh cost in the nuclear sector. It will always be competitive with fossil fuels. And there will be no shortage because:
I read in a professionnal paper last year that at the end of 2005, about 20% of uranium extracted worldwide was being bought by hedge funds just for above-ground storage, not by fuel enrichers. They'll dump it when it's worth 10 times what they bought it (i.e. a couple more years at present pace). Pierre
(I've been looking for a uranium-tracker myself, to no avail).
Such things can be build without actually holding much, if any, physical ore: by proper assembly of ore futures and of shares and derivatives of listed uranium prospection/mining/processing companies with a track record of correlation between ore spot / share spot.
I must confess I already hold such a thing for crude oil (and I'm a peak oil believer). And lately, I bet on a leveraged put on the french stock markets (so you can count me in the "hard landing" proponents). Of course, these two investments hedge each other to some extent. Pierre
Two new publicly traded uranium investment funds are adding to the competition. The funds are similar to gold and silver exchange-traded funds, raising money from investors in initial public offerings of shares to buy uranium.
New Uranium Participation Corp. Follows Gold ETF Footprints By David J. DesLauriers 30 May 2005 at 06:05 PM GMT-04:00 TORONTO (ResourceInvestor.com) -- Uranium is trading at 23-year highs and has been quite a hot topic in the last few months, with many well-known resource bulls and prognosticators calling for much higher prices before the end of this decade. Aside from all of the juniors rushing to stake and revive projects of dubious value, a group has come together to facilitate a direct bet on uranium for retail and institutional investors. This is similar to the various Gold ETFs in Australia, London, Toronto and New York that have taken billions of dollars of gold off of the market, with the most popular ETF, StreetTracks [NYSE:GLD] now holding more than $2 billion worth of gold bullion in trust. UPC Uranium Participation Corporation [TSX:U] recently raised C$100 million in an IPO at C$5. As of May 10 the company had made commitments to buy 1.85 million pounds, or 835 tons, of uranium at $27.87 a pound for a total of $52 million. UPC follows in the footsteps of Portland, Oregon-based fund Adit Capital Management, which started buying uranium in December, and reportedly had physical uranium valued at more than $26 million.
By David J. DesLauriers 30 May 2005 at 06:05 PM GMT-04:00
TORONTO (ResourceInvestor.com) -- Uranium is trading at 23-year highs and has been quite a hot topic in the last few months, with many well-known resource bulls and prognosticators calling for much higher prices before the end of this decade. Aside from all of the juniors rushing to stake and revive projects of dubious value, a group has come together to facilitate a direct bet on uranium for retail and institutional investors. This is similar to the various Gold ETFs in Australia, London, Toronto and New York that have taken billions of dollars of gold off of the market, with the most popular ETF, StreetTracks [NYSE:GLD] now holding more than $2 billion worth of gold bullion in trust.
UPC
Uranium Participation Corporation [TSX:U] recently raised C$100 million in an IPO at C$5. As of May 10 the company had made commitments to buy 1.85 million pounds, or 835 tons, of uranium at $27.87 a pound for a total of $52 million.
UPC follows in the footsteps of Portland, Oregon-based fund Adit Capital Management, which started buying uranium in December, and reportedly had physical uranium valued at more than $26 million.
I've been very wary of putting money in uranium firms: most new ones are just exploratory start ups, and only those few which really find the richest veins will keep growing. Established mines with a track record and predictable production/reserves are under control of big companies, sometime states (Areva, parent of Cogema, one of the world's biggest, is only a few % floated, through just ADR-like stuff, the rest is french state, and it's not even a commodity pure-player: they also build the reactors and provide lots of services). Pierre
Ore cost has a negligible impact on total kWh cost in the nuclear sector
Maybe 25 % of O&M costs, but capital dominates nuclear power. Fuel is 5 % of the cost and one third of that is ore, one third is enrichment and one third is fuel element manufacture. Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
