Not Enough Uranium for a Nuclear Revival
by Stacy Feldman - Jan 4th, 2008 Here's a worthy prediction on Britain's fated (though likely) nuclear power revival, courtesy of Dr. David Fleming on Oil Drum:
The [nuclear] construction projects will have diverted money and policy emphasis away from the fundamentals of energy conservation, structural reform and renewables, and we will be deep into the post-oil peak period without an energy strategy in place. The UK’s energy policy, (in common with that of many other nations), will have been reduced to fiasco.
Why the doom and gloom? Well it turns out the world's running out of uranium. Yep, we have less than a decade to go before demand outpaces world availability of uranium from all sources, says Fleming. Prediction #2:
If the UK Government goes ahead with the construction of, say, four nuclear reactors, ready to go online after 2015, the probability is that they will remain unused. They will be mothballed “until the temporary shortage of uranium has been resolved” – and then they will be quietly left to rot.
According to Fleming, annual demand for uranium is at 65,000 tons. About 25,000 tons -- nearly 40 percent -- come from sources other than mining. These sources will be nearly wiped out by 2013. Meanwhile, some 10,000 tons come from the military uranium that's in Russia’s stockpile of Cold War nuclear weapons. By 2013, this too will be running low.
The rest of the 15,000 tons derive from what Fleming calls “secondary supplies.” These refer to stockpiles of uranium that were built up in the 1970s. Guess what? This source is shrinking too. And Fleming predicts that by roughly 2015, there will be a gap in the supply of mined uranium of about 40,000 tons, and these secondary sources won't be able to fill the void.
And there's no real back-up up to speak of:
Of the dozen nations which are significant sources of uranium, only Kazakhstan shows a useful rate of growth – enough for the time being to compensate for a general decline among the smaller producers.
Fleming also explains that there are no viable alternatives to uranium. Still, reactors are being built with abandon in China and Russia, and the UK and the US have plans in the wings too.
But why? it seems so obvious that a world economy powered by nuclear is clearly not the logical consequence of an energy famine and a climate crisis. Unsustainable. Insecure. Unproven as a global energy source.
Haste makes waste. And the radioactive kind is treacherous.
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