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

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (9509)	9/8/2009 4:51:35 AM
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The Future of Nuclear Energy: Facts and Fiction Part III: How (un)reliable are the Red Book Uranium Resource Data? Posted by Francois Cellier on September 7, 2009 - 10:25pm in The Oil Drum: Europe This is the third part of a four-part guest post by Dr. Michael Dittmar. Dr. Dittmar is a researcher with the Institute of Particle Physics of ETH Zurich, and he also works at CERN in Geneva. For more than 40 years, the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the United Nations have published a bi-annual document with the title "Uranium Resources, Production and Demand." This book, known as the IAEA/NEA 2007 Red Book, summarizes data about the actual and near future nuclear energy situation and presents the accumulated world-wide knowledge about the existing and expected uranium resources. These data are widely believed to provide an accurate and solid basis for future decisions about nuclear energy. Unfortunately, as it is demonstrated in this article, they do not. The conventional world-wide uranium resources are estimated by the authors of the Red Book as 5.5 million tons. Out of these, 3.3 million tons are assigned to the reasonably assured category, and 2.2 million tons are associated with the not yet discovered but assumed to exist inferred resources. Our analysis shows that neither the 3.3 million tons of "assured" resources nor the 2.2 million tons of inferred resources are justified by the Red Book data and that the actual known exploitable resources are probably much smaller. Despite many shortcomings of the uranium resource data, some interesting and valuable information can be extracted from the Red Book. Perhaps most importantly, the Red Book resource data can be used to test the "economic-geological hypothesis," which claims that a doubling of uranium price will increase the amount of exploitable uranium resources by an even larger factor. The relations between the uranium resources claimed for the different resource categories and their associated cost estimates are found to be in clear contradiction with this hypothesis. (Links to 1st and 2nd parts) There's more… (8938 words) europe.theoildrum.com 5. Summary Despite the shortcomings of the Red Book and its associated large uncertainties, some valuable information can still be extracted from it. Perhaps the most important results of our analysis are: The "economic-geological hypothesis" that more uranium resources can be extracted if only one is willing to pay a higher price is in direct contradiction with the Red Book resource data. Realistic uranium resource data cannot be obtained directly from the Red Book. However, a detailed comparison of the data from current and past editions of the Red Book and the often far too drastic resource changes reported, following some observations from this analysis, can possibly be used in the future to obtain better resource estimates. The economically extractable uranium resources in many countries are most likely much smaller than generally believed. In absence of a Red Book document that measures up to its claims, only the RAR uranium data in the < 40 dollars/kg category are reliable and believable. The analysis presented in this and the previous two parts of this four-part article [6] demonstrates that the current uranium extraction and the believed-to-exist uranium resources are incompatible with even a modest growth scenario of conventional nuclear fission power. A debate about the future of nuclear energy must therefore be based on the two questions: When – if ever – will reliable and safe commercial breeder reactors based on uranium or thorium become available? and Will nuclear fusion power be always 50 years away? The current situation and the prospects about these future hypothetical options will be presented in the fourth and final part of this report. Our analysis can thus best be summarized with an addition to the recent warning from Fatih Birol, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency [27]: "We should leave oil before it leaves us," by stating that "we should also terminate the use of nuclear fission energy based on standard light water reactors before uranium leaves us as well."