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32 comments on Weekend Energy Listening: Wind Power with Paul Gipe
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Is Peak Uranium a problem for nuclear power?
Not really.
If you look at the characteristics oil showed - massively increased exploration budgets, leading to relatively minor new discoveries, whilst oil prices ramp out of sight, uranium shows exactly the opposite characteristics.
For many years no-one bothered to look for more uranium, as it was very cheap and in over supply.
A brief climb in prices led to a bit more exploration, with costs in the millions rather than the billions for oil exploration, and it has found massive new deposits.
In fact, in spite of the fact that nuclear is now seen to have a greatly expanded role in future energy supply the price of uranium has halved in the last year.
The French also retain all nuclear 'waste' in an accessible form, as they regard it as a valuable source of future fuel if uranium prices ever go high enough to justify it.
Thorium, which is 3-4 times as abundant as uranium can also be burnt, either in new designs of reactors or in CANDU reactors - the reason it has not been popular is that it is a lousy source of weapons grade materials.
The only barriers to much more fuel efficient, around 50 times, reactor designs are largely licensing issues and the fact that no-one has bothered as uranium is so cheap.
The US had a prototype in the 60's.
TOD featured this article last year, with heated discussion on this topic:
Uranium Depletion
Probably several decades of uranium available - by which time perhaps reprocessing will have matured, not to mention alternatives such as thorium.
" Is Peak Uranium a problem for nuclear power? "
The uranium supply is effectively unlimited.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/2/75132/75324#comment26
The uranium supply is effectively unlimited.
And many oil industry execs say the same thing about oil.
Yet, here is TOD, and the earth is still a ball o dirt - limited in size.
So - who ya gonna believe? People who claim the supply is 'effectively unlimited', or your own lying eyes that see the Earth as a finite system?
Hubbard thought so at any rate.
Anyways, even if that is correct and we run out of uranium, 50 years or so gives us a lot of opportunity to develop renewables.
Sometimes this board reminds me of the old scholastics in the Middle ages, who wanted to solve everything by pure reason, and not to dirty their hands with experiments.
In reality nuclear power provides most of the electricity for France, and has done so safely for years.
In spite of the fact that it is now accepted that it will expand greatly there is no sign of the price of uranium going up, in fact it has halved in a year. and anyway there are good opportunities to use it 50 times more economically.
It would be nice if we focussed on real and imminent issues instead of trying to find a difficulty for every solution.
" The uranium supply is effectively unlimited.
And many oil industry execs say the same thing about oil. "
That’s interesting, I have not seen those reports. Please post links of all oil company CEOs reporting that oil is unlimited.
" So - who ya gonna believe? People who claim the supply is 'effectively unlimited', or your own lying eyes that see the Earth as a finite system? "
All of the references and calculations are presented. You can easily change my mind, just point out the error in my calculations and present more accurate calculations of your own.
Otherwise I will assume this is just an emotional outburst.
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/5/2/75132/75324#comment26
"The uranium supply is effectively unlimited"
So was oil until the compound interest effect of growing demand made it limited.
I'm not against nuclear - I think we should build as many nuke plants as we can but I can't understand this one or the other vitriolic position that pro-nuke anti-wind or pro-wind anti-nuke take.
We need ENERGY. Build brickloads of nuke, hydro and geothermal for base and brickloads of wind, wave, solar thermal for intermittent.
There's no technical reason either why we can't rely purely on wind and solar, it's just expensive. This is the main reason why people say there's no storage. But there is. Batteries or pumped storage. Just expensive.
I'd rather have a situation where an energy source is available but expensive in dollars than a situation where we can't build it because it costs more energy to build than you get out.