Re: Nuclear Power: Unsafe, Uneconomical, Unsustainable

On Feb 4, 7:00 am, xnich...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
2. The potential ofnuclear poweris limited by the amount of
sufficiently high-grade uranium ore available. At today's rate,
economically recoverable reserves of uranium, about 10 million
tonnes, would last less than 100 years.

Well, I'll let the other members of the group address your other
points in turn as they have been doing, but this one is so ludicrously
wrong it doesnt even pass the laugh test. the ten million tons of
uranium is from mines allready opened and doesnt factor in any
exploration.

I posted this as a reply to a similar post earlier today on a similar
board:

First, theres thousands of tons of spent fuel that can easily be
reprocessed into new nuclear fuel rods for light water reactors,
enough to easily last 30 years. And the reason most dont is uranium is
still cheaper to mine from the ground.

http://www.nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/UraniuamDistribution

From currently exploitable ore bodies at concentrations that we're
using today (300ppm and higher) we have approximately 100 million tons
of uranium. A 1GW light water reactor uses about 170 tons of uranium
ore per year, lets round that up to 200... and there are less than 500
commercial power reactors around the world... Lets pretend there are
1000 sucking down 200000 tons of uranium ore per year... Our nuclear
fuel supply will run out in five hundred years. But we can easily mine
lower concentration ore bodies than 300ppm. The rossing mine in nambia
has an energy return of over 500 on mining operations! If we use only
uranium extraction reprocessing we more than double our resource base,
and with MOX fuel its quadrupeled... 2000 years worth of supply from
ore concentrations as high as we're using today.

http://www.nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeEnergyLifecycleOfNuclear_Power

Lets say we run all of civilization on these reactors. We'll need
about 20000 light water reactors, that sucks down 4 million tons of
uranium ore per year. If we limit ourselves to shales and other soft
ores that have an energy return from 16-32 from light water reactors,
we have approximately 1 trillion tons of uranium. Our resource base
will last about 250000 years, or a million years if we use MOX fuel.

If we use breeder reactor regimes and thorium, we multiply our energy
return by 100 and our resource base is about 120 trillion tons of fuel
from thorium and uranium... breeder reactors require about 1 ton of
fertile fuel per year for 1GW. If we have nuclear power output in the
same order of magnitude as the solar flux, say 20 petawatts, we need
20 million 1GW reactors. We probably cant do more heat rejection than
that without seriously roasting the earth so thats sort of our
absolute limit. 20 million 1GW reactors use 20 million tons of fertile
fuel per year, and our resource base of 120 trillion tons lasts six
million years.

I imagine sometime between now and then we'll figure out inexpensive
solar power and commercial fusion power.

The notion that we have 'only 30 years' of fuel left is patently
absurd.



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