There is also peak U...
How Long Before Uranium Shortages?
Posted by Gail the Actuary on February 19, 2009 - 9:16am
There is a great deal of controversy about how much uranium will be available for future use. I decided to check to see for myself, and came to the conclusion that we are likely headed for problems within the next ten years. Below the fold are a few things I discovered, in looking through reports available on the Internet....
The Energy Watch Group is not the only one who has looked at the question of the adequacy of uranium resources. The International Atomic Energy Agency issued a study in 2001 called Analysis of Uranium Supply to 2050. Its analysis also shows a peak and decline of uranium supply, with a peak occurring in 2024, assuming all resources, including the highest cost resources, can be extracted. If only lower cost resources can be extracted, the peak will be sooner....
The World Nuclear Association (with the above faith-based statements) also published a report for £375.00 called The global nuclear fuel market: supply and demand 2007-2030. I do not have a copy of this report, but according to the EIA Energy Outlook 2008, WNA is forecasting that world uranium production will peak in 2015, before slowly declining to 90% of its peak level in 2030. It is strange that the report I quoted above, available on their website, fails to mention this.
theoildrum.com
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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.
solveclimate.com
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Russians are working on a new reactor..
Russia's Unique SVBR-100 Nuclear Reactor
Posted by Gail the Actuary on May 17, 2009 - 9:54am
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This is a guest post by Christopher Babb. Until 2007, Christopher worked as a Ph. D. Economist. In 2007, he retired early to work on issues related the peak oil problem. His background in physics is from undergraduate coursework and from studying about it on his own.
The Significance of the SVBR-100 Modular Nuclear Reactor
Many analysts expect that societies in the post peak oil period will go through a “power down” scenario that will force their economies to be reconstituted using the primitive energy systems of the eighteenth century. However, not all analysts share this expectation. Since the accident at Chernobyl, an important group of Russian scientists has taken it upon themselves to rewrite the energy future of technically advanced civilizations.
Those scientists have chosen to turn away from the dangerous sodium cooled breeder reactor technology, and have turned instead to their own “home grown” “heavy metal” alternative. At present, the Russians are forging ahead to develop and build two different types of uranium fueled “heavy metal” reactors that have most of the favorable characteristics that engineers and policy makers would want in a nuclear reactor. In my opinion, those reactors have the potential to usher in a new era of almost unlimited low cost electric power.
The Russian’s SVBR-100 reactor, which is the subject of this short essay, is the first of those “heavy metal” reactors. (SVBR is the Russian acronym for “lead-bismuth fast reactor”). The first SVBR-100 will go critical and begin generating commercial electric power by around 2020.
There's more… (2604 words)
theoildrum.com
I keep stumbling across Thorium as an alternate source, but don't know much about it.
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