Some people may think that the dramatic price rise indicates we are running out of reasonably price uranium. This is not so.

Uranium mining has been suppressed by low market prices for many years. Governments, predominantly US and Russia, have been releasing excess stockpiles of Uranium for several years which has discouraged exploration and mine development.

Australia, holder of the world's largest reserves, has limited the country to 3 working mines for domestic political reasons. They are revisiting that policy.

Canada is actively expanding production but has recently been significantly delayed on its richest lode by a mine flood.

Australia and Canada are the world's dominant uranium suppliers.

People had better get used to the prospect of going nuclear ( or more nuclear than we are now ). You can only go so far on fossils, wind, bio and conservation.

It is probably the best way to replace coal for base load production (if you care abut CO2 induced global warming) that is.

It is possible that we will have a breakthrough in bio or solar, but we had better take out insurance in case we don't. And that insurance is nuclear.

Even if the west does not, the rest of the world will, India, China etc., and we should hope they do.

After all, global warming is - well - global while nuclear is local ( large but local ).

So we better get on with it and make sure all reactor designs are as safe as possible and we have somewhere to put the waste.

It is likely that public opinion, poisoned by the greens will prevent the spread of Nuclear power in the west, but we should hope that the rest of the world gets on with it.

It won't be a picnic, but it will be better than the collapse of civilisation due to fuel shortages or climate catastrophe.

Besides, the French and Belgians seem to be doing pretty well out of it.

We don't trade renewables, we pick up their shortcomings. There's no way in hell you'll ever get enough electricity off of renewables to sustain the world, so we just need a way of storing the radioactive waste because it is one of our few options that we have for a growing global population.

Pumped hydro? I'm not sure I understand the reference. Are you referring to a plan similar to Ontario Hydro's compensation reservoir associated with Adam Beck #2 or the similar project of the Lewiston Reservoir Pump/Generating Station associated with Robert Moses Dam? If so I suggest you might reconsider. The number of places suitable for construction of a major reservoir near enough to a water source to make that practical as a reserve storage method as well as close enough to a major metro area to keep the efficiencies in place so that your reserve isn’t eaten by transmission loss are few and far between. Nor is this a cheap option either financially or politically. It took a Supreme Court ruling to get Lewiston built and was a major political and legal mess for years.
If, however, you have some other reference in mind please feel free to elucidate, I never mind being given new information. Do note though, that no matter what the scheme, it will probably take forever to be done since the approval process for any new power plant is ten years plus, and that assumes that no major NIMBY opposition occurs.
Base line power is incredibly hard to produce because it depends on rock solid power generation and that requires new plants that are almost always opposed.

If you think the u235 is going to run out, you could always breed Pu239 from u238, but that is a bit of a slippery slope ....
The French nearly did it with SuperPhenix, but stopped at the last moment.

The Chinese may not stop.

As of the first of the year

Power reactors under construction/planned/proposed:

China: 5/13/50
India: 9/4/20
US: 0/2/21

Uranium reasonably assured reserves at $130/Kg (about the current price)is 4.7 million tons U.

Current U consumption (~442 reactors) is $68 thousand tons U. Thus at current rate, current reserves is 69 years.

All other things equal, the consumption rate will, of course, go up as more reactors come on line.

If recycling of fuel is more widely adopted, the consumption of new Uranium goes down. Recycling is usually referred to as fuel reprocessing and has not been done in the US since the 70's.

Plutonium is already created in the existing power reactors. You don't need a breeder. Plutonium is created from U-238 and 97% of the Uranium in a ordinary power reactor is U-238. Much of the Plutonium created is burned before the fuel bundles are removed.

When the fuel bundles are removed from a power reactor, the Plutonium which has not been burned is not suitable for nuclear weaponry even if it is chemically separated from the rest of the fuel. It contains too much Pu-240 which will mess up the operation of a weapon.

Excellent source for nuclear data: www.uic.com.au (If you go to cross check my numbers, they list one reactor in the US under construction-that is not accurate. There is a reactor undergoing an extensive multiyear rebuild, but it is not new.)

The solar energy covering only about 0.5% of desert land world-wide is enough to replace all human electricity demand, if produced by concentrated solar thermal or concentrated PV processes at ~30% efficiency.

High-voltage DC (HVDC) powerline can transmit long-distance with a loss of only 3% every 625 miles. The entire continental USA and Europe can receiver desert solar electricity at under 10% transmission loss.

Why gamble with the perils of nuclear energy?

Roger,

The last time I checked the numbers, PV solar cost about $5000/kilowatt which operates at about 25% of capacity. The new build nuclear in the US is projected to cost about $1500-2200/kilowatt which will operate at about 90% of capacity. That makes the solar about 8 times the capital cost of nuclear.

Thermal solar is supposed to be a little better on capital cost than PV but I don't have a good number for it. Solar has a small cost advantage on continuing operation because it does not have any fuel consumption and the continuing security and regulatory costs are lower.

Solar, although considerably more expensive than wind power, has an advantage to the grid operator of predictability. Grid instability is a problem with wind when the installed capacity gets much over 5% of the total. Solar could probably go to 30% of capacity without causing a problem.

There are two things to add to our thoughts about uranium.
One, uranium does not jump out of the ground in its pure form and stroll to the power plant on its little radioactive legs. It takes energy to mine, process and transport it. At present average ore purity and industry processing methods the nuclear power cycle produces about a third the CO2 per kilowatt hour of natural gas fueled electricity.
Two, uranium ore purity is falling. As with any mined resource, people go for the high quality, easy to extract stuff first. As uranium ore quality declines, the Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI) declines, and the life cycle CO2 emissions rise. Long before we reach the end of the total uranium ore supply, EROEI will be 1:1 and it will be futile to mine it. The faster the worldwide nuclear industry expands, the faster uranium ore will reach 1:1 EROEI. Long before we hit that point we will be looking at dramatically higher fossil fuel costs (and therefore uranium costs) and will have to make pragmatic choices about the diminishing returns from nuclear power.
Below purities of ~0.01% for "soft" sandstone ores or ~0.02% for "hard" granitic ores, a nuclear plant produces more CO2/kWh than a natural gas plant. Check out the work of Jan van Leeuwen and Philip Smith for the details.

Yawn... nuke plants are on the way no matter what you think.

The Uranium Information Centre (UIC) has good information about present conventional uranium reserves, as well as different ore grades in the reserves. The bottom line is there's nowhere close to a 400 year supply, the R/P ratio is more like 80, and that's at current relatively low usage levels. If we tried to replace coal with uranium the figure would drop much lower. Reprocessing doesn't extend the supply 20-30x, it extends it about 25% and reduces the amount of high-level waste. Only breeding plutonium (reactor-grade, not weapons grade) would give us a factor of 50x, because we'd be able to use all the unfissonable uranium. Using Thorium, perhaps another 4x on top of that. So, yes, 1000+ years but only with breeder technology.

Mind you, that's only with conventional and proven reserves. It's fair to say more uranium remains to be discovered, and there are proposals for harvesting it from diffuse sources. But given current knowledge, it seems likely we need to adopt breeder technology if nukes are to go the distance.

Re. the study cited about fossil usage in mining and refining reactor fuel, that is extremely flawed and comes from people trying to make an anti-nuclear case. As an example, they assume that the electricity needed to run enrichment processes comes from the current (heavily coal-based) mix of power sources. The circular reasoning involved in that assumption should be obvious. They also use worst-case, outdated assumptions about the methods used to mine and enrich fuel, as well as for facility lifespan.

IMO it is not a choice of renewables versus nukes - both will be needed, with nukes taking up the slack once we've done all we can with renewables. The calculation of 0.5% of desert area for solar to run the world doesn't ring true. For electricity alone (no transport energy at all) at current levels an area 1/5 the size of Nevada would be needed just for the USA alone, with currently known efficiencies and taking into account the low capacity factor of solar. Perhaps conservation could cut that in half, on the other hand shifting more transport energy demand to the grid (which we inevitably must do) will double the need.

The main problem with going completely renewable is that there is no scalable solution to banking excess power. Solutions such as pumped hydro and/or compressed-air storage rely on site-specific characteristics and won't scale. As with most developed renewable we have (hydro) we should use all we can consistent with the ecology, but it won't be enough. Most people doing home solar rely on the grid as their "bank", which works great as long as 80% of grid power is still coming from conventional sources such as nukes. Going beyond that is going to get increasingly difficult without a magic bullet for energy storage.

Um balderdash. America alone had a reserve of some 58000 tons of purified uranium and only uses 2000 tons of it a year and that in once through process. AND that even tho america has only refined a tiny fraction of the urannium it has.

Was it soo hard to just look at refined stockpile vs useage per year vs current in field reseves and buy a fricken clue? I guess it was.

look guys, this is *very* simple. the reserve estimates for uranium that get thrown around are at the current price or thereabouts, however, at $25,000/kg with reprocessing such as the french have now used for 30 years, the price/kwh increases a whopping 1 cent. TO, I might add, roughly 3 cents/kwh, or STILL 4 cents/kwh below unreliable and grid-crashing wind. At $50,000/kg of yellowcake, nuclear is STILL second only to coal for price/kwh. Since in pretty much all industries, the costs to produce a thing are ALL represented in the price of the finished product, that means that the eroei of nuclear is REALLY FANTASTIC today even in the worst of cases.