Re: Shuttle Replacement Needs to Become a National Priority!!!



"Christopher P. Winter" wrote:
>
> On Mon, 01 Aug 2005 21:28:28 -0700, Richard Morris <ramorris@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote (in part):
> >
> >
> >Ditto for the 3.3 ppb of uranium in seawater. 3.3 ppb is about 10,000
> >times less concentrated than any ore that has ever been successfully
> >mined. Gold is a lot more concentrated, and far more valuable, but I
> >haven't heard of anybody extracting gold from the oceans either. All of
> >the uranium that has ever been extracted from seawater would probably
> >fit easily in the palm of your hand. I will believe it can be done,
> >economically, when somebody builds a pilot plant producing uranium in
> >useful quantities (tons per year) over a period of one or two decades.
> >The oceans are not a friendly environment for high-tech equipment, and
> >it will take a considerable amount of operations to get an idea of the
> >real costs.
> >
> >The last paper I saw on extracting uranium from seawater projected a
> >cost of about $1400 per pound, IIRC. It assumed that the plants would
> >be anchored in ocean currents to avoid the, apparently, crippling cost
> >of pumping the water through the filters. It also assumed that we would
> >burn coal to provide the required process heat. That does not sound
> >very practical to me.
> >
>
> The Japanese have been looking into this. One cost projection is
> $120/pound. See below.
>
> http://www.thegeorgiaguidestones.com/Up_and_Atom.htm
>
> "One possibility for maintaining fission as a major option without
> reprocessing is low-cost extraction of uranium from seawater. The uranium
> concentration of sea water is low (approximately 3 ppb) but the quantity of
> contained uranium is vast - some 4 billion tons (about 700 times more than
> known terrestrial resources recoverable at a price of up to $130 per kg). If
> half of this resource could ultimately be recovered, it could support for
> 6,500 years 3,000 GW of nuclear capacity (75 percent capacity factor) based
> on next-generation reactors (e.g., high-temperature gas-cooled reactors)
> operated on once-through fuel cycles. Research on a process being developed
> in Japan suggests that it might be feasible to recover uranium from seawater
> at a cost of $120 per lb of U3O8.40

I suggest we not count our chickens before they're hatched. Nobody has
yet *demonstrated* a cost within many orders-of-magnitude of that. I'd
like to see your engineering analysis of the infrastructure required to
supply a large part of the worlds energy with uranium from sea water.
And how much does it cost to maintain it?

> Although this is more than 10 times the
> current uranium price, it would contribute just 0.5¢ per kWh to the cost of
> electricity for a next-generation reactor operated on a once-through fuel
> cycle-equivalent to the fuel cost for an oil-fired power plant burning
> $3-a-barrel oil."
>
> 40 Nobukawa 1994: H. Nobukawa "Development of a Floating Type System for
> Uranium Extraction from Sea Water Using Sea Current and Wave Power," in
> Proceedings of the 4th International Offshore and Polar Engineering
> Conference (Osaka, Japan: 10-15 April 1994), pp. 294-300.

Can't find anything more recent?


.

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