Welcome to European Tribune. It's gone a bit quiet around here these days, but it's still going.
Display:
There is one logic mistake here: burning plutonium from decommissionned bomb is not a consequence of lack of uranium ore. It is exactly the other way around actually.

Bombs were decommissionned as a consequence of START treaties, whose lengthy implementation led to results only 20 years later on the MOX market (mixed uranium-plutonium fuel). It caused a uranium price crunch, closure of mines, drop in production. It is not a geological peak.

And more, most existing reactor designs can be adapted to breed thorium, which is several times more abundant than uranium, available in Scandinavia (guess why it was named so in the first place), and entirely fissile (unlike uranium where only <1% is fissile). Which means thorium nuclear power has several hundreds of times the reserves of uranium.

And if this still isn't enough, there is 3 ppm uranium in seawater, and that becomes economically recoverable if uranium is ~1000$/kg (which has a ridiculously small impact on utility costs).

Pierre
by Pierre on Fri Jun 9th, 2006 at 10:33:22 AM EST

Others have rated this comment as follows:

DoDo 4

Display:

Top Diaries

Occasional Series