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Politics : Rat's Nest - Chronicles of Collapse -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (4425)	7/12/2006 9:28:53 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Respond to of 24210

Follow-up comment TrueKaiser on Tuesday July 11, 2006 at 8:47 PM EST After about 60 years the world nuclear power system will fall off the 'Energy Cliff' - meaning that the nuclear system will consume as much energy as can be generated from the uranium fuel. 60 years? only if current levels of nuclear power are maintained. if you ramp it up to replace other electricty sources it shrinks to 5~6 years. stormsmith.nl as for the so called other sources. uranium form the earths crust. The uranium content of granitic rocks varies, but is of the order of 0.0003%. One of the standard assumptions concerning nuclear energy is that if it came down to it, this uranium could be used in nuclear power generation. It is easy to see that this is completely impossible. Taking the yield of the last diamond in Figure 6 (G=0.0003% and Y=0.2), a very optimistic assumption (Huwyler, Rybach and Taube, 1975) and using the value of c for hard ores in Table 4 and the total mass of the natural uranium needed (see page 2 of the appendix) one finds that 4.952 x 103 x 0.654/(0.0003 x 0.2) = 54 EJ would be needed to mine and extract the uranium needed for 24 years full-load operation of a 1 GWe plant operating with a uranium burnup of 46GW(th)day/MgU. The total electrical energy delivered to the net by a 1GWe nuclear power plant in this period is 0.751 EJ, or seventy times less than the energy required for mining and milling alone. As pointed out above, the lessons of practice in the chemical industry indicate that the actual energy needed for extraction would be much more than was assumed by Huwyler et al. for such a lean ore, so that, if it were to be attempted, the recovery of uranium from granitic rocks would be much higher than the theoretical calculations predict. There is thus not the slightest possibility that the uranium in the earth's crust could deliver energy in nuclear reactors. pulled from stormsmith.nl refrence this was made from stormsmith.nl sea water uranium Because of the low concentration of uranium, very large volumes of seawater would have to to be processed in order to extract useful quantities of uranium. With an expected extraction efficiency of about 0.3, 1 gram of uranium could be extracted from 1000 m3 seawater. There are several unsolved problems in the extraction process, such as large losses of titaniumhydroxide (about 15 kg titanium per kg uranium extracted, ORNL 1974), and pollution of the adsorber beds by organic materials of the sea, however. In any case the process needs enormous pumps that would consume large amounts of electricity. Regeneration of the eluant by steam stripping is also an energy-intensive process. same source as above also i need to point out the following. as long as the top quality uranium ore exists a nuke plant from construction to decommission and dismantling emits 33% the c02 of a coal plant. sounds good right? well it would if we were close to running out of top quality uranium(we have been eating allot of former nuclear bombs for this stuff already) and when we do the c02 cost of nuclear power can be as high to even higher then a coal plant. as for breeders.. a study by the japanese produced the following. "A successful commercial breeder reactor must have three attributes: it must breed, it must be economical, and it must be safe. Although any one or two of these attributes can be achieved in isolation by proper design, the laws of physics apparently make it impossible to achieve all three simultaneously, no matter how clever the design." though personally, i know your either going to ignore this or disembowel me for daring to show cracks in your fantasy's. theoildrum.com