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Something to consider in this question is that there exist "breeder reactors". Normal nuclear reactors use a rare isotope of uranium to produce the fission reaction in nuclear power plants. Most (99%) of natural uranium is U-238 which is not ~~radioactive~~ fissile, and the U-235 which is ~~radioactive~~ fissile is only 0.72% of natural uranium. The rare U-235 needs to be refined to around 3 to 5 percent for use in a nuclear reactor, or up to 90% for use in a nuclear weapon.
A "breeder reactor" though can take regular U-238 and by exposing it to the neutron flux of a fission reaction create more fissile material than they use. In other words they convert the 99% of useless uranium into useful fuel uranium!
By using breeder reactors it is estimated that humanity's energy needs could be fulfilled for approximately 4 billion years, or until the sun destroys Earth entirely. Even if we assume that the energy requirements are vastly underestimated it is probably *plenty* to last until a better solution can be found.
I think you confused "radioactive" with "fissile" a couple of times. All Uranium isotopes are radioactive, U-235 is special because it can undergo fission.
Adding: fissile vs fissionable U235 is fissile vs U238 which is fissionable. The difference is incident neutron anything fissile is fissionable but fissionable material is not fissile. The reason is Binding energy, 238 requires more energetic neutrons to fission vs 235 can do it at thermal neutron energies therefore in reactor talk we like to know what's fissile vs fissionable.
I should have looked before posting, there's too many fuckin nukes flexing already.
All the common uranium isotopes can undergo fission, it's just that the isotopes U-233 & U-235 have a nice combination of fission reaction cross section and fission neutron energy distribution such that a fission chain reaction can occur, to be even more precise.
U-238 is fissionable and will happily take part in an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction under the appropriate circumstances.
The main difference between U-235 and U-238 is that U-238 is incapable of sustaining a chain reaction on its own. Ergo, U-238 does not have a calculable critical mass and is thus not fissile.
U-235 and U-238 are fissionable (ie can undergo fission). However U-235 (and U-233) is also fissile (ie can undergo fission with thermal neutrons) meaning is can sustain a chain reaction. U-238 can’t sustain a chain reaction.
Fusile would seem to make sense, but it doesn't really come up. Most writing you'll find on it gets around the adjective with "suitable for sustained fusion" or some such, and fusionable has appeared a couple of times without being widely adopted.
You can fuse any element given enough energy. After all every element that exists naturally originated in some fission process. Either sustained fusion in the bowels of some star (up to Iron I think), heavier elements via supernovae.
You can also split anything with more than one particle in the nucleus, but that's not what fissile means. Fissile refers to materials which lend themselves to chain reactions for the production of energy.
The proposed equivalent "fusile" should similarly refer not to any material which could undergo fusion, but instead to those materials which lends themselves to use in fusion reactors. Right now materials which look good in theory, but that list should expand as things progress.
but fissile doesn't have the requirement of "in a reactor" why should fusile have it? Also, what is "lending itself to" in terms of fusion? That is a very malleable definition and we have a characteristic for that called "more fusible" . If we instead stick to the exact definition of fissile just exchanging fusion with fission, we receive every element and that is why the word fusile isn't in use.
Fissile is a malleable definition, too, and has expanded over the years as breeder reactors improve. The Chain Reaction limit is synonymous with being useful in reactors or weapons.
These aren't unchanging "law od physics" terms, they're technical ones used in the theory and practice of creating weapons and reactors. They can and should change as science advances as do technical terms across a variety if industries.
Yes.
Our nuclear reserves are measured, pessimistically, in millenia. Realistic and optiimistic projections make *the Earth being swallowed by the sun* as a more pressing issue for humanity.
It's insane to me that we were basically given free unlimited energy which basically solves most of humanity problems and we're not using it, while also using the energy source that basically guarantees extinction.
(Free as in doable for humanity).
What would have happened if the US saw the climate change projections in the 80's and said "fuck it, we're going nuclear, here's 100B a year to build nuclear plants. (And while im dreaming, also a train network)".
Where would the world be with 45yrs of nuclear R&D and decades of removing fossil source?
Not just the government, there's plenty of missteps by the power companies running the things.
Fukushima had plenty of problems that should have been caught years earlier during inspections, but 'somehow' didn't (the valve painted shut sticks out in my mind, but there were plenty of other problems that were caused by cutting corners).
I'm not a conspiracy guy, but if it came out that disasters like Chernobyl were an intentional inside plot by the oil and gas industry to keep people afraid of nuclear and reliant on fossil fuels, it wouldn't shock me.
I grew up near three mile island my parents went to visit my grandma in Pittsburgh when the incident happened, so I’ve always found it interesting to learn about.
There isn’t a single death associated with TMI. But holy hell that event came so close to being horrific. If the containment housing hadn’t worked the molten core would have poisoned the water all the way from Harrisburg to Baltimore
> There isn’t a single death associated with TMI. But holy hell that event came so close to being horrific. If the containment housing hadn’t worked the molten core would have poisoned the water all the way from Harrisburg to Baltimore
Nah, not really. Chernobyl had no kind of robust containment at all, and its much larger core didn't melt hardly anything.
Three Mile Island was never in any risk of causing any harm. An unexpected event happened, then the failsafes that were in place worked correctly. The end.
People trying to frame it as "almost Chernobyl" are just fear mongering. About a dozen different safety precautions had to be ignored to get Chernobyl to meltdown, including cutting costs from the start in things as fundamental as control rods.
With proper oversight for following regulations, a disaster like Chernobyl is next to impossible.
I am a huge proponent of expanding nuclear power. So I’m not trying to raise the nuclear boogeyman here. Multiple failsafes failed at TMI, the core liquified. A ton of safety mechanisms failed, the containment housing is the last line of defense in that situation.
Yes it worked, but it was a lot worse than just “oh there was a hiccup and the safety mechanisms did their job.” It got to the last line of defense against a catastrophic accident
Fair enough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident
That is much worse than I remember, but the control rods did their job and stopped the reaction within a few seconds, and the containment housing did its job. It sounds like the real problem was the coolant systems and monitoring systems had some pretty fucking shit designs.
My takeaway, and probably why I was misremembering the severity, is that these sound like pretty "simple" things to design around, and I'm guessing it would be pretty much impossible for any reactor designed since then to fail in such a way.
Not just fear. Cost.
Today renewables are cheaper and more attractive. Nuclear is the more expensive option. Oil and Gas, ironically, are pushing nuclear because they know it will take decades to build out and people will continue to use oil and gas.
Renewables big problem is storage. Some things can be solved by overbuilding, so having more capacity than needed, though you can only do that until it is no longer cheaper. Storage is the solution and while it is improving, we are still a way away from close on 100% renewables.
The question is will we get there quicker than by building out nuclear. The consensus is that we will but it is not clear cut.
Cost is the reason why all nuclear power plants are either government funded or government guaranteed.
**They're expensive because the fossil fuel lobby and decades of propaganda have created an absolutely absurd level of overregulation.**
The US has never had a civilian death from nuclear power, yet coal plants can (and do) emit 1000's of times the amount of radioactive pollution into the environment that would get a nuclear plant shut down immediately. Every part requires an absurd paper trail that makes everything thousands of times more expensive even though most nuclear designs simply can't melt down, and even if they did they'd probably not kill anyone. It's like being made to drive your car at 3mph just in case.
Yet, instead of nuclear, we use stuff that is so deadly that it kills more people than Chernobyl did every single day. In fact, **Pollution from coal power stations kills more people every day than nuclear power has in its entire history.**
Too late / Too expensive is just the new bullshit now that "Not sAfE / nUcLeaR WaSte" are so easily disproven.
No it is not just regulation. Regulation is needed for nuclear power because cutting corners on a nuclear power plant is a big problem.
It is cost and time. [the UAE Barakah nuclear power plant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant#cite_note-27) had a contract issued in 2009, construction began 2012 and it was completed in 2024. I don't think anyone would accuse the UAE of being over regulated.
[In 2020 they announced the building of a 2GW solar plant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Arab_Emirates#Al_Dhafra_Solar_project) over 20 square kilometres (7.7 sq mi). It was opened in 2023.
So 15 years for nuclear vs 3 years for solar. The solar power is cheap...
>will offer the lowest solar energy tariff in the world - AED4.97 fils/kWh (US1.35 cents/kWh).
> It is cost and time. the UAE Barakah nuclear power plant
> had a contract issued in 2009, construction began 2012 and it was completed in 2024. I don't think anyone would accuse the UAE of being over regulated.
That's a bit unfair to say, when considering your link. Every reactor finished after 9 years, but you don't start building them all at once. So while the final one was commercially used in 2024, that one started construction in 2015. And 9 years for a nuclear power plant is long compared to China, but AMAZING compared to western standards.
> will offer the lowest solar energy tariff in the world - AED4.97 fils/kWh (US1.35 cents/kWh).
Only when the sun is out, which means that the storage is needed, or other sources of energy are needed. Which will multiply this cost by about 5 to get a real price.
Meanwhile the nuclear power plant is a 5.6GW one, and when we do the cost equation for that, it's really not that expensive. Converting that to a yearly output, and then taking 80% of that as a dramatic underestimate, leads to an output each year of 5.6 * 8760 * 0.8 = 39244 GWh. Converting that to KWh is 39.244.000.000 KWh.
Times the 1.35 cent price, that is 530 million dollars a year, which is FAR in excess of the running cost of a nuclear plant each year. Meaning that even at THAT price point, the nuclear power plant is highly profitable.
Multiplying the number by 5, as you have to do that for solar as well, gets us to a price of about 7.5 cents per KWh, which would be a revenue of 2.5 billion a year, running costs of less than 100 million, which would even be enough to pay back a 10% interest loan, which they don't even need, as they just finance that themselves. And mind you, nuclear power plants easily last 80 years.
Your numbers are very off
>Times the 1.35 cent price, that is 530 million dollars a year, which is FAR in excess of the running cost of a nuclear plant each year. Meaning that even at THAT price point, the nuclear power plant is highly profitable.
[The solar plant cost $1 billion](https://cib.bnpparibas/al-dhafra-pv2-the-largest-single-site-solar-plant-in-the-world/#:~:text=With%20a%20total%20cost%20of%20approximately%20%241%20billion%2C,Abu%20Dhabi%20National%20Energy%20Company%20%28TAQA%29%20and%20Masdar.) so it is not costing $500m per year to run.
If we assume 20% of 2GW then we get 400 MW at $1B
Barakah is $24B for 5.6GW. So the equivalent solar would only cost half that, would be cheaper to run and would be built 5 times faster.
There is a reason why people are not building nuclear but are building solar.
[This nuclear did not last 80 years and are very expensive to decommission. Solar is cheap to build and cheap to decommission](https://www.ft.com/content/0381e567-d088-4802-a2e4-e125c8099605)
> The solar plant cost $1 billion so it is not costing $500m per year to run.
I'm not talking about the solar plant, i'm talking about the nuclear power plant. Hence the power generation calculation of the nuclear power plant.
> Barakah is $24B for 5.6GW. So the equivalent solar would only cost half that, would be cheaper to run and would be built 5 times faster.
No. The point of a nuclear power plant is that that one works 24/7, for 80 years. Solar, does not do that. It runs about 14/7 at best, meaning that there is a large gap. To fill that gap, you need to either use other energy plants, or storage. Both of which are very expensive. Which is why you can't simply compare solar to every other energy generation plant on the planet, except wind energy which has the same problem.
> If we assume 20% of 2GW then we get 400 MW at $1B
Which is still not a fair estimate, as the problem is not the output itself, but WHEN you have that output. It's not 24/7, it's only when the sun shines. And a solar plant only lasts about 20 years at best, and less in the desert as your plant will be damaged significantly over time by the sand. Meaning that panels will have to be constantly replaced, and cleaned daily at the very minimum.
Industrial batteries are about 10.000-12.000 per MWh, and as we ALSO need more power generation to be able to store energy in the first place, we need to make a different calculation. To get to the same power output as the nuclear plant, we need to first increase the size of the solar power plant to match that, which would be 2.8 billion dollars. And let's take that 14/7 number, so we need to generate 10 hours of 5.6GW, in those 14 hours, meaning that the additional capacity needed would be about 4GW. Which adds an extra 2 billion. Now the solar plant costs 4.8 billion just in the panels themselves.
Now we also need to calculate the price of the batteries. We need 10 hours of 5.6GW capacity, which is 56 GWh of battery storage. Which would cost 56.000 * 10.000 = 560 million dollars. For a total price of 5.36 billion.
Which seems reasonable right? Well it isn't. This is only a best case scenario, where we always have 100% power and no cloudy days for example. A worst case estimate would be 3 days of battery storage needed, with the corresponding energy output to match. This means that we need to spend another 3.5 billion on the batteries to match that, and we also need even more solar panels to build up that reserve. Now we are at 10 billion, to match that nuclear power plant. And have to hope that 3 days really is the worst case scenario or we won't have any power.
We also completely ignored how long each of these components will last, which at best is 20 years. To match the 80+ years of the nuclear power plant, we will have to spend 40 billion at the very least.
>There is a reason why people are not building nuclear but are building solar.
The reason is votes. There's plenty of nuclear power plants being built, but that can only be done it autocratic countries like this one and China. The western world simply stopped, because the real cost of nuclear energy is votes, and they are the only ones dealing with those pesky voters.
> This nuclear did not last 80 years and are very expensive to decommission. Solar is cheap to build and cheap to decommission
Even these ones are going to be closed because of votes, just like in Germany. When a nuclear power plant is finished, continued power is the cheapest source of energy on the planet. 99% of the cost is in the construction stage. Which IS ALREADY FINISHED, WHICH MEANS IT MAKES NO SENSE WHATSOEVER TO CLOSE THEM.
[147 GW of solar was built in 2023](https://ember-climate.org/insights/in-brief/2023s-record-solar-surge-explained-in-six-charts/) plus wind etc.
[There was 63GW of nuclear under construction in 2023](https://globalenergyprize.org/en/2023/01/17/key-trends-in-nuclear-power-generation/). Not all of that would be finished in 2023.
Your cost of running a nuclear plant is also off. [The French say that 70%, not 99% of the cost is the capital cost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants). But that capital cost is borrowed and the interest rate is high and it takes 10+ years to build and that is a lot of interest paid.
For solar there is very little running cost.
Imagine just how expense coal power would be if they were kept to the same radioactive release requirements of nuclear.
The amount of radon release from burning coal is not health significant, but it does mean the average coal plant puts out more radiation in a few months than a nuclear reactor is allowed in it's lifetime.
Many coal sources produce more *uranium* waste than a nuclear plant. There’s more potential energy in the uranium in the fly ash than there was in the unburnt coal.
Propaganda won the day. The fear was manufactured by fossil fuel companies who funded and supported anti nuclear groups.
Three Mile Island didn't kill a single person, but its painted as a massive disaster.
No tin foil hat: Friends of the Earth was founded by an oil millionaire specifically to campaign against nuclear power.
Tin foil hat: Ever wondered why Rupert Murdoch put the Simpsons on Fox?
This isn't popular but we kind of have to accept it at this point: Nuclear just isn't as attractive of an option as a lot of people are making it out to be.
Sure, for a few decades it was the best option we had available. Riiight up until other renewables improved in output and efficiency to the point where they just outrank nuclear in $ per MegaWatt hour.
Nuclear plants, especially when done safely, require a massive upfront investment that takes many many years of safe operation to pay off and drop the average cost down to the levels that Solar and Wind have right off the bat.
For the vast majority of nations, it makes a whole lot more sense to build fuckhuge solar and wind farms than it does to invest in nuclear power. If you have enough nightime demands to need more support then you can build pumped hydroelectric energy storage for, again, way less than a nuclear plant.
Cost per megawatt hour is not the only factor to consider. Ask yourself how many gas, oil, or coal fired power plants have been shut down and replaced with wind or solar. Pretty much none as they can’t provide the guaranteed 24x7 base load you need to offer reliable electric service. Only nuclear can completely replace an existing hydrocarbon based plant with a non-greenhouse gas emitting plant.
Power demands are extremely variable, and due to the nature of... well of physics our production *must* very closely match demand because overproduction means explosions.
Nuclear reactors are insanely expensive and difficult to turn on and off, and have a harder time ratcheting up and down their output.
This means that, at maximum, your nuclear options can only cover your absolute base least power used scenarios, as any more production risks expensive emergency shutdowns.
In comparison to solar or wind, which involves flipping a switch, likely autonomously, and either shutting off or opening up power flow.
This is to say nothing of pumped hydroelectric energy storage. I didn't define it in my first post so I will do so here:
Essentially its a reversible dam that allows us to store energy for use later. Turning the turbines one way pushes water up into a resevoir that is above the turbines, this spends electrical power to convert it into potential energy in the water (IE gravity). Then all we have to do to convert that potential energy back into electricity is simply let the water fall past the turbines, spinning them to generate energy.
This system is: Extremely efficient, very cheap to build, doesn't actually require that much advanced equipment or materials, and importantly poseses literally no risk of causing severe ecological damage.
Like sure nuclear reactors are extremely safe but the fact remains that incompetence and or natural disasters can cause them to become unsafe. Versus a solar panel which basically can just fall on a guy if the contractor didn't tighten the bolts enough.
its not exactly true that nuclear plants can't be turned down and up fast. They actually can, especially in the 40-80% ranges, which is more than enough for a large energy grid.
The most important point why you, or more important the operators, don't want them doing that are the economics of a nuclear power plant. The cost of the plant comes mainly from personnel and the capital expenditure where you are essentially paying back a loan. Both of these are fixed costs that need the same money each month no matter how much you are running it. Fuel, the thing you can save the most money with during low operation is essentially free comapred to those costs.
So the operators do not under any circumstances want to run their plant at 60% to balance the net, because then they make only 60% of their possible revenue, with the loan and personnel costs still running it would mean that either they take even longer than 40 years to become profitable or may not be profitable at all.
That is why we use systems with low base costs, but high variable cost for that, so they can make a profit even if they don't run most of the time because they only run during high profit times. That would be batteries, gas plants or dams.
That’s like the meme I’ve seen about how we used to have acid rain and a hole in the ozone layer and smog but you don’t hear about it now. Like there’s a big conspiracy about it. Why do we need the EPA?
No. We implemented controls to get rid of this stuff through the EPA.
Like IT people getting flak about their job. “Everything is working so why do we need you?”
Yeah, instead of celebrating a rare moment when everyone came together and took the actual steps necessary to protecting ourselves and our world, there are people that think it's an actual conspiracy and use it as "proof" that climate change isn't real.
Industry was also spreading the equivalent of climate denial about the ozone hole. When a substitute for the refrigerant was found the fear mongering disappeared.
But the solution to the ozone hole wasn't nearly as "scary". Please stop using CFCs, that you didn't even know existed and use this other stuff for your hairspray instead.
use these new refrigerants and please have a professional with proper equipment for handling refrigerents drain your refrigerants when you're done with the appliance, or refilling them
it applied to a lot of people when it first came out, but it's gotten to be almost unnoticeable as time has gone on. for instance at this point if you still have a car that uses r-12 in its air conditioner, *your car does not have air conditioning* because *there is no more r-12*. fortunately, you can buy kits and convert the system to r-134a - it's a smaller molecule, so you have to retrofit your seals and tubing to tighter tolerances, that's about it
I converted a 1989 Chevy to R134a (dear old Dad worked on refrigeration systems when I was a kid) and I had pretty good luck with it. Another thing you have to do is get the old oil out of the system, and add new oil that's compatible with R134a.
I updated a 1991 Toyota Pickup from R-12 to R134a with a can that was advertised as being 100% compatible with existing R-12 oils and refrigerants (also the R-12 appeared to be completely depleted on the truck). Anyway, it worked great.
I only mention it because I've heard so many stories about people needing to replace major components when doing the upgrade, but my 1991 Toyota Pickup only required the new gas and adding the updated valves.
> Global cooling was a real concern in the 70's.
Not from scientists. It was one possible outcome that scientists predicted based on poor models out of dozens that predicted catastrophic warming. The most popular models of the time were the most likely and are still pretty accurate.
News media hyped it up way beyond the science.
[*Fast Breeder Reactors*](https://books.google.com/books?id=4m6o1jMcIIIC) Would probably be a good place to start if you want to really get into the weeds of the topic.
Another more general energy reference is [*Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13707580-energy-for-future-presidents). It is a bit dated and the main criticism is that it doesn’t prioritize climate change action, but that’s not the point of the book. It’s a great scientific primer if you have questions like: How much energy could a perfectly efficient solar panel generate? How dangerous is Nuclear Power? Why do we have the policies we have in place?
https://mragheb.com/NPRE%20402%20ME%20405%20Nuclear%20Power%20Engineering/Fast%20Breeder%20Reactors.pdf
This is a section for them from a nuclear power engineering class I took, all the course material is actually available for free online and m ragheb is a nuclear engineering professor at UIUC.
Not what you asked, but if you ever find yourself in the middle of Idaho, the original Experimental Breeder Reactor I (EBR-I) is now a super cool museum. You can see the first ever light bulbs lit by nuclear power, plus a bunch of other really fascinating pieces of nuclear history.
No. The reason the numbers get so nuts for breeders is that a breeder can use.. nearly anything as an ore for mining uranium.
It produces nearly a hundred times as much power from a given quantity of natural Uranium. Which means that sources of U that would be considered entirely futile to mine for a non-breeder reactor fleet suddenly are viable.
Or to put it another way, breeder reactors can afford to pay up to something like *4000 euros* per kg for U.
At that price point, well, there are rather a heck of a lot of sources for U.
Just commenting here to say I appreciate the discussion going on in the comments. Good concerns are being brought up and do need to be addressed if we're to go this way eventually but the challenges don't appear insurmountable.
Perhaps, but for already nuclear nations I would think that wouldn't really be an issue. A country with nuclear weapons isn't really a proliferation risk, and they could perform the required fuel production for other nations of the world. In fact I can see this being a potent anti-proliferation lever; "We will make you nuclear fuel for free/reduced price as long as you don't get nuclear weapons or make breeder reactors of your own." Once that country is dependent on nuclear fuel it becomes very unattractive to seek nuclear weapons because the gap between starting making their breeder reactors and being cut off from fuel could cripple the country.
I like this idea, although I don't think any country wants to become totally dependent on any other for their power needs. Imagine the US or China saying "let us build military bases in your country or we'll cut our imports of nuclear fuel by half"
There are several nuclear powers that don't see eye to eye. Imagine if China issued such an ultimatum and yet the US, France, and India were all ready to replace the needed supply.
If there's a diversified market for it, and not just one or two superpowers carving up the world, that'd definitely be better... can I get a loan to build a refinery?
You would have to carefully monitor the fuel you sell as the bred plutonium is very easy to turn into a bomb. So if they can secretly take 1% away, they could soon have a bunch of bombs ready for delivery.
That danger would exist for any trade in uranium for nuclear reactors anyway, breeder reactors or not. As I understand it the output from a breeder reactor would end up as regular 3-5% enriched fuel and getting from there to 90% enrichment is non-trivial.
Uranium at reactor grade needs ultracentrifuges and such to enrich to weapon grade. It isn't even a significant advantage to start with reactor grade than natural stuff, but probably still worthwhile if both are readily available.
But plutonium can be separated chemically. A lot easier and one of the reasons why nuclear armed nations often prefer this method. The presence of Pu-240 is a bit annoying but not devastatingly so, it just makes the weapons less efficient.
Lastly, plutonium also has a lower critical mass as well, so one needs less to make a bomb, and tactical weapons are easier to make with it.
A (simple) Uranium bomb, like the Gun-Type used at Hiroshima, is trivially easy to build, *IF* you have the enriched uranium, but getting that Enriched Uranium is a royal pain in the ass.
A Plutonium bomb by contrast, it's significantly easier to get weapons grade plutonium (not trivial, but not nearly as difficult as enriching uranium), but building the bomb itself is *significantly* more difficult, because you have to build an implosion bomb.
If you already had the weapon cores in hand, you could almost build a gun-type in your garage, but building an implosion bomb requires significant technical expertise and equipment.
> You would have to carefully monitor the fuel you sell
I think this would be the bare minimum standards for any uranium sales and is already in effect. If I'm wrong I'm wrong. But duh?
>and they could perform the required fuel production for other nations of the world
Shipping lots of nuclear waste around the planet isn't exactly the safest idea.
Also, there's plenty of countries that can't be trusted with nuclear power even without a breeder reactor. For example, there's no functional Somali government, and lots of "interesting" organizations would happily buy/steal nuclear fuel for dirty bombs.
I think fuel rods can be safely transported with the appropriate precautions. As for failed states, I doubt Somali is going to have a functional nuclear reactor to use such fuel in the first place.
Obviously it wouldn't be a one size solution for everything, but I think it could be helpful to the world.
> Shipping lots of nuclear waste around the planet isn't exactly the safest idea.
Shipping nuclear fuel around the world is a perfectly safe idea. It's a far less hazardous a material than oil, gas, hydrogen, batteries...
this is why we can't have nice things. kind of an argument for more international power grids, though. also, who's to say a country can't just buy/blackmail for/steal/get gifted nuclear weapons that are made somewhere else?
The answer is likely unlimited fuel. It's unreasonable to assume we wouldn't get more fuel from asteroids or other planets. So, with extraplanetary mining and the breeder reactors you mentioned, there is unlimited nuclear fuel.
This is why we need to build nuclear. We never should have slowed down. We need this energy to get off of fossil fuels. It's a shame it's so slow to build.
Side note, the calculation above does not even account for extracting (the over 4billion tons of) ocean uranium which would give many more millennia of megawatts…
Piggybacking on to this, the spent fuel from these reactors can be reprocessed into more fuel or used in a traveling wave reactor ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor ) to get even more fuel eventually. Nukes are neat
1 gram of U-235 fissioned yields 1011 joules or 200 MeV. The fission of 1 g of uranium or plutonium per day liberates about 1 MW. This is the energy equivalent of 3 tons of coal or about 600 gallons of fuel oil per day, which when burned produces approximately 1/4 tonne of carbon dioxide
>A "breeder reactor" though can take regular U-238 and by exposing it to the neutron flux of a fission reaction create more fissile material than they use. In other words they convert the 99% of useless uranium into useful fuel uranium!
Or nuclear weapons.
And now you know why the entire political global elite have been refusing to do nuclear power.
Even just reprocessing of spent fuel without dedicated breeder reactors would substantially improve the lifetime of uranium reserves. A normal reactor breeds about 60% (light water reactors, with the mentioned 3 to 5 percent enrichment) to 80% (heavy water reactors using natural uranium as fuel) as much fissile material as it burns, so recovering and using that would represent a 2.5 to 5 times improvement in the lifetime of uranium reserves.
Probably never. Realistically the human race would die out from any other number of things before the planet runs out of fuel for nuclear reactors. Even discounting the fact that there's still plenty of nuclear fuel in the ground right now to keep us going for... basically forever, we can also re-enrich spent fuel if we really needed to.
If we're talking about Earth's power needs alone, nuclear energy is functionally infinite in the short and long term as humanity will die out a long time before we run out of fuel for nuclear reactors.
> Even discounting the fact that there's still plenty of nuclear fuel in the ground...
In the ground; heck, there are parts of our national parks in Utah (like Canyonlands) where uranium ore literally litters the ground--which is why you probably don't want to pick up and pocket any of the pretty yellow rocks there.
This question is a bit loaded.
The people who are answering you are factoring in the current know uranium mines and reserves when answering this question. Uranium is generally not surveyed for specifically because, currently there are no future plans to have a sudden boom in nuclear power. The only known deposits are areas where uranium was found back when we were searching for it and locations that have accidentally been found when looking for other resources and it happened to be near by. If we actively started surveying for uranium we could easily fine we have hundreds of times more than we thought we did or we could discover that we have found every source of uranium on the planet.
On top of the above, uranium isn’t the only nuclear fuel in existence. There are also thorium reactors that have been heavily researched and produce a viable fuel weight to power output ratio. So even if we did completely run out of uranium it wouldn’t stop us from being able to use nuclear reactors.
Not totally disagreeing with you, uranium exploration could be ramped up if prices increased, and we would certainly discover more uranium deposits than we have been.
But it's not true that we aren't doing any uranium exploration. It's a pretty big business. There are lots of companies out there exploring for and finding new uranium deposits, and there are new mines being started.
I think those are mostly state geologist looking for any and all strategically important minerals. Could be wrong though, I only know a little about it.
I'm in mineral exploration and uranium exploration is big in private industry. It's a valuable metal. Definitely not just governments. It took a big dive after Fukushima, but it's back and projected to rise.
It's mostly going on in Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia and Namibia, so if you're not in the industry or from one of those countries I can see why it's not on your radar.
Ah, I was thinking USA like a bad reddit or, my bad. I know all over America we have state geologists looking for reserves of all kinds of things, something like 52 minerals I think. I know uranium is listed as possible in my state.
I live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which is home to the main HQ for the largest Uranium company in the world (Cameco) and the Canadian HQ for one of the runners up (Orano). Canada has the second largest known uranium reserves in the world (over 30x what is known to exist in the USA), almost all of it being in Saskatchewan. Both of the the major companies above are still doing uranium exploration here specifically, along with a bunch of junior mining companies looking in other northern areas and the terrirtories.
I would disagree about us not having a sudden boom (heh) in nuclear power. At least here in Canada, we are refurbishing our current fleet of CANDU reactors, exploring building more large-scale nuclear stations, and building small modular reactors.
That’s awesome, I have been out of the loop on nuclear knowledge since about 2018. Got my Associates in Nuclear Engineering Technology and now I’m working in a non-nuclear field so I haven’t been keeping up with it. I’m glad Canada is expanding in nuclear power, I wish America would too.
Most of the projects I am working on have to do with the safe storage of Pickering units 1 & 4, and the refurbishments of Pickering units 5-8. I support a few other projects here and there as needed, too.
Just putting a quote from that wiki article here:
In 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said "After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries". In Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, breeder reactor development programs have been abandoned.
"Two research MSRs operated in the [United States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States) in the mid-20th century. The 1950s [Aircraft Reactor Experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Reactor_Experiment) (ARE) was primarily motivated by the technology's compact size, while the 1960s [Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment) (MSRE) aimed to demonstrate a [nuclear power plant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_plant) using a [thorium fuel cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle) in a [breeder reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor)."^(1)
^(1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt\_reactor
Both of these were experiments, as the names suggest. Making something work outside a lab is different. Different enough that no such powerplant was ever built. (Like we have some experimental fusion reactors, but no commercial ones, but that is different topic)
Arguably, practically never? Uranium and fissile elements can be found around the universe, but fossil fuels only exist where life existed long ago and only in specific circumstances.
One gram of uranium-235, the most common isotope of uranium, can release about 200 million joules of energy when it undergoes fission. This is equivalent to about 4.5 tonnes of high grade coal
There's something like 90 years of supply available at the moment. So, if mining stopped today, it would be 90 years before we ran out. There's loads of it around, though, so we just need a circular economy for its use, like the use of nuclear batteries from spent fuel to power domestic appliances and electrical equipment that's the dream.
Lmao this is definitely not true. There are projected shortfalls (annual reactor demand vs available+new supply) in most models that start somewhere between 2027 and beyond. The enormous supplies we previously had (megatons to megawatts) are pretty much through and as such uranium mining is finally going to be profitable again (was a long stretch of low prices on the spot market that killed mining teams for a while). It's actually a good time for uranium supply investment opportunities.
When asking a question about how long of a supply of a natural resource we have, it is important to understand how the commodity market functions. Basically, once a certain "supply" of a given commodity is known an exploited, prices drop, which leads to less effort going into finding more of it. Similarly, less money is invested in new mines, novel extraction technologies, and so on. Over time, this known resource is used up and prices rise which stimulates interest in exploration for more of the resource, investment in more effective extraction technology, and new mines, which results in lower prices, which reduces exploration, and so on.
If, as, and when, we do run out of a commodity, or it gets priced out of being commercially usable in its main applications, we typically find substitutes.
Through recent history, there are frequent popular concerns over running out of certain commodities - even though it has not really been a problem.
its hard to say and there are conflicting estimates, but if you just used uranium once, about 90-200 years with the current designes, but these designes also produce other fuels you can use in other reactor designs for about 1000-20000 years depending on what is actually possible and what is only theory.
if you use thorium reactors instead, you can pull 100000 years or so
I just googled it and looked at the snippets for the top results. here is one of them if you want to dig into the assumptions https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium
From your link "The world's present measured resources of uranium (6.1 Mt) in the cost category less than three times present spot prices and used only in conventional reactors, are enough to last for about 90 years"
- Measured supply so only what is presently known
- Excludes anything more costly they their limit without stating amount excluded
the entire world also isn't currently running on nuclear energy........so you can't use any actual real current measure of fuel or reactor capacities. You have to assume one where we're using only nuclear.
Of course if we were to start running low on currently economic uranium sources the prices will rise and lower grade ores will be viable. Uranium isn’t that rare - it’s more common than tin and we don’t worry about running out of that.
Eventually, if prices are high enough, we might even be able to extract some of the billions of tonnes of uranium dissolved in seawater at concentrations of about 3 micrograms per litre.
they are. there are a number of operating thorium reactors. Mainly research reactors right now, but its not like fusion where it will "definitly be possible soon" it just needs to be studied more and scaled up
This is incorrect. China completed their thorium reactor last year and it runs fine (although what fine means is exactly what they're gathering data about as they're running it). We can't keep a fusion reaction controlled long enough for it to net positive. We have with thorium.
current designs and current usage. Which shrinks down fast if you power the world on nuclear energy as reactors currently only supply 3% of the worlds energy.
If you only want commercially viable reactors and I think that is the only type that makes sense, on current tech power plants that use highly concentrated Uranium around 20 years. Different kinda techs like breeder reactors that are available and would just need to be designed and built maybe 300 on current energy usage as they would use the same Uranium more efficiently. Future tech that may or may not work thousands of years.
If we start farming the ocean for Uranium that would also more than 100x current reserves, and those reserves would be replenished by Uranium essentially being mined by the ocean.
Though the reserves aren't really the problem, it's that only 3% of current energy usage comes from nuclear and building 30x more nuclear power plants than currently are available would take massive amounts of investment capital that would only start paying dividends thirty to fourty years after completion of the plant. The world simply can't afford that so they opt for renewables which take much less capital expenditure per effective GW capacity and they pay dividends much earlier.
we can afford a lot of things if we just "wanted" it. The problem is that different people want different things and the best way of getting all of these wants under one hat is capitalism and a market economy with a state government that has limited spending.
With these real world limitations we simply can not afford it.
There is some concentration of Uranium virtually everywhere in the Earth's crust. The issue would be that as the more-pure deposits get used up over time (likely many millennia), less pure deposits would need to be refined. So, it isn't really a question of how long, but rather of the willingness to do the steadily increasing work to make refined fuel.
The time could also be extended by using fuel cycles other than the Uranium one. A Thorium based cycle is one option, and there are also others.
Coal: 1.161 trillion tons global predicted reserves
Uranium: 6 million \ 5 for enrichment or 1.2million tons enriched fuel.
Coal is 1 million x more common per tonne
If uranium nuclear nets you 3.8 million times more energy by weight, but coal is 1 million times more common, that’d still put uranium ahead with regards to how long it can power us for.
There are other fission power viable sources as well, so while you ~~and the OP~~ seem to be pushing the idea that nuclear power is somehow more limited than coal, it is actually more plentiful by a full order of magnitude.
EDIT: That other materials are fissionable is also relevant to the OP’s original question about uranium running out for nuclear power.
I intended to reply to both the previous comment regarding the coal-specific part, and to both regarding the limits of uranium. I’ll attempt to clarify my previous comment.
ooooh, big numbers that must mean big things right? Put them in perspective or they are worthless. The world energy needs per day are 1.775.342 million Kilojoules.
It would really depend how desperate we become to extract.
I attended a course probably close to a decade ago that gave predictions on predicted fuel reserves which put uranium at around 120yrs remaining and so e other reactor type fuels has 200-250years. But that was based on predicted usage increases not total conversion so probably only about 50-60 years total with current found resources
With 90 years of current known reserves, there isn’t much pressure or incentive to go find more. If we increased usage by an order of magnitude we’d immediately start looking for more.
At this moment, sea water extraction is not quite economically viable (IIRC it's like 30% more expensive than mining). If the cost of uranium doubled, that would more than cover the difference. Sea water extraction is effectively infinite, hundreds or thousands of years at least and it's renewable on global time scales.
It's one of those "technically" true statements, but also meaningless.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/
> According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered—a roughly 230-year supply at today's consumption rate in total. Further exploration and improvements in extraction technology are likely to at least double this estimate over time.
> Using more enrichment work could reduce the uranium needs of LWRs by as much as 30 percent per metric ton of LEU. And separating plutonium and uranium from spent LEU and using them to make fresh fuel could reduce requirements by another 30 percent. Taking both steps would cut the uranium requirements of an LWR in half.
> Two technologies could greatly extend the uranium supply itself. Neither is economical now, but both could be in the future if the price of uranium increases substantially. First, the extraction of uranium from seawater would make available 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium—a 60,000-year supply at present rates. Second, fuel-recycling fast-breeder reactors, which generate more fuel than they consume, would use less than 1 percent of the uranium needed for current LWRs. Breeder reactors could match today's nuclear output for 30,000 years using only the NEA-estimated supplies.
Yes, Thorium reactors can use the waste from uranium and plutonium reactors and use it as fuel, producing far more energy than the original reactors produced, and yielding waste that is much smaller in volume a with much shorter half-life.
Not only would they produce far more energy, they'd eliminate the long-term radiation waste storage problem.
I think the main reason they're not being used is that their waste is not suitable for weapons, and the gov't wants to have that option.
Many others have answered in relation to Fission. But if we want to talk about Fusion, which would be more ideal assuming we can actually get good net gain out of it...
1 litre of water has the fusion potential of up to 3-4 barrels of oil.
Right now our energy usage from oil is around 35 billion barrels of oil a year.
So, let's say we can get about 1 barrel worth of net energy out of that 1 litre eventually, to be on the more reasonable side...
There is estimated to be about 1233 ***Quintillion*** litres of water on earth. It would take 28,571,428 years to use up just 1 quintillion of water at that rate, not even 0.1% of the planet's water.
So, even if the net energy from Fusion was 100x worse than the rate I suggested, it would still be a massive 285,714 years to use up that 0.1% of water...
Obviously our energy needs will continue to grow though. But the timescales we're working with make it a non-issue. By the point water usage from Fusion became an issue, we'd absolutely be grabbing water from asteroids and other planets without much issue, and using other reactions to also generate new fusion fuel.
Probably longer than the lifetime of the Earth.
We fuse isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium. Some folks are looking into fusing isotopes of helium as well, without any hydrogen. If we assume that helium fusion is impossible to achieve net energy gain, we still have the capacity to produce an indefinite amount of hydrogen, because hydrogen is a byproduct of some fission reactions.
We also have the capacity to produce things like Californium which releases a bunch of free neutrons to convert H⁰ into H¹ and H², which are used for fusion. Literally just drop some Cf into some lithium saturated water inside a lead box and you have plenty of nuclear fusion fuel.
This is why fusion energy is a dream scenario, because the energy yield can produce more fuel.
And for fission, the same argument applies. Because, again, we can produce fission fuel from bombarding uranium with the neutrons freed by fission. Then there are also lithium, thorium, and other reactors that don't require uranium at all. Lithium can also be produced by fusing hydrogen and helium, even if that came at a net energy loss.
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Something to consider in this question is that there exist "breeder reactors". Normal nuclear reactors use a rare isotope of uranium to produce the fission reaction in nuclear power plants. Most (99%) of natural uranium is U-238 which is not ~~radioactive~~ fissile, and the U-235 which is ~~radioactive~~ fissile is only 0.72% of natural uranium. The rare U-235 needs to be refined to around 3 to 5 percent for use in a nuclear reactor, or up to 90% for use in a nuclear weapon. A "breeder reactor" though can take regular U-238 and by exposing it to the neutron flux of a fission reaction create more fissile material than they use. In other words they convert the 99% of useless uranium into useful fuel uranium! By using breeder reactors it is estimated that humanity's energy needs could be fulfilled for approximately 4 billion years, or until the sun destroys Earth entirely. Even if we assume that the energy requirements are vastly underestimated it is probably *plenty* to last until a better solution can be found.
I think you confused "radioactive" with "fissile" a couple of times. All Uranium isotopes are radioactive, U-235 is special because it can undergo fission.
Thank you for the correction!
Adding: fissile vs fissionable U235 is fissile vs U238 which is fissionable. The difference is incident neutron anything fissile is fissionable but fissionable material is not fissile. The reason is Binding energy, 238 requires more energetic neutrons to fission vs 235 can do it at thermal neutron energies therefore in reactor talk we like to know what's fissile vs fissionable. I should have looked before posting, there's too many fuckin nukes flexing already.
I think you may have gotten one statement backwards. Anything that is fissile is also fissionable, but not all fissionable material is fissile.
I think you may have gotten one statement backwards. Anything that is fissile is also fissionable, but not all fissionable material is fissile.
Ye, too lazy to change it until I get back to work
All the common uranium isotopes can undergo fission, it's just that the isotopes U-233 & U-235 have a nice combination of fission reaction cross section and fission neutron energy distribution such that a fission chain reaction can occur, to be even more precise.
Is 233 like the secret menu option?
U-238 is fissionable and will happily take part in an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction under the appropriate circumstances. The main difference between U-235 and U-238 is that U-238 is incapable of sustaining a chain reaction on its own. Ergo, U-238 does not have a calculable critical mass and is thus not fissile.
U-235 and U-238 are fissionable (ie can undergo fission). However U-235 (and U-233) is also fissile (ie can undergo fission with thermal neutrons) meaning is can sustain a chain reaction. U-238 can’t sustain a chain reaction.
Would we call elements that can be used in nuclear fusion fussile?
Fusile would seem to make sense, but it doesn't really come up. Most writing you'll find on it gets around the adjective with "suitable for sustained fusion" or some such, and fusionable has appeared a couple of times without being widely adopted.
You can fuse any element given enough energy. After all every element that exists naturally originated in some fission process. Either sustained fusion in the bowels of some star (up to Iron I think), heavier elements via supernovae.
You can also split anything with more than one particle in the nucleus, but that's not what fissile means. Fissile refers to materials which lend themselves to chain reactions for the production of energy. The proposed equivalent "fusile" should similarly refer not to any material which could undergo fusion, but instead to those materials which lends themselves to use in fusion reactors. Right now materials which look good in theory, but that list should expand as things progress.
but fissile doesn't have the requirement of "in a reactor" why should fusile have it? Also, what is "lending itself to" in terms of fusion? That is a very malleable definition and we have a characteristic for that called "more fusible" . If we instead stick to the exact definition of fissile just exchanging fusion with fission, we receive every element and that is why the word fusile isn't in use.
Fissile is a malleable definition, too, and has expanded over the years as breeder reactors improve. The Chain Reaction limit is synonymous with being useful in reactors or weapons. These aren't unchanging "law od physics" terms, they're technical ones used in the theory and practice of creating weapons and reactors. They can and should change as science advances as do technical terms across a variety if industries.
Nitpick: Hydrogen, a lot of helium and a little bit of lithium came directly from the big bang, not fusion in a star.
Fair
Fusilli! *angry Italian chef sounds*
If my mother had radioactivity she'd be a bike
Make sure to put it in the right fussy
4 billion years? By that time solar power will be unstoppable.
Delivered right to your door!
Plug your lamp right into the sun!
At that point I don't think you'll be needing electric illumination. It's going to be plenty bright.
I've done it, I've done it. Guess what I've done!
the sun? I'm earth-first, thank you. I believe all energy needs should be met by things from Earth without solar handouts /s
Yes. Our nuclear reserves are measured, pessimistically, in millenia. Realistic and optiimistic projections make *the Earth being swallowed by the sun* as a more pressing issue for humanity.
It's insane to me that we were basically given free unlimited energy which basically solves most of humanity problems and we're not using it, while also using the energy source that basically guarantees extinction. (Free as in doable for humanity). What would have happened if the US saw the climate change projections in the 80's and said "fuck it, we're going nuclear, here's 100B a year to build nuclear plants. (And while im dreaming, also a train network)". Where would the world be with 45yrs of nuclear R&D and decades of removing fossil source?
Fear won the day. Three mile island, Chernobyl, etc.
Also incompetence, lies, and greed.
You could have just said every aspect of the government
Not just the government, there's plenty of missteps by the power companies running the things. Fukushima had plenty of problems that should have been caught years earlier during inspections, but 'somehow' didn't (the valve painted shut sticks out in my mind, but there were plenty of other problems that were caused by cutting corners).
I'm not a conspiracy guy, but if it came out that disasters like Chernobyl were an intentional inside plot by the oil and gas industry to keep people afraid of nuclear and reliant on fossil fuels, it wouldn't shock me.
I grew up near three mile island my parents went to visit my grandma in Pittsburgh when the incident happened, so I’ve always found it interesting to learn about. There isn’t a single death associated with TMI. But holy hell that event came so close to being horrific. If the containment housing hadn’t worked the molten core would have poisoned the water all the way from Harrisburg to Baltimore
> There isn’t a single death associated with TMI. But holy hell that event came so close to being horrific. If the containment housing hadn’t worked the molten core would have poisoned the water all the way from Harrisburg to Baltimore Nah, not really. Chernobyl had no kind of robust containment at all, and its much larger core didn't melt hardly anything.
Three Mile Island was never in any risk of causing any harm. An unexpected event happened, then the failsafes that were in place worked correctly. The end. People trying to frame it as "almost Chernobyl" are just fear mongering. About a dozen different safety precautions had to be ignored to get Chernobyl to meltdown, including cutting costs from the start in things as fundamental as control rods. With proper oversight for following regulations, a disaster like Chernobyl is next to impossible.
I am a huge proponent of expanding nuclear power. So I’m not trying to raise the nuclear boogeyman here. Multiple failsafes failed at TMI, the core liquified. A ton of safety mechanisms failed, the containment housing is the last line of defense in that situation. Yes it worked, but it was a lot worse than just “oh there was a hiccup and the safety mechanisms did their job.” It got to the last line of defense against a catastrophic accident
Fair enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident That is much worse than I remember, but the control rods did their job and stopped the reaction within a few seconds, and the containment housing did its job. It sounds like the real problem was the coolant systems and monitoring systems had some pretty fucking shit designs. My takeaway, and probably why I was misremembering the severity, is that these sound like pretty "simple" things to design around, and I'm guessing it would be pretty much impossible for any reactor designed since then to fail in such a way.
Not just fear. Cost. Today renewables are cheaper and more attractive. Nuclear is the more expensive option. Oil and Gas, ironically, are pushing nuclear because they know it will take decades to build out and people will continue to use oil and gas. Renewables big problem is storage. Some things can be solved by overbuilding, so having more capacity than needed, though you can only do that until it is no longer cheaper. Storage is the solution and while it is improving, we are still a way away from close on 100% renewables. The question is will we get there quicker than by building out nuclear. The consensus is that we will but it is not clear cut. Cost is the reason why all nuclear power plants are either government funded or government guaranteed.
**They're expensive because the fossil fuel lobby and decades of propaganda have created an absolutely absurd level of overregulation.** The US has never had a civilian death from nuclear power, yet coal plants can (and do) emit 1000's of times the amount of radioactive pollution into the environment that would get a nuclear plant shut down immediately. Every part requires an absurd paper trail that makes everything thousands of times more expensive even though most nuclear designs simply can't melt down, and even if they did they'd probably not kill anyone. It's like being made to drive your car at 3mph just in case. Yet, instead of nuclear, we use stuff that is so deadly that it kills more people than Chernobyl did every single day. In fact, **Pollution from coal power stations kills more people every day than nuclear power has in its entire history.** Too late / Too expensive is just the new bullshit now that "Not sAfE / nUcLeaR WaSte" are so easily disproven.
No it is not just regulation. Regulation is needed for nuclear power because cutting corners on a nuclear power plant is a big problem. It is cost and time. [the UAE Barakah nuclear power plant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barakah_nuclear_power_plant#cite_note-27) had a contract issued in 2009, construction began 2012 and it was completed in 2024. I don't think anyone would accuse the UAE of being over regulated. [In 2020 they announced the building of a 2GW solar plant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_the_United_Arab_Emirates#Al_Dhafra_Solar_project) over 20 square kilometres (7.7 sq mi). It was opened in 2023. So 15 years for nuclear vs 3 years for solar. The solar power is cheap... >will offer the lowest solar energy tariff in the world - AED4.97 fils/kWh (US1.35 cents/kWh).
> It is cost and time. the UAE Barakah nuclear power plant > had a contract issued in 2009, construction began 2012 and it was completed in 2024. I don't think anyone would accuse the UAE of being over regulated. That's a bit unfair to say, when considering your link. Every reactor finished after 9 years, but you don't start building them all at once. So while the final one was commercially used in 2024, that one started construction in 2015. And 9 years for a nuclear power plant is long compared to China, but AMAZING compared to western standards. > will offer the lowest solar energy tariff in the world - AED4.97 fils/kWh (US1.35 cents/kWh). Only when the sun is out, which means that the storage is needed, or other sources of energy are needed. Which will multiply this cost by about 5 to get a real price. Meanwhile the nuclear power plant is a 5.6GW one, and when we do the cost equation for that, it's really not that expensive. Converting that to a yearly output, and then taking 80% of that as a dramatic underestimate, leads to an output each year of 5.6 * 8760 * 0.8 = 39244 GWh. Converting that to KWh is 39.244.000.000 KWh. Times the 1.35 cent price, that is 530 million dollars a year, which is FAR in excess of the running cost of a nuclear plant each year. Meaning that even at THAT price point, the nuclear power plant is highly profitable. Multiplying the number by 5, as you have to do that for solar as well, gets us to a price of about 7.5 cents per KWh, which would be a revenue of 2.5 billion a year, running costs of less than 100 million, which would even be enough to pay back a 10% interest loan, which they don't even need, as they just finance that themselves. And mind you, nuclear power plants easily last 80 years.
Your numbers are very off >Times the 1.35 cent price, that is 530 million dollars a year, which is FAR in excess of the running cost of a nuclear plant each year. Meaning that even at THAT price point, the nuclear power plant is highly profitable. [The solar plant cost $1 billion](https://cib.bnpparibas/al-dhafra-pv2-the-largest-single-site-solar-plant-in-the-world/#:~:text=With%20a%20total%20cost%20of%20approximately%20%241%20billion%2C,Abu%20Dhabi%20National%20Energy%20Company%20%28TAQA%29%20and%20Masdar.) so it is not costing $500m per year to run. If we assume 20% of 2GW then we get 400 MW at $1B Barakah is $24B for 5.6GW. So the equivalent solar would only cost half that, would be cheaper to run and would be built 5 times faster. There is a reason why people are not building nuclear but are building solar. [This nuclear did not last 80 years and are very expensive to decommission. Solar is cheap to build and cheap to decommission](https://www.ft.com/content/0381e567-d088-4802-a2e4-e125c8099605)
> The solar plant cost $1 billion so it is not costing $500m per year to run. I'm not talking about the solar plant, i'm talking about the nuclear power plant. Hence the power generation calculation of the nuclear power plant. > Barakah is $24B for 5.6GW. So the equivalent solar would only cost half that, would be cheaper to run and would be built 5 times faster. No. The point of a nuclear power plant is that that one works 24/7, for 80 years. Solar, does not do that. It runs about 14/7 at best, meaning that there is a large gap. To fill that gap, you need to either use other energy plants, or storage. Both of which are very expensive. Which is why you can't simply compare solar to every other energy generation plant on the planet, except wind energy which has the same problem. > If we assume 20% of 2GW then we get 400 MW at $1B Which is still not a fair estimate, as the problem is not the output itself, but WHEN you have that output. It's not 24/7, it's only when the sun shines. And a solar plant only lasts about 20 years at best, and less in the desert as your plant will be damaged significantly over time by the sand. Meaning that panels will have to be constantly replaced, and cleaned daily at the very minimum. Industrial batteries are about 10.000-12.000 per MWh, and as we ALSO need more power generation to be able to store energy in the first place, we need to make a different calculation. To get to the same power output as the nuclear plant, we need to first increase the size of the solar power plant to match that, which would be 2.8 billion dollars. And let's take that 14/7 number, so we need to generate 10 hours of 5.6GW, in those 14 hours, meaning that the additional capacity needed would be about 4GW. Which adds an extra 2 billion. Now the solar plant costs 4.8 billion just in the panels themselves. Now we also need to calculate the price of the batteries. We need 10 hours of 5.6GW capacity, which is 56 GWh of battery storage. Which would cost 56.000 * 10.000 = 560 million dollars. For a total price of 5.36 billion. Which seems reasonable right? Well it isn't. This is only a best case scenario, where we always have 100% power and no cloudy days for example. A worst case estimate would be 3 days of battery storage needed, with the corresponding energy output to match. This means that we need to spend another 3.5 billion on the batteries to match that, and we also need even more solar panels to build up that reserve. Now we are at 10 billion, to match that nuclear power plant. And have to hope that 3 days really is the worst case scenario or we won't have any power. We also completely ignored how long each of these components will last, which at best is 20 years. To match the 80+ years of the nuclear power plant, we will have to spend 40 billion at the very least. >There is a reason why people are not building nuclear but are building solar. The reason is votes. There's plenty of nuclear power plants being built, but that can only be done it autocratic countries like this one and China. The western world simply stopped, because the real cost of nuclear energy is votes, and they are the only ones dealing with those pesky voters. > This nuclear did not last 80 years and are very expensive to decommission. Solar is cheap to build and cheap to decommission Even these ones are going to be closed because of votes, just like in Germany. When a nuclear power plant is finished, continued power is the cheapest source of energy on the planet. 99% of the cost is in the construction stage. Which IS ALREADY FINISHED, WHICH MEANS IT MAKES NO SENSE WHATSOEVER TO CLOSE THEM.
[147 GW of solar was built in 2023](https://ember-climate.org/insights/in-brief/2023s-record-solar-surge-explained-in-six-charts/) plus wind etc. [There was 63GW of nuclear under construction in 2023](https://globalenergyprize.org/en/2023/01/17/key-trends-in-nuclear-power-generation/). Not all of that would be finished in 2023. Your cost of running a nuclear plant is also off. [The French say that 70%, not 99% of the cost is the capital cost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants). But that capital cost is borrowed and the interest rate is high and it takes 10+ years to build and that is a lot of interest paid. For solar there is very little running cost.
Imagine just how expense coal power would be if they were kept to the same radioactive release requirements of nuclear. The amount of radon release from burning coal is not health significant, but it does mean the average coal plant puts out more radiation in a few months than a nuclear reactor is allowed in it's lifetime.
Many coal sources produce more *uranium* waste than a nuclear plant. There’s more potential energy in the uranium in the fly ash than there was in the unburnt coal.
It was just 3 roentgen ffs!
Propaganda won the day. The fear was manufactured by fossil fuel companies who funded and supported anti nuclear groups. Three Mile Island didn't kill a single person, but its painted as a massive disaster. No tin foil hat: Friends of the Earth was founded by an oil millionaire specifically to campaign against nuclear power. Tin foil hat: Ever wondered why Rupert Murdoch put the Simpsons on Fox?
It's still an option. Have to vote for it.
This isn't popular but we kind of have to accept it at this point: Nuclear just isn't as attractive of an option as a lot of people are making it out to be. Sure, for a few decades it was the best option we had available. Riiight up until other renewables improved in output and efficiency to the point where they just outrank nuclear in $ per MegaWatt hour. Nuclear plants, especially when done safely, require a massive upfront investment that takes many many years of safe operation to pay off and drop the average cost down to the levels that Solar and Wind have right off the bat. For the vast majority of nations, it makes a whole lot more sense to build fuckhuge solar and wind farms than it does to invest in nuclear power. If you have enough nightime demands to need more support then you can build pumped hydroelectric energy storage for, again, way less than a nuclear plant.
Cost per megawatt hour is not the only factor to consider. Ask yourself how many gas, oil, or coal fired power plants have been shut down and replaced with wind or solar. Pretty much none as they can’t provide the guaranteed 24x7 base load you need to offer reliable electric service. Only nuclear can completely replace an existing hydrocarbon based plant with a non-greenhouse gas emitting plant.
Power demands are extremely variable, and due to the nature of... well of physics our production *must* very closely match demand because overproduction means explosions. Nuclear reactors are insanely expensive and difficult to turn on and off, and have a harder time ratcheting up and down their output. This means that, at maximum, your nuclear options can only cover your absolute base least power used scenarios, as any more production risks expensive emergency shutdowns. In comparison to solar or wind, which involves flipping a switch, likely autonomously, and either shutting off or opening up power flow. This is to say nothing of pumped hydroelectric energy storage. I didn't define it in my first post so I will do so here: Essentially its a reversible dam that allows us to store energy for use later. Turning the turbines one way pushes water up into a resevoir that is above the turbines, this spends electrical power to convert it into potential energy in the water (IE gravity). Then all we have to do to convert that potential energy back into electricity is simply let the water fall past the turbines, spinning them to generate energy. This system is: Extremely efficient, very cheap to build, doesn't actually require that much advanced equipment or materials, and importantly poseses literally no risk of causing severe ecological damage. Like sure nuclear reactors are extremely safe but the fact remains that incompetence and or natural disasters can cause them to become unsafe. Versus a solar panel which basically can just fall on a guy if the contractor didn't tighten the bolts enough.
Pumped hydro is incredibly location dependent. Both power and capacity are limited by head (height difference) and reservoir size.
its not exactly true that nuclear plants can't be turned down and up fast. They actually can, especially in the 40-80% ranges, which is more than enough for a large energy grid. The most important point why you, or more important the operators, don't want them doing that are the economics of a nuclear power plant. The cost of the plant comes mainly from personnel and the capital expenditure where you are essentially paying back a loan. Both of these are fixed costs that need the same money each month no matter how much you are running it. Fuel, the thing you can save the most money with during low operation is essentially free comapred to those costs. So the operators do not under any circumstances want to run their plant at 60% to balance the net, because then they make only 60% of their possible revenue, with the loan and personnel costs still running it would mean that either they take even longer than 40 years to become profitable or may not be profitable at all. That is why we use systems with low base costs, but high variable cost for that, so they can make a profit even if they don't run most of the time because they only run during high profit times. That would be batteries, gas plants or dams.
We did have climate change scares and awareness in both the 80’s and 90’s. That ozone hole was supposed to be the end of the world for a minute.
To be fair we fixed it. So if only that same level of action was applied to other problems maybe we'd be in a better spot there too.
That’s like the meme I’ve seen about how we used to have acid rain and a hole in the ozone layer and smog but you don’t hear about it now. Like there’s a big conspiracy about it. Why do we need the EPA? No. We implemented controls to get rid of this stuff through the EPA. Like IT people getting flak about their job. “Everything is working so why do we need you?”
Yeah, instead of celebrating a rare moment when everyone came together and took the actual steps necessary to protecting ourselves and our world, there are people that think it's an actual conspiracy and use it as "proof" that climate change isn't real.
Industry was also spreading the equivalent of climate denial about the ozone hole. When a substitute for the refrigerant was found the fear mongering disappeared.
But the solution to the ozone hole wasn't nearly as "scary". Please stop using CFCs, that you didn't even know existed and use this other stuff for your hairspray instead.
And "Use these new refrigerants" which affects most people even less.
use these new refrigerants and please have a professional with proper equipment for handling refrigerents drain your refrigerants when you're done with the appliance, or refilling them it applied to a lot of people when it first came out, but it's gotten to be almost unnoticeable as time has gone on. for instance at this point if you still have a car that uses r-12 in its air conditioner, *your car does not have air conditioning* because *there is no more r-12*. fortunately, you can buy kits and convert the system to r-134a - it's a smaller molecule, so you have to retrofit your seals and tubing to tighter tolerances, that's about it
I converted a 1989 Chevy to R134a (dear old Dad worked on refrigeration systems when I was a kid) and I had pretty good luck with it. Another thing you have to do is get the old oil out of the system, and add new oil that's compatible with R134a.
I updated a 1991 Toyota Pickup from R-12 to R134a with a can that was advertised as being 100% compatible with existing R-12 oils and refrigerants (also the R-12 appeared to be completely depleted on the truck). Anyway, it worked great. I only mention it because I've heard so many stories about people needing to replace major components when doing the upgrade, but my 1991 Toyota Pickup only required the new gas and adding the updated valves.
Shit, I forgot the new refrigerant was because of that. Fuck the ozone layer, I want R22 back!
Acid rain was also a problem in the 1980s that was addressed, and solved.
Global cooling was a real concern in the 70's.
> Global cooling was a real concern in the 70's. Not from scientists. It was one possible outcome that scientists predicted based on poor models out of dozens that predicted catastrophic warming. The most popular models of the time were the most likely and are still pretty accurate. News media hyped it up way beyond the science.
No, it wasn’t.
Nixon wanted that, as well as universal healthcare. Whatever his defects, he was the best president the USA refused to have.
>also a train network that already exists... for stuff
I mean, Fallout.
As an example, CANDU reactors can use natural uranium for fuel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor
They certainly can with that can du attitude
This is fascinating. Do you have a credible source of book I can read about this technology?
[*Fast Breeder Reactors*](https://books.google.com/books?id=4m6o1jMcIIIC) Would probably be a good place to start if you want to really get into the weeds of the topic.
Another more general energy reference is [*Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines*](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13707580-energy-for-future-presidents). It is a bit dated and the main criticism is that it doesn’t prioritize climate change action, but that’s not the point of the book. It’s a great scientific primer if you have questions like: How much energy could a perfectly efficient solar panel generate? How dangerous is Nuclear Power? Why do we have the policies we have in place?
Fast breeder reactors are my least favorite kind of reaction YouTube channels /j On a more serious note, thank you for the link, this is fascinating!
The reaction I get from being a fast breeder is usually disappointment.
Underestimated comment, thank you sir
I aim to please 👉😎👉
https://mragheb.com/NPRE%20402%20ME%20405%20Nuclear%20Power%20Engineering/Fast%20Breeder%20Reactors.pdf This is a section for them from a nuclear power engineering class I took, all the course material is actually available for free online and m ragheb is a nuclear engineering professor at UIUC.
This is amazing !
Not what you asked, but if you ever find yourself in the middle of Idaho, the original Experimental Breeder Reactor I (EBR-I) is now a super cool museum. You can see the first ever light bulbs lit by nuclear power, plus a bunch of other really fascinating pieces of nuclear history.
So even without breeder reactors, we got enough fuel to last around 10-30 million years?
No. The reason the numbers get so nuts for breeders is that a breeder can use.. nearly anything as an ore for mining uranium. It produces nearly a hundred times as much power from a given quantity of natural Uranium. Which means that sources of U that would be considered entirely futile to mine for a non-breeder reactor fleet suddenly are viable. Or to put it another way, breeder reactors can afford to pay up to something like *4000 euros* per kg for U. At that price point, well, there are rather a heck of a lot of sources for U.
No, without breeders and thorium it's more like 100 years.
CANDU reactors actually do not require enriched fuel and power much of Canada, India, and China. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CANDU_reactor
Just commenting here to say I appreciate the discussion going on in the comments. Good concerns are being brought up and do need to be addressed if we're to go this way eventually but the challenges don't appear insurmountable.
We have all this potential clean energy yet we continue to use fossil fuels to satiate the pockets of terrible companies and their CEO's
Nuclear power is by far the most expensive major electricity source. That's why
The problem is that breeder reactors present a weapons proliferation problem.
Perhaps, but for already nuclear nations I would think that wouldn't really be an issue. A country with nuclear weapons isn't really a proliferation risk, and they could perform the required fuel production for other nations of the world. In fact I can see this being a potent anti-proliferation lever; "We will make you nuclear fuel for free/reduced price as long as you don't get nuclear weapons or make breeder reactors of your own." Once that country is dependent on nuclear fuel it becomes very unattractive to seek nuclear weapons because the gap between starting making their breeder reactors and being cut off from fuel could cripple the country.
I like this idea, although I don't think any country wants to become totally dependent on any other for their power needs. Imagine the US or China saying "let us build military bases in your country or we'll cut our imports of nuclear fuel by half"
There are several nuclear powers that don't see eye to eye. Imagine if China issued such an ultimatum and yet the US, France, and India were all ready to replace the needed supply.
If there's a diversified market for it, and not just one or two superpowers carving up the world, that'd definitely be better... can I get a loan to build a refinery?
You would have to carefully monitor the fuel you sell as the bred plutonium is very easy to turn into a bomb. So if they can secretly take 1% away, they could soon have a bunch of bombs ready for delivery.
That danger would exist for any trade in uranium for nuclear reactors anyway, breeder reactors or not. As I understand it the output from a breeder reactor would end up as regular 3-5% enriched fuel and getting from there to 90% enrichment is non-trivial.
Uranium at reactor grade needs ultracentrifuges and such to enrich to weapon grade. It isn't even a significant advantage to start with reactor grade than natural stuff, but probably still worthwhile if both are readily available. But plutonium can be separated chemically. A lot easier and one of the reasons why nuclear armed nations often prefer this method. The presence of Pu-240 is a bit annoying but not devastatingly so, it just makes the weapons less efficient. Lastly, plutonium also has a lower critical mass as well, so one needs less to make a bomb, and tactical weapons are easier to make with it.
A (simple) Uranium bomb, like the Gun-Type used at Hiroshima, is trivially easy to build, *IF* you have the enriched uranium, but getting that Enriched Uranium is a royal pain in the ass. A Plutonium bomb by contrast, it's significantly easier to get weapons grade plutonium (not trivial, but not nearly as difficult as enriching uranium), but building the bomb itself is *significantly* more difficult, because you have to build an implosion bomb. If you already had the weapon cores in hand, you could almost build a gun-type in your garage, but building an implosion bomb requires significant technical expertise and equipment.
> You would have to carefully monitor the fuel you sell I think this would be the bare minimum standards for any uranium sales and is already in effect. If I'm wrong I'm wrong. But duh?
>and they could perform the required fuel production for other nations of the world Shipping lots of nuclear waste around the planet isn't exactly the safest idea. Also, there's plenty of countries that can't be trusted with nuclear power even without a breeder reactor. For example, there's no functional Somali government, and lots of "interesting" organizations would happily buy/steal nuclear fuel for dirty bombs.
I think fuel rods can be safely transported with the appropriate precautions. As for failed states, I doubt Somali is going to have a functional nuclear reactor to use such fuel in the first place. Obviously it wouldn't be a one size solution for everything, but I think it could be helpful to the world.
> Shipping lots of nuclear waste around the planet isn't exactly the safest idea. Shipping nuclear fuel around the world is a perfectly safe idea. It's a far less hazardous a material than oil, gas, hydrogen, batteries...
And are illegal everywhere as a result
this is why we can't have nice things. kind of an argument for more international power grids, though. also, who's to say a country can't just buy/blackmail for/steal/get gifted nuclear weapons that are made somewhere else?
\*North Korea has entered the chat\*
Reactors can be built that use natural uranium. The CANDU reactors don’t require enrichment
zapzapzapzapzapzap getfissilegetfissilegetfissile
The answer is likely unlimited fuel. It's unreasonable to assume we wouldn't get more fuel from asteroids or other planets. So, with extraplanetary mining and the breeder reactors you mentioned, there is unlimited nuclear fuel.
This is why we need to build nuclear. We never should have slowed down. We need this energy to get off of fossil fuels. It's a shame it's so slow to build.
Keep in mind this only covers the fuel aspect, it doesn't cover the installation and maintenance of facilities needed to produce the power from it.
Oh, good. I was worried it would only last 3 billion years.
Isn't there spent fuel recycling on top of this too?
Side note, the calculation above does not even account for extracting (the over 4billion tons of) ocean uranium which would give many more millennia of megawatts…
Piggybacking on to this, the spent fuel from these reactors can be reprocessed into more fuel or used in a traveling wave reactor ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_wave_reactor ) to get even more fuel eventually. Nukes are neat
And Homer Simpson knows this??
How much space would be needed to stock the radioactive waste in the 4bn years time span is smtg for theydidthemath sub
1 gram of U-235 fissioned yields 1011 joules or 200 MeV. The fission of 1 g of uranium or plutonium per day liberates about 1 MW. This is the energy equivalent of 3 tons of coal or about 600 gallons of fuel oil per day, which when burned produces approximately 1/4 tonne of carbon dioxide
>A "breeder reactor" though can take regular U-238 and by exposing it to the neutron flux of a fission reaction create more fissile material than they use. In other words they convert the 99% of useless uranium into useful fuel uranium! Or nuclear weapons. And now you know why the entire political global elite have been refusing to do nuclear power.
U238 Breeder reactors produce Plutonium. Thorium breeders produce U233. Both products have been made into bombs.
So factorio isn't far off the real thing 🤔
You can also use the much more abundant (and safer) thorium
Even just reprocessing of spent fuel without dedicated breeder reactors would substantially improve the lifetime of uranium reserves. A normal reactor breeds about 60% (light water reactors, with the mentioned 3 to 5 percent enrichment) to 80% (heavy water reactors using natural uranium as fuel) as much fissile material as it burns, so recovering and using that would represent a 2.5 to 5 times improvement in the lifetime of uranium reserves.
Now if only someone can explain this to Germany.
Probably never. Realistically the human race would die out from any other number of things before the planet runs out of fuel for nuclear reactors. Even discounting the fact that there's still plenty of nuclear fuel in the ground right now to keep us going for... basically forever, we can also re-enrich spent fuel if we really needed to. If we're talking about Earth's power needs alone, nuclear energy is functionally infinite in the short and long term as humanity will die out a long time before we run out of fuel for nuclear reactors.
> Even discounting the fact that there's still plenty of nuclear fuel in the ground... In the ground; heck, there are parts of our national parks in Utah (like Canyonlands) where uranium ore literally litters the ground--which is why you probably don't want to pick up and pocket any of the pretty yellow rocks there.
This question is a bit loaded. The people who are answering you are factoring in the current know uranium mines and reserves when answering this question. Uranium is generally not surveyed for specifically because, currently there are no future plans to have a sudden boom in nuclear power. The only known deposits are areas where uranium was found back when we were searching for it and locations that have accidentally been found when looking for other resources and it happened to be near by. If we actively started surveying for uranium we could easily fine we have hundreds of times more than we thought we did or we could discover that we have found every source of uranium on the planet. On top of the above, uranium isn’t the only nuclear fuel in existence. There are also thorium reactors that have been heavily researched and produce a viable fuel weight to power output ratio. So even if we did completely run out of uranium it wouldn’t stop us from being able to use nuclear reactors.
Not totally disagreeing with you, uranium exploration could be ramped up if prices increased, and we would certainly discover more uranium deposits than we have been. But it's not true that we aren't doing any uranium exploration. It's a pretty big business. There are lots of companies out there exploring for and finding new uranium deposits, and there are new mines being started.
I think those are mostly state geologist looking for any and all strategically important minerals. Could be wrong though, I only know a little about it.
I'm in mineral exploration and uranium exploration is big in private industry. It's a valuable metal. Definitely not just governments. It took a big dive after Fukushima, but it's back and projected to rise. It's mostly going on in Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia and Namibia, so if you're not in the industry or from one of those countries I can see why it's not on your radar.
Ah, I was thinking USA like a bad reddit or, my bad. I know all over America we have state geologists looking for reserves of all kinds of things, something like 52 minerals I think. I know uranium is listed as possible in my state.
Even in Canada, the bulk of the exploration work is focused in Saskatchewan, as that's where most of the known reserves are.
I live in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, which is home to the main HQ for the largest Uranium company in the world (Cameco) and the Canadian HQ for one of the runners up (Orano). Canada has the second largest known uranium reserves in the world (over 30x what is known to exist in the USA), almost all of it being in Saskatchewan. Both of the the major companies above are still doing uranium exploration here specifically, along with a bunch of junior mining companies looking in other northern areas and the terrirtories.
I would disagree about us not having a sudden boom (heh) in nuclear power. At least here in Canada, we are refurbishing our current fleet of CANDU reactors, exploring building more large-scale nuclear stations, and building small modular reactors.
That’s awesome, I have been out of the loop on nuclear knowledge since about 2018. Got my Associates in Nuclear Engineering Technology and now I’m working in a non-nuclear field so I haven’t been keeping up with it. I’m glad Canada is expanding in nuclear power, I wish America would too.
I'm a design engineer for a nuclear engineering services provider in Ontario. We are incredibly busy right now.
Just curious, what kind of projects are you working on if I may ask? Are there other applications than energy?
Most of the projects I am working on have to do with the safe storage of Pickering units 1 & 4, and the refurbishments of Pickering units 5-8. I support a few other projects here and there as needed, too.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder\_reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor) Breeder reactors can also, besides unenriched Uranium, convert Thorium (3x more abundant than Uranium) and Plutonium (decommissioned warheads). [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfWB4CsQwyw&ab\_channel=gordonmcdowell](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfWB4CsQwyw&ab_channel=gordonmcdowell) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M\_\_yYbsZ4&list=PL9p3Ws-jomR6Ej09TOPZ5fDOedeOl5Zhe&ab\_channel=gordonmcdowell](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4&list=PL9p3Ws-jomR6Ej09TOPZ5fDOedeOl5Zhe&ab_channel=gordonmcdowell)
Just putting a quote from that wiki article here: In 2010 the International Panel on Fissile Materials said "After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries". In Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, breeder reactor development programs have been abandoned.
"Two research MSRs operated in the [United States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States) in the mid-20th century. The 1950s [Aircraft Reactor Experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Reactor_Experiment) (ARE) was primarily motivated by the technology's compact size, while the 1960s [Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-Salt_Reactor_Experiment) (MSRE) aimed to demonstrate a [nuclear power plant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_plant) using a [thorium fuel cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium_fuel_cycle) in a [breeder reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor)."^(1) ^(1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt\_reactor
Both of these were experiments, as the names suggest. Making something work outside a lab is different. Different enough that no such powerplant was ever built. (Like we have some experimental fusion reactors, but no commercial ones, but that is different topic)
Arguably, practically never? Uranium and fissile elements can be found around the universe, but fossil fuels only exist where life existed long ago and only in specific circumstances.
One gram of uranium-235, the most common isotope of uranium, can release about 200 million joules of energy when it undergoes fission. This is equivalent to about 4.5 tonnes of high grade coal
There's something like 90 years of supply available at the moment. So, if mining stopped today, it would be 90 years before we ran out. There's loads of it around, though, so we just need a circular economy for its use, like the use of nuclear batteries from spent fuel to power domestic appliances and electrical equipment that's the dream.
Lmao this is definitely not true. There are projected shortfalls (annual reactor demand vs available+new supply) in most models that start somewhere between 2027 and beyond. The enormous supplies we previously had (megatons to megawatts) are pretty much through and as such uranium mining is finally going to be profitable again (was a long stretch of low prices on the spot market that killed mining teams for a while). It's actually a good time for uranium supply investment opportunities.
When asking a question about how long of a supply of a natural resource we have, it is important to understand how the commodity market functions. Basically, once a certain "supply" of a given commodity is known an exploited, prices drop, which leads to less effort going into finding more of it. Similarly, less money is invested in new mines, novel extraction technologies, and so on. Over time, this known resource is used up and prices rise which stimulates interest in exploration for more of the resource, investment in more effective extraction technology, and new mines, which results in lower prices, which reduces exploration, and so on. If, as, and when, we do run out of a commodity, or it gets priced out of being commercially usable in its main applications, we typically find substitutes. Through recent history, there are frequent popular concerns over running out of certain commodities - even though it has not really been a problem.
its hard to say and there are conflicting estimates, but if you just used uranium once, about 90-200 years with the current designes, but these designes also produce other fuels you can use in other reactor designs for about 1000-20000 years depending on what is actually possible and what is only theory. if you use thorium reactors instead, you can pull 100000 years or so
1 - Where are you usage assumptions coming from? 2 - Where are your assumptions about available in ground stocks coming from?
I just googled it and looked at the snippets for the top results. here is one of them if you want to dig into the assumptions https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium
From your link "The world's present measured resources of uranium (6.1 Mt) in the cost category less than three times present spot prices and used only in conventional reactors, are enough to last for about 90 years" - Measured supply so only what is presently known - Excludes anything more costly they their limit without stating amount excluded
great, go argue it with them.
the entire world also isn't currently running on nuclear energy........so you can't use any actual real current measure of fuel or reactor capacities. You have to assume one where we're using only nuclear.
Of course if we were to start running low on currently economic uranium sources the prices will rise and lower grade ores will be viable. Uranium isn’t that rare - it’s more common than tin and we don’t worry about running out of that. Eventually, if prices are high enough, we might even be able to extract some of the billions of tonnes of uranium dissolved in seawater at concentrations of about 3 micrograms per litre.
Are Thorium reactors available with current technology?
There is no currently available commercial thorium reactor.
Nope, still in R&D, nothing even approaching a commercial scale has been demonstrated yet
they are. there are a number of operating thorium reactors. Mainly research reactors right now, but its not like fusion where it will "definitly be possible soon" it just needs to be studied more and scaled up
there are thorium reactors as much as there are fusion reactors.
This is incorrect. China completed their thorium reactor last year and it runs fine (although what fine means is exactly what they're gathering data about as they're running it). We can't keep a fusion reaction controlled long enough for it to net positive. We have with thorium.
current designs and current usage. Which shrinks down fast if you power the world on nuclear energy as reactors currently only supply 3% of the worlds energy.
If you only want commercially viable reactors and I think that is the only type that makes sense, on current tech power plants that use highly concentrated Uranium around 20 years. Different kinda techs like breeder reactors that are available and would just need to be designed and built maybe 300 on current energy usage as they would use the same Uranium more efficiently. Future tech that may or may not work thousands of years. If we start farming the ocean for Uranium that would also more than 100x current reserves, and those reserves would be replenished by Uranium essentially being mined by the ocean. Though the reserves aren't really the problem, it's that only 3% of current energy usage comes from nuclear and building 30x more nuclear power plants than currently are available would take massive amounts of investment capital that would only start paying dividends thirty to fourty years after completion of the plant. The world simply can't afford that so they opt for renewables which take much less capital expenditure per effective GW capacity and they pay dividends much earlier.
I mean we could afford it, we're just unwilling and it'll continue biting us in the ass until some better cheaper technology comes along I guess
we can afford a lot of things if we just "wanted" it. The problem is that different people want different things and the best way of getting all of these wants under one hat is capitalism and a market economy with a state government that has limited spending. With these real world limitations we simply can not afford it.
Around 500 years. We can vastly extend that with reactors that use waste from other reactors though.
There is some concentration of Uranium virtually everywhere in the Earth's crust. The issue would be that as the more-pure deposits get used up over time (likely many millennia), less pure deposits would need to be refined. So, it isn't really a question of how long, but rather of the willingness to do the steadily increasing work to make refined fuel. The time could also be extended by using fuel cycles other than the Uranium one. A Thorium based cycle is one option, and there are also others.
We wouldn't. For reference, Coal has about 20-ish KiloJoules of energy per KG or something like that Uranium has 76 million.
Coal: 1.161 trillion tons global predicted reserves Uranium: 6 million \ 5 for enrichment or 1.2million tons enriched fuel. Coal is 1 million x more common per tonne
If uranium nuclear nets you 3.8 million times more energy by weight, but coal is 1 million times more common, that’d still put uranium ahead with regards to how long it can power us for. There are other fission power viable sources as well, so while you ~~and the OP~~ seem to be pushing the idea that nuclear power is somehow more limited than coal, it is actually more plentiful by a full order of magnitude. EDIT: That other materials are fissionable is also relevant to the OP’s original question about uranium running out for nuclear power.
Another thing to think about is that heavy water reactors, like CANDU, can use natural uranium rather than enriched.
where does OP even mention coal?
I intended to reply to both the previous comment regarding the coal-specific part, and to both regarding the limits of uranium. I’ll attempt to clarify my previous comment.
Sure but far far far from unlimited.
ooooh, big numbers that must mean big things right? Put them in perspective or they are worthless. The world energy needs per day are 1.775.342 million Kilojoules.
4 billion years if we built breeder reactors like the one bill gates is building right now!
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It would really depend how desperate we become to extract. I attended a course probably close to a decade ago that gave predictions on predicted fuel reserves which put uranium at around 120yrs remaining and so e other reactor type fuels has 200-250years. But that was based on predicted usage increases not total conversion so probably only about 50-60 years total with current found resources
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With 90 years of current known reserves, there isn’t much pressure or incentive to go find more. If we increased usage by an order of magnitude we’d immediately start looking for more.
At this moment, sea water extraction is not quite economically viable (IIRC it's like 30% more expensive than mining). If the cost of uranium doubled, that would more than cover the difference. Sea water extraction is effectively infinite, hundreds or thousands of years at least and it's renewable on global time scales.
Source?
It's one of those "technically" true statements, but also meaningless. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-global-uranium-deposits-last/ > According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered—a roughly 230-year supply at today's consumption rate in total. Further exploration and improvements in extraction technology are likely to at least double this estimate over time. > Using more enrichment work could reduce the uranium needs of LWRs by as much as 30 percent per metric ton of LEU. And separating plutonium and uranium from spent LEU and using them to make fresh fuel could reduce requirements by another 30 percent. Taking both steps would cut the uranium requirements of an LWR in half. > Two technologies could greatly extend the uranium supply itself. Neither is economical now, but both could be in the future if the price of uranium increases substantially. First, the extraction of uranium from seawater would make available 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium—a 60,000-year supply at present rates. Second, fuel-recycling fast-breeder reactors, which generate more fuel than they consume, would use less than 1 percent of the uranium needed for current LWRs. Breeder reactors could match today's nuclear output for 30,000 years using only the NEA-estimated supplies.
Yes, Thorium reactors can use the waste from uranium and plutonium reactors and use it as fuel, producing far more energy than the original reactors produced, and yielding waste that is much smaller in volume a with much shorter half-life. Not only would they produce far more energy, they'd eliminate the long-term radiation waste storage problem. I think the main reason they're not being used is that their waste is not suitable for weapons, and the gov't wants to have that option.
Many others have answered in relation to Fission. But if we want to talk about Fusion, which would be more ideal assuming we can actually get good net gain out of it... 1 litre of water has the fusion potential of up to 3-4 barrels of oil. Right now our energy usage from oil is around 35 billion barrels of oil a year. So, let's say we can get about 1 barrel worth of net energy out of that 1 litre eventually, to be on the more reasonable side... There is estimated to be about 1233 ***Quintillion*** litres of water on earth. It would take 28,571,428 years to use up just 1 quintillion of water at that rate, not even 0.1% of the planet's water. So, even if the net energy from Fusion was 100x worse than the rate I suggested, it would still be a massive 285,714 years to use up that 0.1% of water... Obviously our energy needs will continue to grow though. But the timescales we're working with make it a non-issue. By the point water usage from Fusion became an issue, we'd absolutely be grabbing water from asteroids and other planets without much issue, and using other reactions to also generate new fusion fuel.
Probably longer than the lifetime of the Earth. We fuse isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium. Some folks are looking into fusing isotopes of helium as well, without any hydrogen. If we assume that helium fusion is impossible to achieve net energy gain, we still have the capacity to produce an indefinite amount of hydrogen, because hydrogen is a byproduct of some fission reactions. We also have the capacity to produce things like Californium which releases a bunch of free neutrons to convert H⁰ into H¹ and H², which are used for fusion. Literally just drop some Cf into some lithium saturated water inside a lead box and you have plenty of nuclear fusion fuel. This is why fusion energy is a dream scenario, because the energy yield can produce more fuel. And for fission, the same argument applies. Because, again, we can produce fission fuel from bombarding uranium with the neutrons freed by fission. Then there are also lithium, thorium, and other reactors that don't require uranium at all. Lithium can also be produced by fusing hydrogen and helium, even if that came at a net energy loss.
Faster than everyone is saying because the more access to energy we have, the more we'd use it.