The Future of Nuclear Energy: Facts and Fiction - Part II: What is known about Secondary Uranium Resources?

This is the second 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.

During 2009, nuclear power plants, with a capacity of 370 GWe, will produce roughly 14% of the world-wide electric energy. About 65,000 tons of natural uranium equivalent are required to operate these reactors. For the last 15 years, only 2/3 of this fuel has on average been provided by uranium mines, whereas 1/3 has come from secondary resources. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the secondary uranium resources will be essentially exhausted during the next 5-10 years. In this paper, the situation concerning the secondary resources at the beginning of the year 2009 is presented. The data used are from the IAEA/NEA 2007 Red Book, "Uranium Resources, Production and Demand," and from the World Nuclear Association (WNA).

Our analysis shows that, at the beginning of 2009, the remaining world-wide civilian uranium stocks amount to roughly 50,000 tons. With the almost inevitable yearly draw-down of 10,000 tons, these civilian stocks will be essentially exhausted within the next 5 years. This coincides roughly with the year 2013, when the annual delivery of 10,000 tons of natural uranium equivalent from Russian military stocks to the USA will end. As the majority of the remaining civilian stocks, about 30,000 tons, are believed to be under the control of the US government and American companies, it seems rather unlikely that the USA will share their own strategic uranium reserves with other large nuclear energy users. In summary, all data indicate that a uranium supply shortage in many OECD countries can only be avoided, if the remaining military uranium stocks from Russia and the USA, estimated to be roughly 500,000 tons, are made available to the other countries.

(Link to 1st part)

Introduction

In part I of this analysis, we have described the world-wide situation of nuclear energy produc­tion, the status of uranium mining, and the near future perspectives and limits. In this part, we quantify the situation concerning secondary uranium resources, which have provided for the past 10-15 years the fuel for about 1/3 of the world’s nuclear reactors. The current nuclear fuel situation is, according to official documents from the IAEA and the NEA, totally unsustainable, and the existing secondary resources are expected to be exhausted within the next few years. The seriousness of this situation, largely ignored by the media, has been expressed in the IAEA and NEA press declaration of June 3, 2008, launching the 2007 edition of the Red Book [1], [2]:

"Most secondary resources are now in decline and the gap will increasingly need to be closed by new production. Given the long lead time typically required to bring new resources into production, uranium supply shortfalls could develop if production facilities are not implemented in a timely manner."

In order to clarify the importance of the secondary uranium resources, some facts about nuclear fission energy are summarized below [3]:

  • Commercial nuclear reactors are operated in 31 out of the 200 countries on our planet. In 2009, 436 nuclear power plants, with a net installed capacity of 370.2 GW electric power, are in operation. These reactors provide about 14% of the electric energy produced world-wide.
  • During the past 5-10 years, nuclear power capacity remained essentially unchanged, as the ca­pacity increase from new reactors was compensated for by the shut-down of many old reactors. In contrast to a claimed "nuclear renaissance," 2008 was the first year since at least 40 years, when not even one new reactor was connected to the electric grid.
  • The absolute world-wide production of electric energy from nuclear fission has, according to the WNA data base, reached a "peak" in 2006, when 2658 TWhe were produced. This amount can be compared with the years 2005, 2007, and 2008 when, 2626 TWhe, 2608 TWhe, and 2601 TWhe were generated, respectively [3].
  • The world-wide reactor requirements for the two fissionable isotopes U235 and Pu239, expressed in terms of natural uranium equivalent, are currently 65,000 tons, or about 170 tons/GWe, per year. For more than 10 years now, the primary uranium supply from world-wide mining has provided only about 2/3 of the requirements, whereas 1/3 stems from the draw-down of secondary sources, a huge amount corresponding to almost the total uranium extracted by the three largest uranium producing countries, Canada, Australia, and Kazakhstan, together.
  • Out of the 31 countries operating nuclear power plants in 2006, only Canada, South-Africa, and Russia were uranium self-sufficient. The other countries use a mixture of uranium imports and previously accumulated uranium stocks.
  • Nuclear power plants in Japan, South-Korea, and the Western European countries, which have little or no uranium mining and have little or no civilian and military uranium stocks, are particularly vulnerable to uranium supply shortages.
  • About 48 reactors are under construction today, and up to 60 reactors are in a discussion and planning state. If one assumes that all of the 48 reactors under construction can be completed in time, between 5-10 GWe/year should become operational during the next 5-10 years. These reactors would require roughly 500 tons of natural uranium per GWe for the first load and 170 tons/year during the following years. About 5000 tons/year of uranium will thus be required on average for their startup and operation. If one assumes that the 100 oldest nuclear reactors are not shut down, the yearly uranium demand will increase from 65,000 tons in 2008 to about 90,000 tons by 2015.

In the following, we shall analyze the status and prospects for the possible contribution from secondary uranium resources using the data from the IAEA/NEA Red Book 2007 edition and from WNA information papers. First, we present the current composition of the secondary resources by using publicly available information about past uranium extraction, and we determine the 2009 status of uranium stocks. Then, we combine the information from the secondary supplies with the mining expectations and make a quantitative prediction for the uranium supply situation and its consequences for nuclear power plants during the next 5 years.

The composition of secondary uranium resources

As explained above, secondary uranium resources provide the fuel for about 1/3 of the world’s nuclear fission power plants. These secondary uranium resources are classified as follows:

  • nuclear fuel produced from reprocessing of reactor fuels and from surplus military pluto­nium;
  • U235 produced by re-enrichment of previously depleted U235 uranium tails; and
  • civilian and military stocks of natural uranium, weapon-grade enriched uranium, and Pu239, accumulated during excess mining operations in the past 50 years.

According to the Red Book, about 3500 tons (5% of world-wide demand) stem from reprocessing and from depleted uranium tails. An expansion of such production facilities would, like other big nuclear power projects, require at least 5-10 years. Such an expansion is currently not planned.

Pu239/U235 from the reprocessing of used fuel rods

In order to operate a standard nuclear reactor, the nuclear fuel U235 (or Pu239) has to be enriched to a concentration well above the concentration of 0.71% found in natural uranium. New U235 enriched nuclear fuel rods contain a fraction of about 4% of the fissionable U235 isotope and 96% of U238. During the reactor operation, the U235 concentration will be reduced down to roughly 1%. At the same time, Pu239 builds up to an equilibrium concentration of about 1%. The Pu239 is formed by neutron capture of U238 isotopes and subsequent nuclear β decays. During the normal reactor cycle, the Pu239 component contributes up to 30% of the produced fission energy. After a few years of operation, the fissionable material has been reduced to about 2%, and some new fuel is usually introduced. Consequently, the used fuel rods still contain an interesting amount of fissionable material of U235 and Pu239. However, nuclear fuel recycling is a rather delicate and costly operation, as the fuel rods contain a large number of different radioactive elements. Another problem with this recycling is related to the military use of the Pu239 component. In the past, up to 95% of the extracted Pu239 was used for military purposes, where extraction costs and associated risks were considered less of an obstacle. Besides the huge cost, the potential military use of Pu239 limits the world-wide enthusiasm for nuclear fuel recycling.

However, at least some of the extracted Pu239 is used to produce the so-called "MOX" reactor fuel, a mixture of plutonium and uranium oxides [4]. Even though most current reactors could in principle be operated with MOX fuel, only 8% of the world-wide reactors are currently licensed to use this fuel. For example, the Euratom Supply Agency (ESA) reported that, within the EU-15 countries, reprocessing has produced a total of 95.8 tons of Pu239 since 1996. This amount corresponds to an equivalent of 11,515 tons of natural uranium. The ESA reports that the natural uranium requirements of the EU-15 reactors have been reduced in 2006 by 1225 tons, corresponding to about 5% of total fuel use, with this MOX fuel [5].

According to the Red Book, acknowledging that not all countries have reported their data, the world-wide capacity of Pu239 recycling is about 2500 tons/year of natural uranium equiva­lent.

Another source of "MOX" fuel, following an agreement in September 2000 between the USA and Russia, comes from military Pu239 stocks. Both countries agreed to convert 34 tons each at a rate of at least 2 tons per year. During the lifetime of this agreement, this contribution adds a natural uranium equivalent of roughly 600 tons to the secondary resources.

The used fuel rods also contain about 1% of U235. This uranium can be partly recovered as reprocessed uranium (or RepU). According to the 2007 Red Book, RepU processing is very costly and is currently done by France and Russia only. The yearly production capacity is estimated to be up to 2500 tons, but only 600 tons/year are currently being produced [6].

U235 from depleted tails

Depleted uranium tails are a by-product of the U235 enrichment process. The tails contain normally between 0.25-0.35% of U235, or about one third of the 0.71% contained in natural uranium. The inventory of depleted uranium is increasing every year by roughly 60,000 tons. It is estimated that roughly 1,800,000 tons have been accumulated in different countries by the end of 2008. In theory, a large amount of U235 is still contained in these tails, but the existing enrichment capacity is already rather limited. Nevertheless during the years 2001 to 2006, Russia delivered yearly up to about 1000 tons of re-enriched uranium to the European Union. According to the Red Book, the Russian Federation indicated that this delivery will be stopped once the existing contracts end. For the USA, a pilot project is anticipated to produce a maximum of 1900 tons of natural uranium equivalent during a period of two years. No additional information about the status of this or other world-wide projects is given in the Red Book.

Past uranium extraction and how it was used

In order to understand the uranium supply situation during the coming years, we need to know:

  • how much uranium has been extracted in the past;
  • how much of it has already been used up in reactors;
  • the geographical distribution of these stocks; and
  • how much of this excess capacity exists in civilian and in military stockpiles.

Partial answers to these questions can be obtained from different editions of the Red Book and from the WNA. Unfortunately, these presumably very precise numbers often do not agree with each other. For example in the Red Book 2007 edition, one finds two precise, but inconsistent, numbers for the amount of extracted uranium. The uranium mined up to the end of 2006 is given as 2,234,083 tons in chapter 1c (Table 19, page 39) and as 2,325,000 tons in chapter 2c (page 74), about 90,000 tons higher. A comparison with previous Red Book editions and the uranium mining results from 2005 and 2006 resolves the discrepancy in favor of the higher number. Unfortunately, such inconsistencies in the Red Book do not strengthen the confidence in the claimed accuracy for many other uranium numbers.

Next, we need to know how much of this uranium has been used up (fissioned) so far. Ac­cording to the 2007 Red Book (chapter 2c), a total of 1,700,000 tons of uranium have been used up in reactors until the end of 2006. Thus, the total remaining stocks at the end of the year 2006 were 625,000 tons. During 2007 and 2008, the world’s uranium mines produced 41,264 tons and 43,853 tons, respectively. Another roughly 7000 tons (3500 tons/year) came from recycling and reprocessing of depleted uranium tails. With reactor requirements of 65,000 tons/year, we find that the stocks have been reduced by roughly 40,000 tons. Out of this, roughly 20,000 tons came from the draw-down of Russian military stocks and another 20,000 tons from the draw-down of the remaining civilian stocks. Following this estimate, we find that, at the end of the year 2008, about 587,000 tons of natural uranium equivalent remain in the combined military and civilian stocks.

In order to understand the supply situation from these secondary resources during the next few years, it is important to know that the yearly delivery of 10,000 tons of uranium from the Russian military stocks will end in 2013. The future of the secondary uranium supply depends thus mainly on the size of the remaining civilian uranium reserves. Unfortunately, only a few countries have provided this information for the Red Book 2007 edition, but at least 43,844 tons (end of 2006) were attributed to civilian stocks. The majority of this amount, 41,279 tons, is assigned to the civilian stocks of the USA [7]. It is further specified that roughly one half of these stocks, or 17,796 tons, are owned by the US government, and that this amount is reserved to guarantee uranium supplies for their own reactors for two years. Assuming that the yearly draw-down of civilian stocks has continued during the past two years, we can expect that the stocks in the USA have been reduced to an amount of 25,000-30,000 tons. However, it is possible that this reduction was somewhat smaller as, unknown to the author, some contribution might have come from a conversion of military stocks of the USA.

Slightly more accurate numbers can be obtained, if we combine the well documented ura­nium data of the past eight years with those presented at the 2001 annual symposium of the World Nuclear Association [8]. In this document, the uranium associated to the civilian and military stocks of the Western and Eastern blocks has been estimated. The WNA analysis indicated that the civilian stocks at end of the year 2000 consisted of about 140,000 tons, out of which 117,000 tons should be associated with the Western block.

The WNA analysis started from a total of 1,999,000 tons of extracted uranium up to the end of the year 2000. This number is about 3% larger than the corresponding number of 1,938,000 tons given in the 2003 Red Book. The total reactor requirements up to the year 2000 were given as 1,138,000 tons, which is about 170,000 tons smaller than the amount that can be calculated from the 2007 Red Book estimate. The discrepancy between these two numbers might be understood from a different accounting of the remaining, not yet used, fissionable material in the reactors. The first uranium load requirement for a 1 GWe reactor is about 500 tons, but only about 170 tons are used and exchanged every year. Accordingly, one finds that the not yet used fuel within all existing 370 GWe reactor cores corresponds to an equivalent of up to 185,000 tons, in good agreement with the above discrepancy of 170,000 tons. In absence of a better number, we will thus use the 2007 Red Book number for the reactor used uranium and assume that the civilian uranium stocks at the end of the year 2000 were 140,000 tons.

During the past eight years, world uranium stocks have been reduced by about 170,000 tons, or about 21,000 tons annually. While about 80,000 tons came from a reduction of Russian military stocks, it can be assumed that the other 90,000 tons came mostly from Western civilian stocks.

It thus seems reasonable to estimate that, at the end of 2008, only 50,000 tons of civilian uranium stocks remain; out of these, about 27,000 tons are being controlled by the USA, whereas the remaining 23,000 tons are being controlled by Russia. If one subtracts this number from the total remaining stocks, the military stockpiles, shared somehow between the USA and Russia, can be estimated to be roughly 540,000 tons. Our estimate for the military stocks is at least 10% smaller than the amount that we would calculate from an update of the 2000 WNA estimates alone. If we assume that the percentage-wise distribution between the Eastern and Western military stockpiles from the year 2001 WNA analysis were roughly correct, the military stocks at the end of 2008 can be estimated. Taking into account that the Russian reserves have been reduced by about 80,000 tons and assuming that the military reserves are shared mainly between the USA and Russia, we can estimate their stocks at the beginning of 2009 to be 230,000 tons and 310,000 tons, respectively.

The above approximate numbers, as summarized in Table 1, indicate that the civilian ura­nium reserves, at the end of 2008, consist of roughly 50,000 tons. Furthermore, one finds that about 27,000 tons and 23,000 tons remain in the Western and Eastern civilian stock­piles, respectively. The military stocks can be estimated to be about 10 times larger and consist of roughly 540,000 tons of natural uranium equivalent.


Table 1: State of the uranium extraction and use up to the end of 2008, as estimated from the 2007 Red Book and WNA numbers for the years 2007 and 2008. Roughly 3500 tons/year of natural uranium equivalent is estimated to come from world-wide reprocessing, and this amount is subtracted from the yearly requirements of 2007 and 2008. Taking into account that not all countries have reported accurate data to the Red Book and that some inconsistencies in the accounting exists, the civilian and military reserves contain perhaps an uncertainty of up to ±10%. The Eastern and Western stocks are believed to be controlled almost entirely by Russia and the USA.

The military uranium stockpiles

As described in the previous section, roughly 540,000 tons of natural uranium equivalent can be associated with the military reserves of the USA and Russia. Not all details about these military stockpiles are public, but some numbers relevant for the possible conversion of these stocks into reactor fuel can nevertheless be estimated.

Data from nuclear arms negotiations between the USA and Russia and other countries indicate that these two countries control currently roughly equal shares and a total of about 95% of all existing nuclear weapons [9]. For the following, it seems to be sufficient to only consider the military stocks of these two countries.

First, we estimate how much of these 540,000 tons of uranium is blocked in the remaining 20,000 nuclear warheads. It is known that the Hiroshima bomb was made of about 64 kg of uranium, with a U235 content of 51 kg (enrichment of 80%). This corresponds roughly to the critical mass, the amount required to start the uncontrolled chain reaction in a sphere of uncompressed bare metal of U235. Sophisticated methods for the uranium storage and controlled compression have reduced the critical mass by a factor of 2-3. In any case, the danger of uncontrolled explosions limits the amount of the U235 content in the warheads. It is also known that the nuclear fission bombs of today are based on U235 or Pu239, and that fusion bombs are started with an explosion of U235 or Pu239. On average, the nuclear weapons of today are estimated to have an explosive power at least 10 times stronger than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.

In absence of more precise data, we may assume that each nuclear weapon contains on average just the critical mass or at least 50 kg of U235. Using this assumption, we find that the U235 of one nuclear bomb corresponds to 7 tons of natural uranium equivalent on average, and that the uranium from about 25 such bombs is sufficient to operate a 1 GWe reactor for one year. Consequently, about 140,000 tons of uranium, about 1/3 of the military stockpiles, are currently blocked directly in nuclear weapons. Another large fraction of the military stocks can be assumed to exist as highly enriched weapon-grade uranium, HEU. In order to be used as normal nuclear fuel, these stocks would have to be downgraded to reactor-ready low-enrichment uranium, LEU, with a U235 fraction of 3-4%. During the past years, a natural uranium equivalent of 10,000 tons/year has been downgraded to reactor fuel, and this number may be considered roughly equal to the currently existing downgrading capacity. On a time scale of 5-10 years, it should be possible to increase this capacity.

Theoretically and assuming a total nuclear disarmament, the military uranium stockpiles would thus be sufficient to operate the current world nuclear reactors for about 8 years or for about 25 years assuming the current draw-down of secondary resources. Taking the current world real politics into account, such a total nuclear disarmament is unfortunately not very likely.

Nevertheless, the military stockpiles are certainly large enough, even without touching the remaining 20,000 warheads, that an extension of the current policy to convert about 10,000 tons/year can be imagined. It is however not obvious that either the USA or Russia will share their strategic uranium reserves with other users of nuclear fission energy. In addition, and with a longer term perspective, the downgrading of large amounts of previously highly enriched uranium seems to be pointless, as the original enrichment process was very expensive and as the highly enriched uranium might eventually be needed directly to fuel future Generation IV fast breeder reactors.

Secondary uranium supply, the near future

All existing data indicate that draw-down of the civilian inventories, practiced during the past 10 years, has reduced the civilian uranium stocks to roughly 50,000 tons. With an expected further yearly draw-down of up to 10,000 tons and without access to the military stocks, the civilian Western uranium stocks will be exhausted by 2013. Furthermore, the supply situation will become even more critical as the delivery of the 10,000 tons of military uranium stocks from Russia to the USA will also end during 2013. Thus we find, in agreement with the dramatic warning from the IAEA/NEA authorities, that secondary uranium supplies will essentially come to an end within a few years.

The severity of the supply situation seems to be known and acknowledged by the Uranium (Ux) Consult­ing Company (UxC) and by uranium mining co-operations. For example some interesting numbers about the evolution of demand and secondary supplies and the required primary uranium mining were presented in September 2008 at the annual WNA symposium [10]. The evolution of the secondary supply side was estimated to decrease by roughly 1000 tons per year starting from 20,029 tons in 2009 and ending with 15,008 tons by 2013. For the following three years up to 2016, a further reduction of about 2000 tons per year is assumed (the numbers for the years 2014-2016 are in dis­agreement with the 2013 termination of the yearly delivery of 10,000 tons from Russia). The authors of this WNA study assumed that many new reactors will start up during the coming eight years, and they estimate that the uranium demand will increase from 65,000 tons in 2008 to about 85,000 tons by 2013. Some of their uranium supply and demand estimations for the coming years are summarized in Table 2.


Table 2: Forecast for the world uranium balance prediction for the years 2008-2016 according to the Macquarie Research Commodities predictions presented at the 2008 WNA annual sym­posium [10]. The forecast for the 2008 primary uranium number(*) was about 1200 tons larger than the now known number of 43,853 tons. The latest WNA forecast for 2009 is 49,375 tons and thus also about 1000 tons smaller [11]. The claimed accuracy for the forecast should raise some doubts about the underlying methodology to guess these numbers.

As discussed above, the uranium supply might become the limiting factor for the near future of nuclear power production. This demand depends, among other things, on the future of the aging nuclear power plants and on how rapidly the reactors that are currently under construction can be completed. If the primary fuel supply cannot be increased as quickly as required, some interesting world-wide decisions about the future of nuclear power can be expected. For example, one needs to weigh the stable operation of older nuclear power plants, which require 170 tons/GWe/year, against the stability of early operations for new reactors that have a first load requirement of 500 tons/GWe. Of course, the situation will be further complicated by national and regional interests. It is difficult to imagine that the US government will sell their strategic uranium reserves to their economic competitors in Japan, China or Western Europe.

In absence of such political insights, one can nevertheless try to guess how much uranium fuel will come from different sources, and how many existing and new nuclear power plants can be operated with this fuel during the coming years. For this forecast, we make use of the uranium supply information presented in parts I and II of this document and assume that the demand will be limited by the possible supply. This "upper" limit guess is calculated on the basis that 170 tons/GWe/year are required to fuel an already operational reactor, and that 500 tons/GWe are needed for the first reactor load. This forecast is presented in Table 3 and can be compared with the one from Table 2. The main difference comes from the mining forecast and the assumption that the military component of the secondary supply from Russia will terminate by the end of 2013. Obviously the two scenarios should be checked and corrected for the real mining results during the coming years. Interested readers should fill Table 3 with their own favorite nuclear energy scenario under the constraint that it be consistent with their future secondary and primary uranium supply estimates.


Table 3: The author’s upper limit forecast covering the years 2009-2018 for the world-wide natural uranium equivalent primary and secondary fuel supply and its consequences for nuclear fission produced electric energy in TWhe. This fuel-based scenario assumes that world-wide uranium mining cannot be increased as estimated by the IAEA/NEA and WNA. The result of this scenario will be a slow, about 1% annual, reduction of nuclear produced electric energy up to 2013. The decline will become much stronger after 2013, if military stocks will not add at least 10,000 tons annually to the fuel market.

Both scenarios obviously contain some guesswork, and many political and economic decisions during a world-wide economic crisis can change the near future of uranium mining and the evolution of the nuclear disarmament. Especially critical for uranium mining will be the situation in Kazakhstan, where the current optimistic forecast expects that by 2013 the existing and new mines will increase the uranium output from 8500 tons (2008) to about 18,000 tons annually. An increase of similar size is also hoped to come from the mines in Niger, Namibia, and South Africa [10].

In conclusion, uranium shortages and thus reactor shutdowns can be avoided only if world-wide uranium mining can be increased by roughly 10% or about 5000 tons each year. While such an increase looks rather unlikely for the next few years, the presented numbers for the required primary uranium in 2008 and the obtained results show a shortage of about 1200 tons indicating that up to 1400 tons will be missing already in 2009. This amount corresponds roughly to the reduction of the uranium requirements that followed the 2007 earthquake in Japan with an 8 GWe nuclear capacity outage.

We expect that the uranium supply situation will become especially critical for those countries where a large fraction of the electric energy comes from nuclear power and that important essentially 100% of their uranium needs. This supply problem will especially affect OECD countries in Western Europe and Japan. One might hope that discussions about new nuclear power plants will consider the warning from the NEA/IAEA press declaration about the Red Book 2007 edition expressed in the following paragraph:

"At the end of 2006, world uranium production (39,603 tons) provided about 60% of world reactor requirements (66,500 tons) for the 435 commercial nuclear reactors in operation. The gap between production and requirements was made up by secondary sources drawn from government and commercial inventories (such as the dismantling of over 12,000 nuclear warheads and the re-enrichment of uranium tails). Most secondary resources are now in decline and the gap will increasingly need to be closed by new production. Given the long lead time typically required to bring new resources into production, uranium supply shortfalls could develop if production facilities are not implemented in a timely manner."

References

[1] The detailed numbers are extracted from the Red Book 2007 edition, "Ura­nium 2007 Resources, Production and Demand." The book is published ev­ery two years by the IAEA/NEA and can be found at the OECD bookshop http://www.oecdbookshop.org/oecd/display.asp?K=5KZLLSXQS6ZV&DS=Uranium-2007. Free online versions of some past editions can be found via Google books.

[2] Nuclear Energy Agency press declaration from 3 June 2008 about the new edi­tion of the Red Book 2007 "Uranium 2007 Resources, Production and Demand" at http://www.nea.fr/html/general/press/2008/2008-02.html.

[3] For the year 2008 status and production of nuclear electric energy, cf. for example the WNA papers at http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/reactors.html, http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf01.html, and http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/nshare.html.

[4] For some details about MOX reactor fuel and further references, cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOX fuel.

[5] Cf. the EURATOM supply agency report 2006, page 24 at http://ec.europa.eu/euratom/ar/ar2006.pdf.

[6] Cf. reference [1], page 80.

[7] Cf. reference [1], page 367.

[8] Cf. the presentation of Bernard Del Frari The Global Nuclear Fuel Market Supply and Demand 2001-2020 at the 2001 WNA symposium http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/01idx.htm.

[9] For an overview of the nuclear weapons and nuclear weapon states, cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_weapons.

[10] Cf. the presentation of Maximilian Layton, Macquarie Capital Securities "The global uranium outlook: is 2008/09 a buying opportunity?" at the 2008 WNA symposium http://www.world-nuclear.org/sym/2008/presentations/laytonpresentation.pdf.

[11] Cf. the July 2009 version of http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf23.html.

Keeping my word, part 1:  I quote directly from the press release linked in footnote 2:
Uranium resources sufficient to meet projected nuclear energy requirements long into the future

There is enough uranium known to exist to fuel the world's fleet of nuclear reactors at current consumption rates for at least a century, according to the latest edition of the world reference on uranium published today.

Uranium 2007: Resources, Production and Demand, also known as the Red Book, estimates the identified amount of conventional uranium resources which can be mined for less than USD 130/kg* to be about 5.5 million tonnes, up from the 4.7 million tonnes reported in 2005. Undiscovered resources, i.e. uranium deposits that can be expected to be found based on the geological characteristics of already discovered resources, have also risen to 10.5 million tonnes. This is an increase of 0.5 million tonnes compared to the previous edition of the report. The increases are due to both new discoveries and re-evaluations of known resources, encouraged by higher prices.
It is trivially true that the warning quoted above, "uranium supply shortfalls could develop if production facilities are not implemented in a timely manner", is valid.  However, this applies to ALL inputs to the fuel cycle and also the construction materials for the new plants; if they don't arrive on time, there are delays.  Do I need to point out that the success of large-scale engineering projects proves that this a Solved Problem?

Uranium mining activity has been depressed because of the conversion of stockpiles of fissionables from weapons use to energy production.  This means that some of the historic mining activity is finally being realized as electric generation, but like the combustion of coal laid down 500 million years ago this won't go on for long.  As the fuel requirements of new and existing plants can no longer be met by existing mines plus "secondary resources", orders for fuel can only be met by new mining activity (and ramped-up enrichment, for LWRs).  The USA already has an excess of enrichment capacity, so mining is the only significant thing left.

US mining could be stepped up rapidly if demand justified it.  The EIA states:
At the end of 2008, there were four uranium mills located in the United States (with a total capacity of 6,150 short tons of ore per day). Only one mill was operating, with a capacity of 2,000 short tons of ore per day. Also, there were nine uranium in-situ-leach plants (with a total capacity of 12 million pounds U3O8 per year). Four in-situ-leach plants were operating, with a combined capacity of 8.5 million pounds U3O8 per year.
If the existing mines and mills are still idle, it is proof positive that their output is not yet needed to meet projected demand.  It appears that demand has already more than doubled US uranium production over the lull in 2003.

Given the rapid recovery of uranium via in-situ leaching (the majority of the resource recovered within 6 months), the major items remaining on the time-line are
  1. negotiations of mineral rights and mining permits,
  2. (mining, dealt with)
  3. extraction from ion-exchange media,
  4. conversion to UF6,
  5. enrichment,
  6. conversion to UO2, and
  7. assembly into fuel rods.
The enterprises in the nuclear fuel business have been doing this for decades, and it is stretching credulity to claim that they're going to be a major stumbling block in the startup of the new generation of nuclear powerplants.

Dear anonymous Engineer-Poet,

perhaps you have noticed that the content of this article
(and the previous one) are not about the claimed to exist long term uranium resources
(if you can wait for some 2-3 weeks I will comment on that).
Thus please try to stay within the context of the secondary resources
and or on the combined consequences for the near future of nuclear fission energy
of the hard numbers presented in I+II combined.
And just in case, neither thorium not fast breeders are relevant in this context
either (please wait for number IV).

Thus for your comment about the USA potential capacity and what is really extracted

you might know that the 2008 results were disappointing for the US mining
1430 tons only (compared to a predicted more than 2000 tons) and the 1650 and 1670 in 2007 and 2006!

make your predictions for this 2009 year please! We can check within a few months only!

and for the
claimed (old?) capacity from the past glory when 16000 tons were mined.
Do you suggest to return to the cold war conditions to extract uranium
at no matter what condition?
Who cares about the damage from the past? I guess you live far away from those areas.
but in case,
make a trip and enjoy a visit to Arches National park. And have a careful look just outside is a huge field of
remaining waste next to the river. I saw it myself

thanks for not having to live downstream of that river after a ``century" flooding.

michael

Michael,

Dear anonymous Engineer-Poet,

Why do you address EP as "Dear anonymous Engineer-Poet"? It seems a rather petty insult, insinuating that he's hiding behind anonymity. It's conventional here at TOD for posters to use handles. If you click to EP's user profile, you'll find a link to his regular blog. Lots of interesting articles there, too. But that's all BTW ...

Do you suggest to return to the cold war conditions to extract uranium at no matter what condition? Who cares about the damage from the past? I guess you live far away from those areas. but in case, make a trip and enjoy a visit to Arches National park. And have a careful look just outside is a huge field of remaining waste next to the river. I saw it myself.
thanks for not having to live downstream of that river after a ``century" flooding.

(I think that last sentence was non-native English for "Be thankful that you don't live downstream ..")
I don't personally like the impact that any mining operation has on the environment, but let's be honest and keep things in perspective. There are three to four orders of magnitude difference between the impact of uranium mining and the impact of coal mining. And perhaps 8 orders of magnitude between the impact of uranium mining and the cumulative impact of farming, roads, and cities. I don't think any species have been driven extinct by uranium mining, and the only human deaths outside of a handful of mining accidents have been a few early cancers among mining town residents, as calculated from a "linear no-threshold" model of radiation damage that is probably wrong to begin with.

Nonetheless, I'm all for anything we can do to minimize our heavy footprint on the world. So let's reduce mining requirements by another two orders of magnitude by developing fuel cycles that achieve 100% fuel burn-up. And for the uranium mining that we have to do, let's employ the in-situ leaching methods discussed previously that have negligible surface disruption.

Let's be true environmentalists, not the willfully ignorant and innumerate hysterics that the anti-nuclear movement has nurtured.

The long cancer rates for uranium miners from the boom were startling high, and provide some basis for the LMT model.

A 30+ year old Science article rated the lung cancer rate for non-smoking miners to be = to smoking non-miners, and the lung cancer rate for smoking miners was about 8x that of either other group (smoking non-miners & non-smoking miners). This article made an impression on me back in high school.
====================
I can see a crunch coming in uranium supplies (unless Mr. Murphy takes a vacation), and some nationalistic hoarding making it worse.

Mines do *NOT* come on-line quickly and always on schedule (and leaching is, AFAIK, a slow but cheap process with low annual yields and bad effects on the watershed). Note: not an expert on leach mining.

The crunch should be resolved in a decade time frame, but this temporary shortfall will slow any new nuke building program. What will the Chinese reaction be to a brand new completed reactor without fuel ?

One response to a fuel shortage will be to derate existing nukes by using the same fuel months longer, and perhaps moving to slightly lower enriched fuel.

Alan

Mines do *NOT* come on-line quickly and always on schedule (and leaching is, AFAIK, a slow but cheap process with low annual yields and bad effects on the watershed). Note: not an expert on leach mining.

World-nuclear.org has this to say on the matter:

In the USA the production life of an individual ISL well pattern is typically one to three years. Most of the uranium is recovered during the first six months of the operation. The most successful operations have achieved a total overall recovery of about 80% of the ore, the minimum is about 60%. In Australia individual well patterns can operate from between 6 and 18 months with target recoveries of around 70% in 12 months.

Plenty fast.  The effects on groundwater depend on how much of the acid etc. is neutralized or otherwise cleaned up.

I am no chemist, but if an acid leach recovers radium along with uranium, the radium and radon content of the groundwater will be reduced immediately.  In the long run, less uranium means less radium and less radon.

AlanfromBigEasy was referring to the time it takes for a mine to come on line, not for the time it takes to recover the ore, once operating.

Around here, water wells are drilled in days or hours.  I'm assuming that one tube going into an aquifer is much like another.

The long cancer rates for uranium miners from the boom were startling high, and provide some basis for the LMT model.

Not true. Early miners worked in poorly ventilated mines of very high grade ore. They received radiation doses to the lungs vastly higher than the optimum dose for radiation hormesis indicated by Dr Cohen’s study.

The results of the study were described by their own authors as “surprising” and “stunning”: Clear evidence of radiation hormesis. It looks like Bernard Cohen has been vindicated after all.
“We were certainly not looking for a hormetic effect,” says co-author Joel H. Popkin of Fallon Clinic and St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester. “Indeed, we were stunned when the data pointed to that conclusion in such a strong way.”

http://enochthered.wordpress.com/category/radiation-hormesis/
http://www.radonmine.com/pdf/riskinperspective.pdf

Modern mines are well ventilated.

yes sorry about that!

But another hard fact is that I can loose patience when attacked.
Nevertheless I am more used to discuss with people who do not hide their identity.

For the impact of uranium mining (and yes essentially all other mining operations)
they are huge! In east Germany (by the communists) the Wismut Ag and during the really cold
times of the cold war extracted huge amounts of uranium and shipping it to Russia.

At least 20000 miners died of lung cancer following the poor conditions.

For the USA, Canada and Australia one finds many horror examples on how uranium mining destroyed
the living of the already poor indigenous communities. But I am drifting away also from
the topic of Chapter II of this article.

so perhaps we could try to find some agreement about the actual
situation with secondary civilian and military resources and the consequences for the next few years.

michael

But another hard fact is that I can loose patience when attacked.

How did you ever get through your PhD defense?

Anyone can make mistakes, but making many gross errors shows that your work is inadequate, to say the least.  To get defensive about it is a personal failing.

so perhaps we could try to find some agreement about the actual situation with secondary civilian and military resources and the consequences for the next few years.

You were talking about a lack of primary and secondary resources; shifting to the consequences is changing the subject.

I think you manage effectively to disqualify yourself.

probably a good thing!

michael

Dear anonymous Engineer-Poet

I am not anonymous.  I am pseudonymous; this is a nom de guerre, by which I am known far and wide and have a reputation.  Shall I address you as "Dear Mister Tendentious and Silly Michael Dittmar"?  If that's the reputation you want, you are on your way to success.

you might know that the 2008 results were disappointing for the US mining
1430 tons only (compared to a predicted more than 2000 tons) and the 1650 and 1670 in 2007 and 2006!

The EIA claims excess capacity of 3.5 million pounds of yellowcake (12 million pounds capacity vs. 8.5 million pounds produced).  There is obviously no difficulty meeting demand; the existing operations were only running at about 70% of capacity.  Yet you see a supply crisis?  The defect is in your vision.

Do you suggest to return to the cold war conditions to extract uranium
at no matter what condition?

Ah, yes, the devastating legacy of in-situ leach mining.  Wellheads poking discreetly above the terrain, with wildlife oblivious to the reactions percolating below.  From world-nuclear.org, which is one of your sources:

And after the mining is done and the wellheads are gone, there's... nothing.

Pseudonymous/anonymous
Now there's a distinction without a difference. Sounds like you're sorta pregnant.

So quit asking who I am.  It doesn't matter anyway.  Only the facts matter; if I was Albert Einstein and said "God does not play dice with the universe" I would still be wrong.

Ask yourself this:

  1. What are the facts?
  2. What conclusions proceed from the facts?  ("We don't know" is one of the options.)

Dittmar's conclusions are refuted by facts drawn from his own sources.  That pretty much is all you need to know.

I agree with the first statements what matters is not "who" wrote it!

What matters are
1) facts

2) what do these facts indicate

As it seems you have not even looked at the facts I presented (with references)
and you do give different numbers for the
secondary resources (the topic of this paper)
perhaps you could add them in your next postings!

Michael

It would help if you become less aggressive and
discuss the points raised in my article.

For the claimed capacity of mining and the real hard number
may be you have a look at Chapter I again.
I discuss all this with references and the Red Book is very clear about that!
(but no point to discuss if you do not even look at what I wrote!)

It seems also that you do not agree with the uranium requirements
for the "first load" of a 1 GWe reactor (the 500 tons and each year 170 tons roughly.

Either you present your numbers for the requirements backed up with hard numbers
(similar for other claims)
or read the references I gave.

michael

http://www.nucleartourist.com/basics/hlwaste.htm

Characteristics BWRa PWRb
Overall assembly length, m 4.470 4.059
Cross section, cm 13.9 x 13.9 21.4 x 21.4
Fuel rod length, m 4.064 3.851
Active fuel height, m 3.759 3.658
Fuel rod outer diameter, cm 1.252 0.950
Fuel rod array 8 x 8 17 x 17
Fuel rods per assembly 63 264
Assembly total weight, kg 319.9 657.9
Uranium/assembly, kg 183.3 461.4
UO2/assembly, kg 208.0 523.4
Zircaloy/assembly, kg 103.3c 108.4d
Hardware/assembly, kg 8.6e 26.1f
Total metal/assembly, kg 111.9 134.5
Nominal volume/assembly, m3 0.0864g 0.186g

PWR fuel assemblies are shipped 2 to a container (the blue cylinder to the left). For a cycle of 1 to 2 years length, 40 to 60 new fuel assemblies might be added. The fuel assemblies are unpackaged then inspected as shown in the middle picture.

Fuel Assembly details
http://www.nucleartourist.com/systems/pwrfuel1.htm

Fuel Assembly seem to be the same as fuel bundles. 121 to 193 fuel bundles are loaded into a reactor core in a PWR. so 193 times 461.4 kg of Uranium is 89 tons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel#PWR_fuel
PWR fuel

PWR fuel bundle The fuel bundle is from a pressurized water reactor of the nuclear passenger and cargo ship NS Savannah. Designed and built by the Babcock and Wilcox Company.Pressurized water reactor (PWR) fuel consists of cylindrical rods put into bundles. A uranium oxide ceramic is formed into pellets and inserted into Zircaloy tubes that are bundled together. The Zircaloy tubes are about 1 cm in diameter, and the fuel cladding gap is filled with helium gas to improve the conduction of heat from the fuel to the cladding. There are about 179-264 fuel rods per fuel bundle and about 121 to 193 fuel bundles are loaded into a reactor core. Generally, the fuel bundles consist of fuel rods bundled 14x14 to 17x17. PWR fuel bundles are about 4 meters in length. In PWR fuel bundles, control rods are inserted through the top directly into the fuel bundle. The fuel bundles usually are enriched several percent in 235U. The uranium oxide is dried before inserting into the tubes to try to eliminate moisture in the ceramic fuel that can lead to corrosion and hydrogen embrittlement. The Zircaloy tubes are pressurized with helium to try to minimize pellet cladding interaction (PCI) which can lead to fuel rod failure over long periods.

BWR fuel
In boiling water reactors (BWR), the fuel is similar to PWR fuel except that the bundles are "canned"; that is, there is a thin tube surrounding each bundle. This is primarily done to prevent local density variations from effecting neutronics and thermal hydraulics of the nuclear core on a global scale. In modern BWR fuel bundles, there are either 91, 92, or 96 fuel rods per assembly depending on the manufacturer. A range between 368 assemblies for the smallest and 800 assemblies for the largest U.S. BWR forms the reactor core. Each BWR fuel rod is back filled with helium to a pressure of about three atmospheres (300 kPa).

800 assemblies X 183.3 kg is 146.6 tons for the largest BWR. (1.2 GWe and some new ones are bigger)

For the claimed capacity of mining and the real hard number

Actually you focus on actual production, not capacity. EP claims that many mines are closed or operating at reduced capacity. For ecample, if a mine is running on one 8 hour shift now, it could go to two or three shifts to dramatically increase production if the price goes up substantially.

1… Do you have references to show that all mines are running at max capacity?

what matters is the amount of natural uranium/TWh
no significant change since 1986!

2… What were the estimated reserves 30 years ago?

3… If you were writing this post 30 years ago what year would you have predicted running out of uranium?

``Actually you focus on actual production, not capacity."

yes right that is what counts not what people claim!

Quote
1… Do you have references to show that all mines are running at max capacity?

look at the Cameco second quarter report this year for example
(and the ones earlier). They are trying hard but fail to achieve the goals.

Quote
2… What were the estimated reserves 30 years ago?
3… If you were writing this post 30 years ago what year would you have predicted running out of uranium?

difficult to answer. I am not a historian.

But yes certain studies were published 30 years ago
who under the assumption that by the year 2000 we would have a capacity of 1000 GWe
that this can be done only by fast breeders

today we neither have 1000 GWe nor fast breeders ready!

does this answer the question?

michael

No it does not answer the question for #3. The issue is if you did you Redbook analysis back in 1979 with the amount of Uranium being mined etc... then when would you have predicted things to have run out. You would have ignored the possibilities of breeders back then because again there was only 1 or 2 back then. It is not a matter of being a historian, it is matter of using an old dataset and reports and running your same method over it.

Sorry I do not have access to the report from 1979 right now.

Tell me what the claimed resource numbers were at that time and I try to answer.

But what does it matter.

I make a short term prediction like other people can do based on hard facts
of nuclear reality.

The numbers are as they are.

If you disagree with some of the Red Book numbers tell me
in the chapter III I will report the shortcoming and errors I found in the resource data.

What are you trying to say with respect to the short term prospects and relative to the secondary
resources?

Do you find it a good idea for the USA to be 50% dependent on Russia's good will?

Or do you think that the USA and Russia are going to give there military might
and their strategic reserves and their power to the nuclear power plants in Europe

just for our nice blue/green/black eyes?

michael

What does it matter?

If your methodology applied to historical datasets always gives bad results and bad predictions that would show that your methodology has problems.

If you had a methodology for predicting the future price of stocks or commodities or houses then a standard practice would be to run the method over old datasets to validate it. If it should work now then it would be pretty at working back then.

Do you see that is suggesting more scientific validation of basic assumptions in your methodology ?

Do you find it a good idea for the USA to be 50% dependent on Russia's good will?

It is not good will. The Russians were paid billions for their uranium. It is a matter of price. they sold before they will probably sell again if the price is right.
Plus the US has excess in its own stockpiles. The case is one of economics. Just like the issue of rising prices would spur more activity. Even the peak oil arguments here make some acknowledgement about increased prices bringing more marginal and higher costs reserves online.

Your assumptions are that political, strategic and other concerns apply and will override all economic factors in any possible agreement.

There has been new agreements with russia covering 2014-2020 for natural uranium.
http://www.stratfor.com/analysis/20090527_russia_uranium_deal_u_s_power_...

I do not think it is unreasonable to expect that paying the market price for the down-blended uranium would not be possible if needed.

Also, Russia is planning a substantial build of new nuclear reactors so if they use their own nuclear material that would still mean better supply-demand balance.

look so far I only made a prediction on the short term effects.

you didn't dispute that one.

For the resource data from 1979 and the long term predictions.

it is not the topic right now but for what it matters

the believers in a great future of nuclear were wrong and those who
predicted that an increase up to 1000 GWe by the year 2000
will not happen.

and it did not happen!

that is a fact may be you should figure out why the great growth prediction was wrong
for now!

and wait till I present my analysis for the uranium resources early September
to discuss about resource errors and so on.

if you do not want to stay with the topic of the near term future
or are not interested in it why do you contribute?

For the link and its content.

lets see In Western Europe we get the gas from Russia
and sometimes and for some reasons it seems to flow more slowly than
it should.

What can I add if you feel comfortable with the Russian dependence
fine with me!

michael

I'd like to hear your opinion of whether "that didn't happen" because of a fuel shortage, or because of the well-known and extremely costly legal/regulatory licensing delays and uncertainties imposed by anti-nuke activists?

There are several reasons one can imagine on why it did not happen.

the uranium shortage hypothesis
which said there is not enough uranium to fuel these reactors over
their lifetime has not been tested so far.

why not because these 1000 GWe have not been constructed!

the most likely reason in my view was that the promises made by the
nuclear promoters did not hold and yes the market killed this growth as well.

michael

The author’s upper limit forecast covering the years 2009-2018 for the world-wide natural uranium equivalent primary and secondary fuel supply and its consequences for nuclear fission produced electric energy in TWhe. This fuel-based scenario assumes that world-wide uranium mining cannot be increased as estimated by the IAEA/NEA and WNA. The result of this scenario will be a slow, about 1% annual, reduction of nuclear produced electric energy up to 2013

I dispute the assumption that worldwide mining cannot be increased. Mines have been coming online in 2009, so your projection is already looking wrong. I would also dispute the availability of other sources and the rate they would be available for substitution. There are US HEU available for blenddown if needed. Supplies from phosphate mines, coal ash etc... I say there will not be a uranium supply problem that constrains the amount of nuclear power generation. Is that a clear enough objection to your prediction ? You had also asked for my alternative predictions and I have supplied those twice. This is another annoying habit where you repeatedly claim that people are not disagreeing with some narrow aspect of your articles, when they are already disagreeing with most parts of it.

Do you find it a good idea for the USA to be 50% dependent on Russia's good will?

I think this is a very revealing example of your backwards thinking.

The reality is the opposite:  the USA paid Russia to turn over weapons materials for destruction.  This guaranteed that they could never be lost, stolen, sold to terrorists, or otherwise used against the United States or its allies.

What you are claiming is a resource problem with uranium was in truth an element of international nuclear disarmament policy.  You have had this explained to you several times, but you still can't get your mind around it... or you just aren't listening.  While there is no cure for stupidity, hitting someone over the head is bound to get them to pay attention.  Maybe if you stopped getting so indignant about the "attacks" you're enduring, you might achieve some small bit of enlightenment.

forgot to add

does this mean that you are satisfied with the answers to the other points
and the Cameco link?

michael

``Actually you focus on actual production, not capacity."
yes right that is what counts not what people claim!

So you agree that what counts is actual capacity, not actual production or what people say, which are two other things.

In 2009 only one of 5 uranium mills in the U.S is in normal production. A lot of capacity is not in production.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/dupr/qupd_tbl3.html

1… If the world has a deadly flu outbreak the question will be, “What is our capacity to ramp up vaccine production”, not “What was our vaccine production rate for the last several years”.

Your conclusion is that we will soon have a shortage of capacity based on past production, which has always met demand. Why does your report ignore capacity and focus on production?

2… Reactor fuel assemblies cost about one half cent per kWh in 2007,

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html

of which natural uranium cost is about one third.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html

Fuel cost for coal was, 2.4 cents per kWh, and for natural gas, 5.67 cents.

If uranium went up 500% how much would the O&M cost / kWh change?

3… What do you think would happen at those mills in standby if the price of uranium went up by, say, 500%, due to the construction of new reactors, and that a rigorous analysis predicted the average price would stay in that range for the foreseeable future, not just a momentary spike in the spot price as we have seen in the past?

If the world has a deadly flu outbreak the question will be, “What is our capacity to ramp up vaccine production”, not “What was our vaccine production rate for the last several years”.

This is indeed a very valid argument. Since demand for nuclear fuel has always been met until now, the fact that past production has been low doesn't prove that it cannot be increased if the demand should be rising.

I am still concerned though because we currently take about 1/3 of our nuclear fuel from secondary sources, and those secondary sources will come to a birsk end in 2013 for two separate reasons.

Step functions are always a bad thing in production cycles. They tend to cause a shock. Thus, it remains to be seen whether the primary resources can be ramped up fast enough to compensate for the lack of secondary resources.

In this context, spare capacity is indeed a very relevant issue that needs to be looked at.

I think we have still a misunderstanding here.

I am writing about the primary and secondary natural uranium equivalent
required to operate the 370 GWe (plus some new and minus some shutdowns) for a year.

the chain to start from a rock to get the Uranium out of it in the right composition
to enrich it to make fuel roads to exchange the fuel rods (with annual shutdowns)
restart the reactor bring it to full power (a day or so) and run it stable for as long as possible
is not trivial.

So far enough spare capacity has managed to keep this going and in most countries
of the planet. In fact, at least i have not heard about the contrary even during the communist times and in the eastern
block it seemed to have worked.

ok now comes the real point

the input raw material is somehow not sufficient from mines and must be supplemented from secondary material
from past excess capacity which kills to some extend the development of new mining sites

at the same time some "older equipment will get too old and eventually stops to function in
a satisfactory way but new equipment has not been developed at some point in the past

lets compare it with the oil --> car making --> and using the car

could it happen that some old well known car makers with lots of excess capacity get out of buiseness
when better cars come from far away and people full of energy with knowledge to use the old machines
(lots of spare capacity) will not be able to use it?

anyway in this context
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/tradingdesk/archive/2009/08/18/...

First Uranium may need more financing
Posted: August 18, 2009, 7:32 AM by Peter Koven
Uranium, Mining, First Uranium
A possible liquidity shortage is looming at First Uranium Corp., according to BMO Capital Markets analyst Edward Sterck.

Based on the company's recent guidance, Mr. Sterck lowered his uranium sales forecasts at First Uranium's Ezulwini and Mine Waste Solutions (MWS) mines to zero in fiscal 2010 (the company has had challenges ramping up production, and Mr. Sterck is assuming a three-month delay from production to point of sale).

This could be trouble, because First Uranium ended the first quarter of fiscal 2010 with a cash balance of US$123-million, but has an estimated US$266-million in capital spending still to be made, Mr. Sterck wrote. If the company is not churning out sufficient cash from selling uranium, a shortfall is possible.

for the price questions I answered already
yes it seems that the uranium cost is far too small to keep the chain going.

I can imagine that one or more of the four big uranium mine players
think they should get a much larger fraction of the cake
and that shortages might be in there interest

for the russian roulette player in the game
this might be interesting as the victim will not be the player!
(of course if it is a fatal blow the collateral damage will be large as well)

michael

the input raw material is somehow not sufficient from mines and must be supplemented from secondary material from past excess capacity which kills to some extend the development of new mining sites

could it happen that some old well known car makers with lots of excess capacity get out of buiseness
when better cars come from far away and people full of energy with knowledge to use the old machines
(lots of spare capacity) will not be able to use it?

Michael

Detroit had a virtual monopoly on the U.S. car market up to the 60’s, then cars from Europe and Japan started showing up. People marveled at how well they ran. They were economical, did not squeak or rattle, were low maintenance and did not litter their driveway with stripped bolts, screws and other loose hardware.

Detroit’s market share has been shrinking ever since. Did foreign car makers move into the U.S. because Detroit could not produce enough cars to meet demand? No, Detroit had enough capacity to cover football fields all over the country with unsold cars. Detroit lost market share because customers found other options with a better cost / benefit ratio.

The destruction of weapons grade uranium and plutonium has some great benefits for the entire world. I am glad that utilities have switched to that source for part of their fuel and hope it will continue.

You seem to understand this principle applied to cars, why not to the uranium supply?

People marveled at how well they ran.

No, they really didn't. The first Japanese and European cars, like the first Datsuns and Beetles, were terrible. They sold because they were really, really cheap, in part due to lower wages, in part due to indirect subsidies.

It was only in the 80's that they really started moving upmarket, using their cost advantages to invest in quality.

Nick are you old enough to remember those early imports or just taking all this on hearsay and extrapolating conclusions from market share numbers? Actually, the early imports were in the fifties and early sixties.

By 1969 Datsun had introduced the 240Z, a good, very competitive little sports car. Toyota Corollas of the late sixties and beyond were very well thought of small cars (mind you small cars as a whole weren't well thought of by the mainstream). These cars came better than fifteen years before the mid eighties.

The seventies saw Detroit get lazy and produce a relatively homogenous product across the board, but early in the seventies gasoline still sold cheap so economical cars didn't have much operational cost edge over roomy boats. After oil was deregulated under Carter-which caused gas prices to double in very short order-smaller cars getting decent mileage got noticed a whole lot more and lots of people realized many were well made and generally handled much better than the boats to boot.

All the while the Japanese had been adding models and features. By the early eighties the Honda Accord was making substantial inroads into mid level market as it performed well, had lots of amazing standard features (like intermittent wipers and cruise control if I recall), was fun to drive as it handled well and was a decent mid to long haul car.

By the mid eighties one of the big three, Chrysler, had already endured a brush with death brought on by its pitiful foresight, poor decisions and the onslaught over a decade and a half of well made ever improving Japanese cars.

Beetles didn't have quite the same story though, but they broke the ground for the import wave and that was very significant in itself.

I probably shouldn't have digressed so much from the main post but the improvement in the Japanese cars didn't just suddenly jump out of no where in the mid eighties as your post seems to imply, it was a twenty five year process that went nearly unheaded by Detroit. All this might not seem worth mentioning except that THE SAME THING JUST HAPPENED AGAIN. This time two of the former big three went bankrupt when oil prices jumped.

Japanese cars didn't just suddenly jump out of no where in the mid eighties as your post seems to imply

I agree - imports improved steadily (Japanese faster than European). You'd agree that they had a poor start?

My points were several-fold: imports started at poor quality; they improved in large part due to cost advantages which allowed greater investment in quality; imports competed first in a low-cost small car niche; as you note, they only moved into the mid level market much later.

I think it's a mistake to attribute Detroit's gradual loss of sales to imports to bad management. Instead, it mostly depends on accidents of history & US trade and foreign policy: Detroit had unsustainable labor and benefit costs, higher interest rates and taxes, and adverse exchange rates.

Detroit's management had no control over this sharply higher cost structure - only changes in Federal policy, and a final crisis & bankruptcy, could change them.

This sharply higher cost structure starved Detroit of the funds needed for investments in higher quality, especially of parts, which largely determine vehicle reliability.

I disagree on your assessment that Detroit's management decisions are not at the heart of Detroit' demise. My rebuttal will merely be anecdotal so it has limited worth. However, it certainly is interesting which of my trucks were good and which were garbage.

I have owned a 1950, 1955, 1970, 1974, 1988, 1999, and (currently) 2003 Chevy/GMC pickups. Now the first two were worn out when I got them so I will leave them out. The 1970 had 130,000 miles on it when I bought it 180,000 when sold, needed relatively little upkeep and ran well long after my stint of owning it. The 1974 I got when it was young, but it aged quickly, I traded it for the 1970, some cash and a saddle and got the best part of the deal by a long shot. The last three pickups I bought new. The 1988 had few issues, I drove it 188,000 miles and gave it to my son who put another 50,000 on it. The 1999 started having substantial failures before it reached 50,000 so I unloaded it. The 2003 has more soft spots than I care to know about but I am likely to be stuck with it. Management set the specs for these vehicles, their cost cutting on major operational components while adding cushy marketable features weakened the product. It is no accident Detroit's market share slid drastically of late, they sold a lot of crap. I'm sure the factors you mentioned played a part, but the truck/SUV bubble made Detroit a lot of money. To gain a bigger share of that profitable bubble GM at least took its eye off the ball and forgot what it was that made their pickups really good and thus popular in the first place. They got away with that in the midseventies because Detroit made almost all the pickups back then. That is not the case any more.

Management set the specs for these vehicles

Yes, but they also accepted low bids for parts, and pushed their parts suppliers viciously for cost reductions. There's no way for suppliers to maintain quality in that environment.

their cost cutting on major operational components while adding cushy marketable features weakened the product. It is no accident Detroit's market share slid drastically of late, they sold a lot of crap.

No question.

I'm sure the factors you mentioned played a part, but the truck/SUV bubble made Detroit a lot of money.

No, it just allowed them to survive.

To gain a bigger share of that profitable bubble GM at least took its eye off the ball and forgot what it was that made their pickups really good and thus popular in the first place.

They didn't forget - they had no choice.

They got away with that in the midseventies because Detroit made almost all the pickups back then.

Sure.

Nick, it sounds like either you have done an extensive case study on Detroit for maybe an MBA or are/were deeply involved in Detroit' parts supply chain. I infer that you feel the souls of those companies are whole and about to rise like the phoenix from the ashes of bankruptcy, that the division managers were blameless as they followed the marketers (my major back in the bronze age by the way)and financiers deeper into the morass of modern American business, that GM was the world's largest company and it could only go on by selfdestructing then being reborn. Maybe so, maybe the mean feds set different regs for Detroit than for the imports, the UAW certainly was more than inflexible than it should have been, pie in the sky that can't be delivered is so loved by the members (not in the unions I'm familiar with though). I hope you are right.

I don't have near the inside window on Detroit you seem to have. Mine is what I get every time I bring a defective rig in for warranty work. Years ago I read people would rather go to the dentist than the dealer's service department. I would rather get a root canal. At least there would be a fair chance the dentist would do good work and actually fix the problem. There has been almost no chance of the happening for some time with Mr. Goodwrench's bunch.

I didn't mean to blow off your question about the rocky start the imports had last post by the way. Yes I agree those early imports were pretty poor automobiles. Detroit had good reason to see no threat coming from those cars, but conditions changed fairly quickly and Detroit was way too arrogant and obstinate to respond in truly competitive manner until things were way too far gone.

Nick, you and I a pretty far from the uranium discussion here but it has been a good tangent.

I infer that you feel the souls of those companies are whole and about to rise like the phoenix from the ashes of bankruptcy,

I think they have a decent chance. Unfortunately, the bankruptcy didn't fully reduce Detroit's wage & benefits to a competitive level (the UAW had a lot of clout, and a proper restructuring would have been very bad psychologically for the economy). OTOH, I think they've closed the overall structural cost gap by perhaps 60%, which will help a lot.

the division managers were blameless as they followed the marketers (my major back in the bronze age by the way)and financiers deeper into the morass of modern American business

They didn't have much choice, given their budgets. The move to dependence on rebates/price reductions and marketing, rather than engineering and fundamentals, was cost-driven. I don't think they were blameless: they never treated their engineers as well as they should have, and finance/marketing did get too powerful (Iaccoca is a good counter-example: he was an Industrial Engineer, and clearly one of Detroit's best managers).

On the other hand, mistreatment of engineers is a national illness: the prestige and pay of engineers in the US has crashed since WWII, displaced in the social hierarchy by doctors, lawyers (to some extent) and financiers.

It's worth noting that the US also misallocates it's engineering talent: about half of all engineers work in the "military-industrial complex". How often have you seen the best engineering products in the US marked "not for export"?

GM was the world's largest company and it could only go on by selfdestructing then being reborn.

Yes. The UAW was too strong, because of pattern bargaining
and government support for the unions.

maybe the mean feds set different regs for Detroit than for the imports

Imports had lower wages and benefits (both in their countries of origin, and in Southern "transplants"); lower interest rates and taxes (especially in Japan), and artificially low exchange rates (which has improved slightly recently).

pie in the sky that can't be delivered is so loved by the members (not in the unions I'm familiar with though).

Almost all unions were susceptible to excessive promises on benefits, especially pensions - "30 and out" was (and is) a disaster.

I'm more familiar with the construction trade unions myself. 30 and out comes with SUBSTANTIALLY reduced benefits in many of them. Others have only defined contribution plans in which the balances were nicely halved last year as the market imploded. Longer life spans don't necessarily mean that the working life in physically demanding fields has been equally extended. In the construction trades the union hand is little more than day labor with a tool belt/kit and a well developed skill set. Whether or not modern UAW work is as demanding I don't know. Robots have picked up much of the dangerous exposure in auto manufacture but I'm guessing in the assembly area people are used where is too damned expensive to try and make a machine that can do what they can. But all that said, long term survival of a union requires long term survival of the industry it mans. It seems to have taken a collapse to make the UAW realize they had take into account all the players in the game even if many were not sitting at the negotiating table.

Government support for unions is not near as strong as many believe, though. That union membership has been steadily shrinking for decades in all sectors of the economy except government is evidence of how thin the ice the unions walk on is. That wasn't good for Detroit either since low wage help around the country couldn't afford new cars. Government protection of workers is a much trickier balancing act than many think. But then maybe it is time for the forty hour work week to go, time and half to disappear, workman's comp to evaporate, safety regulations be abolished and the worker to once again assume all risk when he or she enters the work place (ah the good old days of England), after all it was their choice to go to work, they could have been pure finders, bone pickers, beggars or thieves, no one made them get a job. Things get bad enough it will go that way anyhow, but trying to squeeze the workers for all the profits possible is very short sighted, since workers without money don't buy products. If the unions are forced out of existence the multipliers on lower workers wages will render a smaller product and the economy will shrink all the more, then watch the scramble to be in the last dying remnant of the middle class. Oops I rambled out a bit far, there does have to be balance and a union that is too strong can destroy the balance near as well as an omnipotent owner--agreed

The Detroit management failures go back at least to the seventies and eighties when there was money. Detroit should have started reducing redundant product lines back then, or reshaped those lines to specifically compete with foreign companies who were already then providing the variety needed for a vibrant market place. The horse was well out of the barn before Detroit considered closing the doors. Even now GMC and Chevy still make virtually identical pickup trucks, brilliant. I know there are contractual hurdles involved here but managers with enough foresight, competence, sand and authority (I am just guessing but corporate structure and culture may have made it impossible for managers with those qualities to survive, setting the stage for failure long before the import threat even occurred) could have started turning things around long ago.

The American people themselves are hardly blameless with their penchant for big rigs. I certainly have had at least my share, but I have had 80's Accords and Camries along with them side by side. I would have been happy to had equivalent Detroit models instead but THERE WEREN'T ANY. Damn UAW must have told the management what to make.

Your points on our poor treatment and use of engineers are right on--not to mention how much of their time evaporates in the ridiculously complex permitting process (that is a construction thing and possibly doesn't carry over to the rest of manufacturing). Dwight's warnings when he coined the term military industrial complex were right on. I just reread the speech and thought the following quote from it would move my post back toward a TOD message.

"Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow." Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961

30 and out comes with SUBSTANTIALLY reduced benefits in many of them. Others have only defined contribution plans

I have the impression that the carpenter's union doesn't reduce benefits. Is that right? I know that transit worker and AFSCME pensions tend not to.

UAW pensions were (and, I believe still are) breathtaking.

I agree about the decline of unions. I also agree that Detroit's management wasn't blameless - they were slow to recognize the threat, and way too complacent and short-term oriented. Still, better management couldn't have fixed the structural cost problems.

I would have been happy to had equivalent Detroit models instead

Did you look at the Chevy Nova? It was a Chevy branded Corolla. I was never sure why it didn't sell well.

the ridiculously complex permitting process

And all of those plans still have to be submitted on paper, I bet.

Dwight's warnings when he coined the term military industrial complex were right on.

Yes. It's a bit disappointing that he waited until the end of his term to say it, which suggests that he didn't think he or anyone else could really do anything about it.

unions

The carpenters national pension, as far as I am aware is only for union officers and I have never looked into it. The other pensions are either setup up by regional councils, only in the last decade have many locals been brought into these, and locals. The pensions vary substantially. In the Alaska regional council, Anchorage has both defined benefit and defined contribution, and I believe like the laborers a certain percentage of defined benefit pension is lost for every year the retiree retires before the set age 60-65, I can't remember which. In Fairbanks the defined benefit pension serves only a few members as it was rolled into, after a fashion, a defined contribution only package after a lawsuit filed about vesting requirements during the pipeline era got very messy. These contracts are renegotiated every three years and when times are tough the raises do not keep pace with inflation. After the post pipeline construction crash, wage/benefits did not go up for a long time and many separate contracts were negotiated to work for 80% of scale.

That is plenty too much in specifics but I am just trying to illustrate how complex the wage benefit issue is at least in the Alaska trade unions. Additionally, nationwide union scale for the carpenters varies by near 50% with several different scales within each negotiating district (generally regional councils, but a few locals have hung on to their autonomy). Alaska has full commercial, light commercial and residential scale (the first defined by a building square foot amount, 10000 square feet in Fairbanks and 30000 square feet in Anchorage).

Just to give a little more inkling on how diverse-though confused may sometimes be a better description-the construction union picture is, the Juneau carpenters, millwrights statewide and pile drivers statewide also maintain their own locals within the Alaska regional division of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters. Add to this all the other trades (nothing unusual to have at least the best part of a dozen on any decent sized job) and you can see a union picture that is quite the opposite of the massive, powerful UAW, whose awesome wage/benefits were certainly a major contributor to an awful result (thanks for calling me on that one). Of course negotiating with all these entities (back to building trades now) and dealing with their jurisdictions and competing work scopes can be more than a little ungainly and counterproductive. Many umbrella associations try to smooth this some. Its quite the morass, that is for sure--kind of like my post here.

Nova

My dad bought a Nova/Toyota. It was a great car, unfortunately is developed a little seal leak and spotted his new garage floor-the first garage he had to park in since I was a toddler-so he impulsively traded it off for a new Ford Tempo which blew up shortly after its short warranty ran out. I didn't even get the chance to give him an offer on the Nova. Oh well, he was good old WWII veteran (had the lovely job of medic in the retaking of the Philippines) so whatever made him happy was good enough for us, though I did 'give him the business' as he would have said, about the trade.

Ike

Since I wound us back to WWII, it kind of brings us back to Ike. I do need to read more on/by him, but your point about his not mentioning any of those issues until the farewell speech, three days before Kennedy was to take over, is very likely right on. He could see the freight train was picking up speed, which made stopping it something not even thought of yet. After all he had seen and all the lives he knew his decisions had affected for better or worse, he seems to have felt compelled to at least go on record about the necessity of throttling down and considering using the brakes.

On a technical note, my HTML skills are very limited. I would have liked to made Ike's 'farewell speech' into a live link (it is very brief and hits on much that now ails us) but I've no clue how to do that--a long URL in the middle of a post is rather distracting. Any help here would be appreciated. thanks

Thanks for the carpenter's union notes. I've seen multiple parallel union negotiations - messy.

Ike: yes, he did the best he could.

Use (a href="URL")TEXT(/a)

where TEXT is what you want to appear, and pointed brackets (greater or less than symbols) replace parentheses.

Thanks for the help

engineers

Missed this point last post: It does seem the permitting process has strong ties with the pulp industry, kind of odd when an environmental impact statement almost needs an impact statement of its own.

Ike

Eisenhower's farewell speech

Your welcome.

paper: has anyone seen a permitting process that doesn't require paper??

Nick,

1) The Wagner Act plus lowering trade barriers set GM on the road to bankruptcy. The Wagner Act forced GM into labor agreements and labor relations that raised costs, lowered quality, and lowered the rate of process innovation. It just took over 70 years to get there.

2) But GM could have made it another 10 years before bankruptcy if it had gotten the quality religion back in the 1970s. It did not need UAW cooperation for many ways to improve quality.

Some aspects of quality cost more. But other aspects of quality are cheaper. When GM failed to go very aggressively after ways to control processes to improve quality that ultimately saved money (by enhancing perceived value, reducing warranty costs, allowing greater understanding of process and hence better understanding of how to cut process costs) GM sealed its fate.

Both these causes matter.

The Wagner Act plus lowering trade barriers set GM on the road to bankruptcy.

Yes, the existence of unions was a big factor. They alone didn't do it. There was also a society-wide disregard for long-term planning for the costs of pension; a variety of US indirect subsidies for Japan; and a variety of Japanese indirect subsidies for manufacturers.

Edit: don't forget employer-based health insurance (why does Ontario have more car manufacturing than Michigan?) and a Strong Dollar policy.

I don't think Detroit was blameless. Their lack of understanding of quality (including the basic concept of Doing It Right The First Time that underlies statistical process quality control and gives the cost savings you noted) was certainly a problem.

But, as you note, perfect management couldn't have saved them.

Agreed. Looking at past production data alone doesn't suffice to decide on the ability of the industry to react to fuel shortages, which never happened so far. The vaccine example certainly is valid.

Yet, we have also read, e.g. in a comment made by Engineer-Poet, that it takes some time from the moment uranium-rich ore is extracted from the ground until we have finished fuel rods that can be inserted in nuclear power plants.

Thus, if I were an operator of a nuclear power plant, which I am not, I would make sure to sign contracts for delivery of fuel rods sufficiently in advance of when I need them in order to guarantee that they will be available at that time.

Thus, if we already know, by analyzing past data the way Michael did, that there is a potential problem in fuel delivery looming in 2013, we cannot wait until 2013 with ramping up production. We must start sufficiently early to make sure that the production of new fuel rods will be in full swing come 2013.

To stay with the vaccine metaphor: if we know that the swine flu is coming to the Northern hemisphere this fall, we don't wait with producing vaccines until the flu season starts, but rather, we make good use of the summer months to start producing vaccines as fast as we can.

Thus, if we already know that there is a potential problem with the delivery of nuclear fuel in 2013, we should pick up an increase in mining operations just about now -- not finished fuel rods yet, mind you, only mining operations.

If this doesn't happen pretty soon, then Michael's prediction will certainly become reality.

Do we see already an increase in mining operations? Does anyone know?

Even if methods such as in-situ leaching cannot be scaled up rapidly in response to a shrinking supply of ex-weapons material, there are plenty of alternatives to mining.

Re-enrichment of DU tails is a massive, though expensive, source of LEU.  For instance, if the body of DU tailings contains 0.25% U-235 and these are re-processed to make more LEU and a new tails stream at 0.15% U-235, the amount of new LEU is roughly 20% of the total quantity of LEU produced in the first enrichment.  "The first enrichment" includes all LEU made from the DU which remains in inventory, all the way back to the start of the nuclear age.  20% of all the LEU produced thus far is a massive amount of fuel; the US has about 60,000 tons of spent fuel in inventory, so the US share of this potential re-enrichment product would be about 12,000 tons of LEU.  At perhaps 50 tons of LEU for an initial fuel load and 1/3 of this for a reload, this is enough to fuel ~250 new reactors or provide ~750 biannual reloads.

If you had 12 years of fuel on hand for all the reactors operating or planned, would you be worried about a supply crunch in 2013?  I'd laugh at it too.

The major problem with this is the large SWU (Separative Work Unit) burden required to enrich such a low-quality input stream to the level required for LWR fuel.  I could see difficulties in this; it is costly in both energy and money and requires lots of equipment.  However, Dr. Dittmar does not give any hint as to the concentration of the DU tailings.  He does not even mention SWU in his post, and he has not responded to any of the questions on this in the comments.  Since this is key to the issue, I have to ask:  was he just careless, or is he trying to hide something?  Dodging the issue for so long looks like the latter.

if I were an operator of a nuclear power plant, which I am not, I would make sure to sign contracts for delivery of fuel rods sufficiently in advance of when I need them in order to guarantee that they will be available at that time.

François, we agree on the principle.

Thus, if we already know, by analyzing past data the way Michael did, that there is a potential problem in fuel delivery looming in 2013, we cannot wait until 2013 with ramping up production.

I agree with most of this statement as well, but that is a very big IF.

The utilities have experts who’s job is to study the uranium market in great detail and acquire contracts that will provide a very reliable supply of fuel. To avoid risking their careers I would expect them to make very conservative decisions. Keep in mind that fuel assemblies are very cheap and compact on a per kWh basis. Storing a year’s supply of coal or gas on site is not practical, but keeping a year or more of new fuel is easy with reactors.

A goggle search reveals that most uranium mills in the U.S. are on standby. I expect those experts know the condition of every significant mine and mill on the planet. If they see a problem they would be bidding up the price now.

Some people think the volatility of the spot market is a bad thing, but it is really a reflection of what buyers and sellers see in the future. Perhaps this was a factor in the spot price run-up of 2007. The falling price indicates that the experts are comfortable now.

The combined opinion of dozens of career experts is different than Michael’s, and a review of ALL the data supports the experts.

I understand your way of reasoning, Bill, but I don't see where Michael's data would be in error. As far as I can tell, they are rock solid. Contrary to what Engineer-Poet suggested, Michael didn't cherry-pick his numbers. They were carefully extracted from a number of official documents, and Michael was very careful to compare these numbers with each other and try to compute each of them in more than one way, if and when possible.

I agree that you cannot conclude from the historical data offered in these documents that there is no spare capacity, because the data measure past actual production, not past potential production, but this is a different issue altogether.

The spare capacity, if it exists, should be activated by now in order to prevent a shortage by 2013. I have no explanation why this isn't happening, and I agree with your assessment that the operators, if they recognize a potential problem ahead of them, would try to secure their own supply, which should jack the prices up if there is a shortage of supplies in the future. Clearly, this isn't happening, and I don't have a good explanation for it.

Bill, but I don't see where Michael's data would be in error.

François, I am not saying it is in error. It is incomplete. I would like to see a spreadsheet of all the mines and mills in the world. How many are in standby waiting for higher prices? How many are operating at reduced capacity waiting for higher prices? If Michael has reviewed a full data set he should present it. If not he does not have enough information to draw a conclusion. The experts do.

We know there is a great deal of unused capacity in the U.S. If that is true elsewhere it would explain the low price and lack of concern among the experts.

The spare capacity, if it exists, should be activated by now in order to prevent a shortage by 2013.

It does not take 4 years to start an existing mill in standby, or to ramp up one running at low capacity.

Excellent re-direct. I would add that even that information is of little use without documenting raw yellowcake inventories and fuel rod inventories.

The spare capacity, if it exists, should be activated by now in order to prevent a shortage by 2013.

Should it?  How do you know this?  Can you tell me the actual schedule for production of LEU fuel rods, starting with yellowcake delivered from the mine?  If this is 2 years and not 4, we might not expect to see increased deliveries for another 2 years.  Mining activity would step up sometime next year.

There is every reason for companies not to buy ahead of their need.  Adding physical inventory costs money and has carrying costs, unlike a Memorandum of Understanding.  A contract for future capacity is bound to be much cheaper than current delivery.  Unless there is an immediate supply problem—and even according to Dittmar's projections, we'll see about 5 years of shrinking civilian inventories before the problem really bites—we don't have anything that will actually affect generation.

No, I don't know how long it takes from the moment you get uranium-rich ore out of the ground (in existing mines with spare capacity) until you have finished fuel rods than can be inserted into a nuclear reactor. This was my question earlier.

If indeed this process takes only two years, that would indeed explain why we don't see enhanced activity and/or increased prices yet.

That very point is crucial to Dittmar's conclusion, yet he doesn't address it (that belonged in Chapter I).  The issue of how long it takes to start an in-situ leaching operation, and how much it costs, is very significant and also not addressed.  For instance, if an ISL mine costs $40/lb, enough activity on the futures market at the last price of $49/lb would lead someone to fill the futures contracts and book a $9/lb profit.  These mines would be unprofitable at the long-term contract prices around $25/lb, but that's not the marginal demand which is being addressed here.

When TOD looks at alternatives to conventional crude such as tar sands and coal liquefaction, one of the things we look at is the cost to get 1 bbl/day.  Equivalent data for uranium are completely missing from this series so far.  I would hope that Dr. Dittmar would realize that his work has gaps you could sail a container ship through, and go back to address them before going on to Chapter III.  If he revised his paper in the light of new information, it could only improve the product... and it would address most of the objections raised here.

Again, theres about a zillion tonnes of uranium hexafluoride tails from enrichment sitting around and Eurodif alone isn't going to be dismantled until 2020. If theres a run on uranium, theres going to still be substantial enrichment capacity for a long time to tap depleted uranium tails while mines are ramped up.

The notion that reactors will be pressed out of service when you have literally years worth of stockpiled fuel at some reactors and decades worth of fuel in depleted uranium simply doesn't pass the smell test.

I believe the Kayelekera mine has started producing, and also a new one in Kazakhstan. There may be others.

Total production has been increasing about two percent a year over the last 12 years.

http://world-nuclear.org/info/uprod.html

(How fire can be domesticated)

Do I need to quote again what I wrote in my second article about that?

Or perhaps you can find it yourself!

I gave you what is perhaps the most accurate number
on military reserves.

But isn't it clear that even this draw down is limited by some capacities right now?

And more important by remaining cold war mentality in the USA and in Russia?

Otherwise let me ask a counter question

do you really believe that the USA will open their strategic reserves to the European
and Asian competitors just for our beauty?

michael

Do I need to quote again what I wrote in my second article about that?

I believe you do.  A number of us have looked at the evidence you gave and decided that your conclusion is a non-sequitur.  You leave too many unknowns:

  1. From primary sources, the costs and schedule for bringing existing mines out of mothballs and up to full capacity, or starting new mines (e.g. in-situ leaching, which appears to recover most of the resource in the area of a well pattern in 6 months to 1 year).
  2. From secondary sources, the size of the "used"-but-not-actually-used resource in the form of DU tailings available for re-enrichment.

If you can put an error bar on the size of these resources and they still don't equal the forecast requirements, you've got something.  But your references don't support the claim of a crisis.  For instance, the Layton presentation (your endnote #10, page 6) posits that orders for uranium for use in a core required in 2013 will come next year (2 or 3 year lead time) and the 2016 fuel deliveries will use uranium ordered in 2012.

The Layton presentation also mentions the tails assay of DU.  The levels are rather high for non-Russian material; 0.240% U-235 is typical.  There is a lot of recoverable U-235 in this; Russian DU is 0.130-0.150%.  There may be little spare capacity in the enrichment market to 2013 (which appears to assume that the Paducah GD plant isn't operable at anything close to full capacity), but the new reactors in the USA won't be going critical until 2015 or so.  There is room for slippage in the schedules.

do you really believe that the USA will open their strategic reserves to the European and Asian competitors just for our beauty?

You only posit a 5000 ton/yr shortfall.  The unused ISL capacity in the US last year (3.5 million lb/y U3O8) was on the order of 1/6 of this all by itself.  The Layton presentation also has the per-lb capital expenditure for the ISL at the Honeymoon mine:  $68/lb/yr (page 11).  Operational expenditures are ~$20/lb, so in an extreme case where shortages drove the spot price of U to $88/lb a new ISL mine could pay off its entire capital expenditure in 1 year.  The average price projected is $35/lb.  Layton says "[factors] could see spot prices rally, but the impact on the short term fundamentals of the market appear limited, so any large rally in prices will be a good selling opportunity." (page 13, emphasis added)

As I've said before, your sources do not support your conclusions.

NB:  I uncovered a news article which stated that work on the Honeymoon ISL mine started April this year and production will commence the middle of next year.  Call it around 14-16 months.

There may be little spare capacity in the enrichment market to 2013 (which appears to assume that the Paducah GD plant isn't operable at anything close to full capacity), but the new reactors in the USA won't be going critical until 2015 or so. There is room for slippage in the schedules.

Remember Eurodif also. Its scheduled to be replaced by centrifuge enrichment capcaity, but it isn't dismantled until 2020. This represents an enormous surplus of enrichment capacity in a crisis.

Perhaps you can point out where you disagree?

from a few comments you make here it seems that you agree more or less

There may be little spare capacity in the enrichment market to 2013 (which appears to assume that the Paducah GD plant isn't operable at anything close to full capacity), but the new reactors in the USA won't be going critical until 2015 or so. There is room for slippage in the schedules.

little spare capacity
room for slippage

and so it goes some 5000 tons/year are missing
and thus 5-10% forced shutdowns or early retirements
or similar.

Thus,

my conclusion is that the official data are inconsistent with the
growth scenario between 1-2% per year!

if the military reserves from the USA and Russia will not be opened
for European / Asian users!

in fact the Euratom agency has published an interesting report
about the future western european needs

and yes from todays 23000 tons/year reactor requirements (more than 1/3 of the planet)
it is expected to go down to something like 17000 tons by 2023 or so
(if needed I can dig out the document with more precise numbers)

remark the German termination plans of nuclear energy
would reduce by only 3000 tons!

so much for the growth of nuclear energy.

May be besides the wishful thinking in Europe
the people behind (the clever operators etc..) have
already decided how it will evolve!

michael

You're going to have to be a little less incoherent, and apparently you're not even looking at the numbers. Enrichment capacity globally is rising very fast, such that Eurodif is supposed to be retired next year. But it doesn't get dismantled untill next decade.

You realize we have literally millions of tons of DU stockpiled as uranium hexafluoride gas right next to these enrichment facilities, right?

And this is predicated on the fiction that mining capacity wont rise in lockstep. The world you must live in. Tell you what, you want to make a fantastic amount of money because you are so sure of your position: Put it all into uranium futures.

If the CDU party stays in power (election in a month), German nukes aren't likely to be shut down. It's true Europe is quite backwards when it comes to nuclear, but economic giants UK and Italy are re-evaluating their stances and I'd guess they'll start building within a decade, as will Germany. (At least if AGW stays high on the EU agenda.)

Hi,

that remains to be seen!

but for what its worse..

the Euratom supply agency is doing the long term planning

its not my numbers that show a decline of 6000 tons
by 2023 or so.
have a look at the tables on page 30 in the appendix
http://ec.europa.eu/euratom/ar/last.pdf

If Euratom is making long term contracts on this basis

well how many nuclear power plants will be operational
in 2008 2015 2025 ??

well it is roughly the ratio (reactor needs)
21810 tons
17462 tons
and 14492 tons

the numbers indicate a decline in europe -1/3
within 15 years only
don't they?

if the long term contracts are made like that
what will some populist from the CDU do about that
shout in the wind to get some votes and forget again

michael

the numbers indicate a decline in europe -1/3
within 15 years only
don't they?

They foresee the German phase-out which is not likely, but furthermore, they assume the amount of natural uranium needed will be lower due to more intense enrichment - i.e. there will be less U235 in tailings. Also, there is the issues of reprocessing and of inventory management. So I don't think you can draw the 1/3 conclusion.

if the long term contracts are made like that
what will some populist from the CDU do about that

Being pro-nuclear is anti-populist. They will get the uranium anyhow.

Just to remind you (look for the numbers in chapter I)

germany requires about 3000 tons / year!

thus another decline of 2000-3000 tons must be associated with other countries.

also, if you would take the time to look
they talk about the natural uranium equivalent needs.
thus it has nothing to do with tail, recycling etc.

sorry but you opinion is not based on facts!

For the pro-nuclear .. don't you spread the message that the light can stay on
and that our good life can continue if we just allow some more nuclear power plants?

Compare this with the ugly message of slow down!

Michael

germany requires about 3000 tons / year!

thus another decline of 2000-3000 tons must be associated with other countries.

No, the net drop is only about 3000 tons, which is about what Germany needs. From the report you cite: "The foreseen decline over the years reflects the planned closure of reactors in some Member States, especially Germany, and the small number of firm plans for new reactors, although several others are planned."

also, if you would take the time to look
they talk about the natural uranium equivalent needs.
thus it has nothing to do with tail, recycling etc.

Wrong again.

"Net requirements are calculated on the basis of reactor needs less the contributions from currently planned uranium/plutonium recycling, and taking account of inventory management as communicated to the Agency by utilities."

and...

"Average estimated net requirements for natural uranium for the next 10 years are down 0.6 % but forecast net enrichment requirements are up 2.0 % from the previous estimates (for total reactor needs the figures are +0.2 % for natural uranium and +2.0 % for enrichment). This reflects further decreasing tails assays due to the current relationship between natural uranium and enrichment prices."

I am not sure if we are talking about the same numbers! probably not!

I looked at the overall requirements
appendix 2
called
Reactor requirements

they go down from 2008 21810 tons

to 14492 tons by 2027

that is what counts in order to determine how much power can be expected according to each year
the german forecast in this counting makes only 3000 tons.

now you seem to talk about the net requirements nd how this comes together.

perhaps you could figure out yourself that we were addressing different numbers
but if you prefer to
shout "wrong again" fine with me. But does it convince anybody?

I think for most the situation according to Euratom is obvious
a larger number of reactors will be retired without replacement!

michael

Look at the same table, one column to the right, and you will see "net requirements". That is the relevant figure, and I have explained why with a few citations. Please read them again if you do not understand.

For most, the situation is obvious: Euratom goes with the official licensed life times of reactors. As we all know, licenses are extended and plants refurbished. Also, we know public opinion is getting more nuke-friendly every day, and that many EU governments are reevaluating nuclear in a positive way.

I understand that you are talking about the net requirements!
Can you calculate the total power in GWe from the net or from the numbers
of natural uranium equivalent I prefer to use?
Unfortunately the Euratom people have not done the calculation for us
or prefer to hide it.

Anyway my numbers are easy 170 tons/year/GWe
what are yours?

and as you say:

`` Euratom goes with the official licensed life times of reactors."

thats exactly the point!

not only the reactors in Germany are on the list but many more!

for example the three older and smaller reactors in Switzerland
(about 1 GWe together) will have a hard time to get a new license to run beyond 2015/16
and in the optimistic planning a new big one could be ready perhaps by 2022 or so.

similar for UK lots of really old reactors will be terminated
without replacement

this is very consistent with the slow phase out!

If you agree that uranium fuel is largely ordered in a long term deal
it looks like that the "market" tension will be reduced by the EU slow down!

in case the WNA news said that the new bulgarian plant will be in trouble
as the German company Eon is running out of money to
put it in the most profitable(?) investment opportunity

just one example.

I agree that there are a number of small, old power reactors in the EU that will probably close in this time period. But I believe the stage is set for these to be replaced and for capacity to be built out - on average one new reactor would be sufficient to replace three old ones.

UK nuke plans are quite impressive, contrary to your statement of older reactors not being replaced.

*UK nuke plans are quite impressive, contrary to your statement of older reactors not being replaced.

yes the plans are impressive
but it seems that reality is far from it!

the "overoptimistic WNA" report reads like
that nothing at all is fixed so far (besides the shut downs (and may be the resulting blackouts?)

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf84.html

at the same time the financial chaos is hitting hard in the UK
not much money left ..

if required that WNA news item strengthened my case for Europe

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/NN_Tough_decisions_ahead_for_the_Bulga...

Well, the current financial crisis is more of a possibility, actually, since there is spare, cheap capacity in the industry, which would make plants cheaper. However, unfortunately, they won't start building for a few years yet, and the crisis is soon over.

About over-optimism: You present the Euratom view that disregard all construction plans and fully counts all end-of-life plans. Then we have WNA, that fully counts all construction plans and (almost) disregards all end-of-life plans. I think the truth is somewhere in-between, don't you?

And I think that while WNA is certainly being a bit optimistic, they are consistent over time. This means that the impressive increase in their global outlook from January 2007 which showed 22, 69, 124 GW in construction, planning and proposal stages, to current figures of 44, 150, 289 GW, does represent a real change in the nuclear industry's momentum.

I understand that you are talking about the net requirements!
Can you calculate the total power in GWe from the net or from the numbers of natural uranium equivalent I prefer to use?

Several of us have been using your 170 t/GW-yr as a basis, but you are not responding to our questions.  For instance, when I asked you about supply issues here, your response was very dismissive:

"Perhaps you can point out where you disagree?"

Your own sources disagree with you.  We do not understand how you reached your conclusion.  We have asked you to explain several times, breaking things down into more detail and addressing issues like SWU capacity.  SWU is a huge factor; if you are producing LEU at 3.75% from NU at 0.72% U-235, your yield rises from 137 kg LEU/ton NU to 163 kg LEU as you go from a tails assay of 0.24% to 0.13%.  That is a 19% increase in product yield with the same input for about a 1/3 increase in SWU per unit LEU (60% more SWU per ton of input).

Unfortunately the Euratom people have not done the calculation for us or prefer to hide it.

Several of us have also noticed this.  If it is important to your argument, writing an essay without obtaining this calculation means you cannot support any conclusion which relies on it.

As I just posted elsewhere in this discussion, I think you are confusing your desires with your facts.  One half of your desires is accelerated nuclear disarmament (not a bad idea... if it includes N. Korea, Pakistan and Iran).  This appears to be the other half:

and so it goes some 5000 tons/year are missing
and thus 5-10% forced shutdowns or early retirements
or similar.
so much for the growth of nuclear energy.

As I noted in another comment just minutes ago, the 5000 mt/yr demand you claim is not satisfied can be met by 15 more mines on the scale of the Honeymoon ISL operation in Australia.  At USD 60 million capital expenditure each, the total capex for these mines would be under USD 1 billion.  This could supply the 500 ton requirement you claim to start 10 new reactors per year, or the on-going uranium requirements for 30 reactors.  If we assume the cost of a plant is $5 billion, the capex for the mines is 2% of the plant cost to start, and 0.7% of the plant cost to continue operation.  This is down in the noise.

At $20/lb O&M cost to produce U3O8, the 500 tons metallic U to start a reactor costs $26 million; compared to the capex for the plant itself, this is insignficant.  The annual refuelling cost is about $8.8 million.  For a 1 GW plant running at 90% capacity factor, this is about 0.11¢/kWh.  Again, down in the noise.  How is this going to force shutdowns and retirements?

I'm taking all of this from your own sources, Michael.  How can you possibly claim confidence in conclusions so wildly out of sync with the data you allegedly used to reach them?

I think we went through this discussion.

Michael based his prediction about a shortage looming in 2013 on (correct and valid) past production data. The problem with this approach is that it doesn't take free capacity into account. Since sufficient reserves (partly civil and partly military) were available, there was no need to produce more to meet the demand. Thus, we cannot conclude from a lack of production a lack of capability to produce.

The projected shortage in 2013 is real, but you wrote elsewhere that, according to publications, it only takes about 3 years to ramp up production, i.e., we cannot conclude from the fact that production hasn't been ramped up yet, that it won't still ramp up in time to meet the shortage in 2013. The ramp-up should start in 2010, and therefore, we should be able to see it fairly soon if it will indeed materialize.

The argument was also made that the operators of the current nuclear power plants are confident that they can buy fuel when they need it, because if this were not true, we should see already now an increase in the prices of nuclear fuel, which isn't visible yet.

Concerning new nuclear reactors, since their construction takes at least somewhere around 5 years (this seems to be an absolute minimum because of the safety regulations), and since the start-up of new production of nuclear fuel takes less time than that (3 years), we wouldn't see an increase in production until the construction of the new power plant has already started.

Yes indeed we went through all this.

The future is not fixed yet.

However, large scale projects take time, and usually much more time than predicted.

This is true for nuclear power plants, new uranium mines (Cigar lake disaster!) and many many other things like
for new large particle accelerators (not the topic
but if it matters I received a strange (warning?) mail to "shut up" right after the first article
saying something about the LHC delays and that one should not write on other topics before the project
is shown to function) .

What I wrote in the articles is that current policies are pointing directly to a supply crunch
in uranium fuel provision. I am not the only one and if you want
I only justified the statement / warning from the NEA/IAEA press declaration.

In the second paper I present the situation with remaining civilian and military stocks.

The data are as they are and the politics as well.

claimed capacities is not the same thing as real capacities!
The nuclear energy sector is full by fake (ghost) capacities!

What does it help that some capacity is already in place for the floated Cigar Lake mine?

Similar for oil refineries. What are they good when the peak problem will become obvious?
The believers in nuclear energy here on the oil drum should explain why
they are often very clear about the oil situation but believe in the nuclear energy sector
everything is different?

I can only put the official well documented numbers together
and make the point

to do it again:

1) the nuclear power plants world wide are old and replacement is far behind
2) mining has stopped in many countries. Most uranium users have mostly no uranium
left on their territories.
3) the USA has so far failed to bring up mining again and is at 10% now of what it was 30 years ago!
4) hopes for fueling future new reactors in China and India are based on the good will of the USA and Russia
who would believe that this hope is justified and on what reason?
5) Western Europe (read the Euratom document I posted) apparently has already made the decision
about the slow decline! -30% within the next 15 years!
the long term buying will determine future investments also
but if Europe has made a silent decision already (1/3 of the world nuclear power plants are in Europe!)
the signals are clear.
6) populist ignorant leaders are needed in order to find a responsible.
Thus one needs to claim that the decline is the fault of greens, stupid others
but not the problem of the nuclear industry itself.

For oil drummers this should sound familiar for the problems in the oil sector!

Its the fault of Arabs, left wing nationalists, russians (ex communists) , Chinese who want more of the cake
or big oil companies but not of the people who are using too much oil

Michael

ps EP
it is not a claim that first fuel of a 1 GWe power plant requires 500 tons of natural uranium
and that 170 tons are roughly exchanged every year. Just a fact!

and so on

As far as I can tell..

(1) - Yes, we know. Not sure how relevant it is to keep making this point.
(2) - This is a simple function of the oversupply of cheap uranium for the past few decades. You could mine uranium at an energy profit in many countries right now.
(3) - See above. If the US government decided to offer a floor price of $250/lb for uranium produced on US territory this would be a different story.
(4) - No, they are not.
(5) - The main signal from Europe is that nuclear power is the only way we can demonstrate large reductions in GHG emissions.
(6) - The combination of lassie-faire economics, cheap natural gas and the greens have stopped nuclear power, yes. What has oil got to do with this?

Speaking as a geologist, I'd say the difference between Uranium and Oil supply is that Oil is freakish; most conventional oil is found in the biggest fields and there is a clear ERORI cutoff for lower grade resources. Uranium is more like a conventional mineral in that the quantities available in low grade deposits are larger, and the EROEI cutoff is at very low concentrations, especially if the resource is fully utilised through breeders.

for 1) don't know how old you are but aging without replacement has some obvious and relevant effects.
just as a fact since 2008 not a single new power plant has been connected to the grid but some have
stopped.

2) so why does the uranium output from Canada fall?
3) oh now you ask for 250$ per pound
why, isn't the amount which can be mined with great profit and for the current price of more than 100$/pound
already a good profit? And is energy independence a goal since at least 30 years in the USA
so why did nobody have the idea to subsidize? sounds like a good idea to me
you know these bad russians ...

4) China and India are not hoping for the good will of Russia and USA military uranium
well on what good will do they hope?

5) the main signal from Europe?
well as I said the real signal from Europe.. why don't you look into the Euratom
supply manual I posted?
Otherwise the main signal for Europe and co2 emissions

as far as I can see it .. the main message is the (soon) falling imports of Gas and Oil
combined with a decline of the little remaining resources

and yes that message is not popular!

(6) - The combination of lassie-faire economics, cheap natural gas and the greens have stopped nuclear power, yes. What has oil got to do with this?

are you sure about that statement?
I can always read that nuclear kwhe are much cheaper better cleaner etc..
strange why do people not understand this?

What oil has to do with it?

Well as a geologist perhaps you can tell us how much (the fraction)
uranium comes from the single largest mine
and how much oil in respect from the single largest oil field.

you can add the next few mines
and compare this with the oil sector.

michael
ps.. What data do you have which support the statement (may be the breeder discussion we can leave for the
final chapter) . I know the famous paper (at least what is written about it. but have a look at the abstract
and the comment about the validity ..)
http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=6665051

your quote:

Uranium is more like a conventional mineral in that the quantities available in low grade deposits are larger, and the EROEI cutoff is at very low concentrations, especially if the resource is fully utilised through breeders.

I think much of the discussion has focused on the current low uranium production, and the fact that if things aren't improved soon, there will be a shortfall by 2013. However, as far as I can see, production is ramping as we speak. In 2007 and 2008, uranium production increased by 2000 tonnes each year, but it seems these figures will be dwarfed by increases in 2009 and 2010, as considerable mining capacity is coming online:

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/section.aspx?fid=796

2) so why does the uranium output from Canada fall?

It seems to have been Rabbit lake being mined out, and a temporary shortfall for McArthur. But Cigar Lake among other new mines are expected to increase production quite a lot.

why, isn't the amount which can be mined with great profit and for the current price of more than 100$/pound

The current price is lower. Spot market prices aren't used much.

And is energy independence a goal since at least 30 years in the USA so why did nobody have the idea to subsidize?

I guess US stockpiles (military and civilian) are deemed quite adequate.

well on what good will do they hope?

None, I guess. They are relying on for-profit operations.

I can always read that nuclear kwhe are much cheaper better cleaner etc.. strange why do people not understand this?

The Greens have done a good marketing job. Also, NG and coal is quite cheap also, if you don't care about externalities.

What data do you have which support the statement

You cite a good paper yourself. The case is pretty strong.

sorry I wanted to write
kg instead of pounds my mistake!

>why, isn't the amount which can be mined with great profit and for the current price of more than 100$/pound

The current price is lower. Spot market prices aren't used much.

********************************************************************
you write:
>you cite a good paper yourself. The case is pretty strong.

I asked if you have any evidence.

The paper formulates an interesting hypothesis (with some interesting remarks)

thus what are the data which support this thesis?
(we are now almost 30 years later!

For the "greens" and similar do you really believe that they are so strong?

Why didn't a much much stronger movement not stop the Iraq war?

and yes what high external cost of natural gas are you talking about?

I doubt that you accept the numbers from the Stern report
so what are your numbers?

michael

The paper formulates an interesting hypothesis (with some interesting remarks)

thus what are the data which support this thesis?
(we are now almost 30 years later!

What are the data to contradict the thesis, 30 years later? Scientific theories that hold for so long usually are quite accurate. But I guess this is more of an academic issue anyway. If we scale conventional tech to dominate electricity generation, uranium will get rather expensive quite soon. But then breeders will compare favourably, and if we do those, fuel won't be a problem for centuries. We don't really have to know if we can fuel breeders for millions of years - such an outlook is meaningless. We shouldn't shoot for more than 50 years at most.

For the "greens" and similar do you really believe that they are so strong?

Why didn't a much much stronger movement not stop the Iraq war?

I was talking about Europe, mainly.

and yes what high external cost of natural gas are you talking about? I doubt that you accept the numbers from the Stern report so what are your numbers?

AGW. I don't have any numbers on this. Btw, I don't have much against NG at this time, but I would like to see us phasing out coal and trying to avoid oil sands.

The paper from 30 years ago formulates a hypothesis.

If you can't find any data which support it well bad luck.

As I said in another post

it took a long time to accept that the Vatican was not the center of the universe
and that Darwin had some good points about evolution.

you need more?

ok from my own field

1) Neutrinos are mass less
was accepted for 50 years perhaps now we have enough evidence
to reject the idea.

I have seen fundamental fights about why these experiments
were wrong

2) Supersymmetry

since 30 years a nice(?) hypothesis
but no evidence so far!

i could add more but I guess thats enough for now!

michael

ps.. the greens in europe?
As far as I know they are tiny
with little influence in most countries.

the didn't manage to stop any construction which was really wanted by
governments and the industry

yes the german fast breeder story Kalkar

but who stopped it really?

I remember the large and violent manifestations about the Brockdorf power
plant near Hamburg.

the effect was it happened and produces "happily" lots of TWhe for Hamburg.

for the other one Kruemmel

smaller protest, strong evidence for increase leukemia in children nearby
(effect is still small compared to car accidents agreed)

what happened
nothing the reactor functioned over the years
just until the moment that a small unimportant incident 2 years ago
put if down.

Why? bad management and perhaps some unknown hidden things
who knows

but it is still down!

michael

If you can't find any data which support it well bad luck.

The original article writers had supporting data in the form of uranium mining data and average amounts in certain types of rock, such as granite. If you can't find any opposing data, well bad luck.

1) Neutrinos are mass less

I think uranium prospecting and assessment is fairly easy compared to neutrino mass measurements.

s.. the greens in europe?
As far as I know they are tiny
with little influence in most countries.

They are tiny but due to proportional parliamentarism, they have often been able to participate in governing coalitions and they always demand nuke phase-out. For instance, they have been a governing party from 1998-2005 in Germany. In my own country, Sweden, the socialist party actually sacrificed the two modern reactors in Barsebäck to secure the support of the Greens. Also, since Greens draw voters from mainly big socialist parties, such parties have adjusted their agendas to accomodate green views.

>The original article writers had supporting data in the form of uranium mining data and average amounts in certain types of rock, >such as granite. If you can't find any opposing data, well bad luck.

There are two statements in the article

the first one is almost "trivial"

between high or grade and average crust grade and the huge amount of crust
one can expect that huge amount of uranium exist.

the second one is the one that matters and it less clear and unproven!

that much more uranium can be extracted if one is willing to pay a higher price!
it depends on many other things as has been pointed out in the abstract!

>I think uranium prospecting and assessment is fairly easy compared to neutrino mass measurements.

but what about extracting it? Cigar Lake seems to be even more behind the schedule
than our LHC.. both were supposed to start in 2006
now we are for 2009/10 and the Cigar Lake not before 2012!

for the greens and their influence (even though I think it is largely exaggerated)
do you believe that these green ideas will disappear or become stronger?

in case they become stronger (which seems likely)

your nuclear future would change?

I think the case for enough uranium reserves for the near-to-medium term is solid, as does the industry. I can live with you believing otherwise.

About Cigar Lake - that's an unusually tough environment - but also extreme concentrations of uranium. They'll get to it eventually.

The green ideas will likely become stronger over time, but:

1. Green isn't as prominent in the US and even less in the Asian countries that are currently driving the renaissance.
2. Green loses to need. If we ever get a fossil fuel crunch, people will accept anything to keep BAU.
3. As Chernobyl gets farther away in time and significant AGW gets closer, nuclear will increasingly be accepted as the greener alternative.
4. Westinghouse and Areva seems poised to create cheap, dependable, safe nuclear power. The current renaissance itself will create a momentum that will be hard for governments to ignore.
5. I wind and solar to not become as cheap as the new nuclear.
6. I also expect these intermittent sources to hit grid integration walls in different regions during the next 10 years.

6. I also expect these intermittent sources to hit grid integration walls in different regions during the next 10 years.

Starting 'yesterday' as monopolistic energy firms hammer at legislatures and regulators to make their century plus stranglehold on electrical generation the only path to the future. Colorado's Xcel shelved its surcharge for business and residential rooftop solar generation after the public screamed and democrat Gov. Ritter pressured it. Guaranteed their next attempt will have considerable pressure greasing the most influential least affected by public outcry wheels first. Monopoly/oligopoly types don't generally respond in a constructive manner when defending their turf.

I also expect these intermittent sources to hit grid integration walls in different regions during the next 10 years.

We've talked about a "wall" at 20% kwh market share. That's an overall market share, not a regional level. Look at France and Denmark, which rely on their neighbors.

For more, see your conversation with me and E-P elsewhere in this post.

I have to say, I'm impressed that you feel that wind can get to 20% in only 10 years - wouldn't you agree that says something about the relative swiftness with which wind can be installed?

sorry forgot

I think much of the discussion has focused on the current low uranium production, and the fact that if things aren't improved soon, there will be a shortfall by 2013. However, as far as I can see, production is ramping as we speak. In 2007 and 2008, uranium production increased by 2000 tonnes each year, but it seems these figures will be dwarfed by increases in 2009 and 2010, as considerable mining capacity is coming online:

http://www.world-nuclear-news.org/section.aspx?fid=796

yes right the discussion should foccus on the points raised in my two papers!

the WNA list is interesting as they "forgot" to include the not so good looking news from Cameco Canada!
for Cigar lake lets see when it comes online. For now it is not before 2012
and this also seems rather unlikely.

can you explain what you mean by a "temporary shortfall of the McArthur mine?
It seems to go down every year now since 2006 no?
First half 2009 were just reported and they are lower again!

otherwise what is you prediction for the mining 2009 result
I made mine in the paper.
Official numbers so far from Kazakhstan are impressive
lets see the end of the year result!

michael

can you explain what you mean by a "temporary shortfall of the McArthur mine?
It seems to go down every year now since 2006 no?

No, it has operated at licensed capacity, 8500 tU, since 2002, but has had shortfalls in 2003 and 2008, probably due to production glitches. In 2009, it is expected to be allowed to produce more, which would be rather pointless if it couldn't do that.

otherwise what is you prediction for the mining 2009 result
I made mine in the paper.

I don't know - I just see capacity increases everywhere, but I have no idea where it will end up. In this economic climate, with lower metal prices all around, efforts may well be postponed a year or two. But I'm positively not worried about nukes running out of fuel, that's for sure.

*No, it has operated at licensed capacity, 8500 tU, since 2002, but has had shortfalls in 2003 and 2008, probably due to production *glitches. In 2009, it is expected to be allowed to produce more, which would be rather pointless if it couldn't do that.

ah good to know! maximum production was during the good times 7200 tons!

are you sure about the 8500 tons uranium and not the U3O8
(maximum prod was 8492 tons in these units!)

but if right, you have another proof that capacity is always larger than reality!

thanks

michael

Right, my figures was U3O8, thanks for pointing that out. They have had a license for a maximum of 8500 tons U3O8, and have produced this amount since 2002, with two short-fall years. They have requested to get a higher license and it seems they will get it.

It would help if you become less aggressive and discuss the points raised in my article.

It would help if you would allow such discussion by using public sources (not the current edition of the Red Book, which is not openly available and thus cannot be used to check your claims), and if you would actually discuss matters instead of acting offended.

You should have noticed that I quoted references of your own footnotes back to you.  If you don't think the source is credible, you should not cite it.  I have cited the Energy Information Agency, which is a public source.  You have not tried to dispute the validity or relevance of any data from either the EIA or world-nuclear.org brought up to argue against your claims.  You have not quoted relevant data to clarify your claims when they were overbroad, nor have you responded when others questioned your interpretation of the data.

You have acted as if skeptical questions are an affront to your dignity, not just to me, but to advancednano and others.  You have made grossly inaccurate claims about batteries.  You compounded this with irrelevant references to 30 years past, when the world situation (especially Chindia) has obviously changed radically.  I could go on and on about Chapter I, but I'll stop here.  You wonder why you are questioned aggressively about this?  I suspect that you would too, if you thought that someone was insulting your intelligence.  That's what I think, and I'm not alone.

If you build your thesis on several questionable assumptions which do not appear to be true in practice, you can expect to be questioned aggressively and even treated dismissively.  I have told you before:  pleasing you is not our job.

For the claimed capacity of mining and the real hard number may be you have a look at Chapter I again.

I recall several people laughing at the circular nature of your argument about mining capacity in Chapter I.  For instance, you said that mining activity was low (in the face of what is obviously slack demand due to conversion of weapons material to fuel), then claimed this low level of mining activity implies that a supply crisis was imminent.  You also dismissed the Red Book numbers on mining capacity of various nations (after pointing to it as an authoritative source).  Nowhere did you admit that mining activity might pick up as demand increased and the Megatons to Megawatts program wound down.  Even if we assume the full difference between Red Book demand figures (66,500 tons) and the low end of Red Book mining capacity (54,000 tons) must be made up by new mines, it is only 12,500 tons per year.  The production from United States ISL mines alone is about 1/3 of this figure, and the spare capacity is roughly 1/8.  The USA could deal with a large fraction of this without breathing hard.

You had the chance to clarify and justify your claims back in the previous discussion.  As I recall, you acted as if questions were wounding your pride rather than treating them as opportunities to make matters clear to a skeptical audience hungry for information. 

I discuss all this with references and the Red Book is very clear about that! (but no point to discuss if you do not even look at what I wrote!)

We looked at what you wrote.  We also noted that you take the Red Book as gospel when it suits you, and dismiss it when it doesn't (e.g. "In fact, the data on uranium mining and the large import dependence for several large uranium consuming countries undermine strongly the widespread belief that uranium resources are plentiful and that uranium exploration and mining costs are only a minor problem for nuclear energy production").  You ignore the fact that the high rates of uranium imports are a matter of disarmament policy, and uranium prices remain low (which they would not if there was an actual supply crisis).  What's one to make of this?

It seems also that you do not agree with the uranium requirements for the "first load" of a 1 GWe reactor (the 500 tons and each year 170 tons roughly.

I used your 170 ton/year figure, and the difference between 260 tons and 500 tons for the starting load is down in the noise.  I may have made an arithmetic error previously, but the 3.5 million lb/a of unused ISL capacity in the USA could provide the starting fuel load for all 20 new US reactors in the planning stage in a few years.  Since much of this uranium will not be needed until well after your 2015 crunch time, even that's not an issue.

Either you present your numbers for the requirements backed up with hard numbers (similar for other claims) or read the references I gave.

The difference between 260 tons and 500 tons NU to start is down in the noise.  170 t/a over a fleet of 104 reactors is ~18000 t/a; starting another 20 reactors over 10 years is just 1000 t/a.  Unused ISL mining capacity in the USA alone in 2008 was 1750 short tons of yellowcake; if that capacity was actually needed, why was it idle?

You have also failed to address my documented critiques regarding the feasibility of re-enriching tails given the massive surplus of US enrichment capacity.  I think we can agree that ISL has minimal effects on communities and re-enrichment of tailings has approximately zero, so we can get right back to the amount of resource available.  If the USA (or others on the USA's behalf) is using ~18000 t/a of NU to make ~2000 t/a of EU, the difference is ~16000 t/a of tails.  Relatively little of these tails is used for other purposes (the claimed amount of DU ammunition used in the Middle East is in the hundreds of tons total), so we can assume that at least 50% of these tails remain in inventory.  Over 20 years, this 50% would come to 160,000 tons of DU.  The world supply would probably come to 4x or so that amount, more if you assume less of the DU being converted to other uses.

I gave you a spreadsheet which allows you to calculate the SWU requirements of enrichment given the assays of the input, product and tails.  (You showed no ability to calculate this yourself, and didn't thank me or even acknowledge it.)  You can make different assumptions about the U235 assay of the existing tails and see how much NU could be replaced by the re-enrichment of the DU inventory given those assumptions.  This IS the chapter on secondary resources, but you passed over the crucial questions:

  1. How much resource is represented by the DU inventory?
  2. What is the capacity to recover it (tons/yr of EU)?
  3. How does this compare to the calculated shortfall from mining and conversion of weapons material?

You don't just fail to address these questions in your chapter, you avoid them in the discussion.  Why?  Would they force you to change your conclusion?  It may not be your conscious intent to only see what supports the conclusion of an imminent uranium fuel crisis (and stalling of the LWR industry), but that's what it looks like.

look

if you would be honest and if have read my paper you would have seen this paragraph in my paper
Its all there! But for one reason or another you did not.

U235 from depleted tails

Depleted uranium tails are a by-product of the U235 enrichment process. The tails contain normally between 0.25-0.35% of U235, or about one third of the 0.71% contained in natural uranium. The inventory of depleted uranium is increasing every year by roughly 60,000 tons. It is estimated that roughly 1,800,000 tons have been accumulated in different countries by the end of 2008. In theory, a large amount of U235 is still contained in these tails, but the existing enrichment capacity is already rather limited. Nevertheless during the years 2001 to 2006, Russia delivered yearly up to about 1000 tons of re-enriched uranium to the European Union. According to the Red Book, the Russian Federation indicated that this delivery will be stopped once the existing contracts end. For the USA, a pilot project is anticipated to produce a maximum of 1900 tons of natural uranium equivalent during a period of two years. No additional information about the status of this or other world-wide projects is given in the Red Book.

Thus you have ignored this or you have not read the paper!
thus put the mirror in front of you.

do you understand the difference between theoretical large quantities and real capacities?

It would help if you would allow such discussion by using public sources (not the current edition of the Red Book, which is not openly available

concerning the Red Book 07 and some previous ones
you again demonstrate your arrogance and have not read in the reference I provided
that you can use "google books" to find the book
and all the data you need.

use google books and
Uranium 2007 resources demand and production

and you get all what you need.

you better start reading now!
its a long and interesting book!

michael

Whoops, you have me there; I just hadn't read that far.  I had the post open in two tabs, with one for the text proper, and I was commenting on each part in turn; when it was published I immediately got overwhelmed by the discussion and never got back to the post itself.

Still, the 1.8 million tons is a red flag.  Why is Russia not delivering more re-enriched fuel?  Obviously, it is not profitable.  Why isn't it profitable?  Either their enrichment capacity is fully subscribed with NU, or the price of LEU isn't high enough to make it profitable.  Do we have any reason to believe Russian enrichment capacity is fully used?

You didn't address the USA's surfeit of enrichment capacity.  That's 11.3 million kg-SWU/year of which only a small fraction is being used; it's expensive to run (gaseous diffusion is an energy hog), but it's there.  If there was a shortage of LEU and NU but a large amount of spare SWUs, reasonable electric costs and 1.8 million tons of DU available, one would expect the SWUs to be employed to re-enrich the DU.

We have the SWUs, the DU and the electricity.  Judging from the price of uranium there is no shortage of NU, and the behavior of the industry doesn't support the thesis of a shortage of LEU.

again you didn't read to the end
the USA is mentioned as well

this is the official declaration from the USA correspondent to the IAEA
it seems (or what the UN people made out of it)

is this spare capacity really operational?

at least the UXC and others seem to have doubts

but you certainly know this all as you have the insider information
so please give us the details of this secret information
which is not given to the UN people.

(you do not risk much who will find you ..)

michael

ps for the Red Book how is your reading going?

is this spare capacity really operational?

If the USA is looking at a shortage of enrichment capacity, this is now supported by government policy; the Obama administration refused to guarantee loans for a centrifuge-enrichment plant in Piketon, OH.  If the USEC's GD capacity is not fully operational it may mean that a lack of enrichment capacity isn't an accident, it is government policy.  (There is no strategic advantage to be gained by this.  There is plenty of gas centrifuge capacity in the world, including some the USA would love to shut down.  The world supply of LEU does not appear to rely much on what the USA does.  However, there may be domestic political advantages to be had.)

but you certainly know this all as you have the insider information

I have no inside information, but I'm not the only one who can see that your thesis doesn't add up even given your own numbers.  Take this from the post itself:

Ac­cording to the 2007 Red Book (chapter 2c), a total of 1,700,000 tons of uranium have been used up in reactors until the end of 2006.

This is grossly inaccurate.  The US inventory of actual used uranium (spent fuel) was about 47,000 tons in 2002, and at about 2200 t/yr it would be roughly 60,000 tons today; the world inventory would be roughly 4x this much, around 240,000 tons.  This quantity of "used uranium" obviously includes several very different things under the same heading:

  • Depleted uranium tailings from enrichment.
  • Slightly enriched uranium (~1% U-235) in spent LWR fuel.
  • Heavily depleted uranium (~0.2% U-235) in spent CANDU fuel.
  • Actinides.
  • Fission products (the only part that's really and truly "used").

Even in the short term, we've seen that bulk of this "used" uranium (DU) can in fact yield a substantial amount of new LEU fuel if that is necessary.  It's not like this is oil, hidden in the ground with its owners lying about their reserves; this is stuff that was mined years ago and is sitting in warehouses.  When you claim an imminent LEU supply crisis based on these numbers, we have every reason to dismiss the claim as unfounded.  Given that there are many who would make such a claim on the basis of their politics, we have even more reason.

ps for the Red Book how is your reading going?

That's reversing the burden of proof.  You have asserted a LEU supply crisis based on numbers from the Red Book.  I have shown that the numbers you have given are not sufficient to prove your case.  I'm willing to be convinced, but you will have to find data which actually supports your claims unambiguously.

You have made grossly inaccurate claims about batteries

Having read this link, it is cause for concern. If the 30% figure takes in account the prime mover's efficiency for the generation plant then it may not be far off the mark, but this is far from clear in the post.

Actually, I stayed a couple of weeks a few blocks away from those uranium tailing piles when I was mountain biking in Moab in the spring. The tailing piles are right on the outskirts of the town. What I found interesting is that the uranium refinery just piled the tailings on the banks of the Colorado river without worrying about what would happen if there was a hundred-year flood on the river.

What would happen is that the uranium waste would end up in the water supplies of the good people of Utah, Nevada, Arizona and Southern California, which I'm sure would distress them.

It doesn't seem to bother the people of Moab, though. The uranium trucks used to drive bumper-to-bumper down the main street of Moab, dumping uranium ore onto the street every time they hit a bump, but the people made a lot of money from mining uranium, they now are making a lot of money from the cleanup (see below), and all the old uranium exploration roads have created a thriving mountain-biking industry in the area.

The interesting thing is that, while the original refinery processed about $64 million worth of uranium, the cost for the cleanup is estimated at $900 million and rising steadily. This kind of fails the cost-benefit analysis. The uranium mining in Utah never was economic - it was done due to ridiculous levels of federal subsidies - and once the subsidies ended, so did the mining. Only the cleanup remains.

There's certainly not much uranium left in Utah after all that mining. Any ore deposit big enough to find with a Geiger counter has been mined out. Some of the mines were only about the size of one old tree (the uranium tended to concentrate in petrified wood.)

True right now people in the region do not care a lot.
That's what I noticed.

But eventually people will be forced to care about it.

The uranium mining legacy
is not really the point of the article,
but certainly important in order to understand the real uranium mining costs.

Future generation will pay like for many other things we enjoy doing
(just think about the 10000 billion dollar debt).

the ``Profit now pay later" policy.

michael

I would like to second this comment, especially the part about cleanup costs exceeding the benefits derived from the mining.

The following quotes from Jared Diamond's book, "Collapse," simultaneously expand on this idea while revealing the downside to limited liability corporations and the drive - often within individuals but particularly under capitalism - to externalize costs whenever possible:

"In Montana there are about 20,000 abandoned mines, some of them recent but many of them a century or more old, that will be leaking acid and toxic metals essentially forever. The vast majority of those mines have no surviving owners to bear financial responsibility, or else the known owners aren't rich enough to reclaim the mine and treat its acid drainage in perpetuity... In the U.S. today, a company opening a new mine is required by law to buy a bond by which a separate bond-holding company pledges to pay for the mine's cleanup costs in case the mining company itself goes bankrupt. But many mines have been "underbonded" (i.e. the eventual cleanup costs have proved to exceed the value of the bond), and older mines were not required to buy such bonds at all," (p. 36).

"In Montana as elsewhere, companies that have acquired older mines respond to demands to pay for cleanup in either of two ways. Especially if the company is small, its owners may declare the company bankrupt, in some cases conceal its assets, and transfer their business efforts to other companies or to new companies that do not bear responsibility for cleanup at the old mine. If the company is so large that it cannot claim that it would be bankrupted by cleanup costs... the company instead denies its responsibility or else seeks to minimize the costs. In either case, either the mine site and areas downstream of it remain toxic, thereby endangering people, or else the U.S. federal government and the Montana state government (hence ultimately all taxpayers) pay for the cleanup through the federal Superfund and a corresponding Montana state fund," (p. 36).

"[I]n 1998, to the shock of the industry, and to politicians supporting and supported by the industry, Montana voters passed a ballot initiative banning a problem-plagued method of gold mining termed cyanide heap-leach mining... Some of my Montana friends now say: in retrospect, when we compare the multi-billion-dollar mine cleanup costs borne by us taxpayers with Montana's own meager past earnings from its mines, most of whose profits went to shareholders in the eastern U.S. or in Europe, we realize that Montana would have been better off in the long run if it had never mined copper at all but had just imported it from Chile, leaving the resulting problems to the Chileans!" (p. 37).

[Jared Diamond quoting David Stiller,] "American businesses exist to make money for their owners; it is the modus operandi of American capitalism. A corollary to the money-making process is not spending it needlessly... Such a tight-fisted philosophy is not limited to the mining industry. Successful businesses differentiate between those expenses necessary to stay in business and those more pensively characterized as 'moral obligations.' Difficulties or reluctance to understand and accept this distinction underscores much of the tension between advocates of broadly mandated environmental programs and the business community," (p. 37).

It seems to me that both mining cleanup operations and waste handling is typically overdone by one or two orders of magnitude. There are no real cost-benefit analyses done - politicians just throw taxpayer money at problems that the public is worried about, or they impose overly strict regulations that drive up costs unnecessarily.

"Overly strict" ?

By whose metric ? By what value system ?

Alan

Governments have never found it difficult to fill nuclear plant resident inspectorships. Often these people's families, and always and especially they themselves, are in the way of whatever harm the plants might do.

If it were just as easy to get civil servants to accept long-term assignments patrolling up and down gas pipelines, seeking to prevent the next few Ghislenghiens, Skikdas, and whatever other major recent gas disaster names I'm not remembering right now, that would be a sign that nuclear power regulation was not too strict.

(How fire can be domesticated)

The residents, perhaps? Would they rather take the money and use it for other purposes, or would they rather have the clean-up done, if they had a choice?

The Moab population referenced above by RockyMtnGuy, for instance, is 4779, and somebody has decided to spend "$900 million and rising" for clean-up. That's $188,000 per capita.

Or you may have a more global outlook: Say that they would have spent $10 million in clean-up where it did the most use, and then, for instance, spent the rest of the money on traffic safety at optimal places in Utah. Would that have resulted in more lives saved? How many fatal cancers were prevented by the marginal $890 million spent?

Jeppen,

In my humble opinion a little of that money could be far better spent fencing the area off and erecting skulls/crossbones.

The rest of it should have gone to buying some critical watershed with important ecOlogical and recreational uses that could also supply clean water to downstream towns,or in some similarly more useful way conducive to the preservation of the environment.

But the decisions in such cases are either made or forced by the green nutcases.They are far more interested in power,revenge,and self justification than they are in cost effective stewardship of the environment.

The billion dollar cleanup,which in times such as these should not be a high priority,will be used to prove that nuclear power is a BAD,BAD,PUPPY!!!

MEANWHILE,back at the COAL MINES,coal is being dug and burned by the MILLIONS of tons,releasing far more deadly pollutants and more radiation on the public by several orders of magnitude than the nuclear power industry.

But explaining this to the average greenie is no easier than explaining evolution to a third grade dropuot Baptist preacher.

There are several kinds of religion not normally recognized as such with numerous followers these days.

As Lord Chesterfield said,when people stop believeing in god,that does not mean that henceforth they believe in NOTHING.

Well, as I was trying to point out with the quotes I used from "Collapse," the residents themselves often end up wishing that the mining had never been done in the first place and that somebody else had had the "pleasure" of operating and reclaiming a mine.

This is, of course, because the communities in question almost never see a net benefit from the mining in the long run; sure, they get some jobs for a while, but the aggregate incomes and taxes often don't equal the eventual cleanup costs, regardless of the type of mine in question. If the mining companies themselves had to internalize the costs of the damage they caused, it might not be so bad, but instead they just declare bankruptcy or deny their responsibilities and leave it for taxpayers to deal with.

Another point is that spending a reduced amount (e.g. your hypothetical $10 million) probably isn't going to do much of anything (i.e. groundwater will still be polluted so that people can't drink it, use it, etc.). Restoring the site costs what it costs and I seriously doubt that the government is cleaning it up to higher standards than the residents themselves would prefer.

I'm CERTAIN the government is cleaning up to higher standards than the residents would prefer, if they could have the money instead. But as the government is cleaning up for free, there is no limit on the demand of clean-up, and the residents will always be unhappy.

Well, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree.

You're correct in asserting that since the local residents aren't paying the full cost of the cleanup their demand will exceed what it would be if they had to pay for it all themselves. However, the residents didn't make the mess, mining companies did and then reneged on their responsibilities altogether; this is important, so let's keep it in mind.

Furthermore, it's not like residents would just receive all the money from the Superfund used on some local cleanup; they would get to keep their portion of state and federal taxes, but that's nowhere near as large as you make it sound because the federal Superfund expenses are collected at the federal, not state level. (E.g. $900 million / 300 million people = $3; whoop-dee-doo!)

In addition, since we're playing H. economicus here, why would politicians spend more money than they have to on cleanup when they could use it to give tax breaks to their political donors instead? We all know that in American politics it's money and cronyism that gets you elected after all.

Finally, the residents have to drink that water; if it's polluted, they get sick, their crops wither and their animals die. People don't just want, but *need* clean water as a prerequisite for life. You simply assert that cleanup is done to orders of magnitude greater than necessary without any citation of supporting sources. Show me one scientific article - not funded by the mining industry - that concludes this. As Jared Diamond notes in his book, most of the time these sites simply go without any reclamation at all, so the need for Superfund support is, I would guess, orders of magnitude greater than the funds available. What sense is there in cleaning up some sites orders of magnitude better than needed when there are potentially orders of magnitude more sites needing cleanup?

Adrynian,

The distribution of tax money is a very hit andd miss affair,and the cleanup IS what lots of money donors or coalitions of donors want.MY point is that the law of diminishing returns is applicable to the cleanup.

Of course if I lived there personally and were paying roughly only one three hundred millionth of the costs I would insist on a state of the art job myself,but that's not good sense for the body politic.

If you can save a dozen lives over the next twenty years by rebuilding a cloverleaf for ten million bucks or a hundred by hiring more traffic cops with the same money to get drunks off the road,I say hire the cops.

Now as to downstream water pollution ,in this case I have no data,but my position is that if it is up significantly,the cleanup needs to address that issue.Future miners should have to post bonds that will cover such costs if necessary,and if the bonds are not available/ unaffordasble ,then there should be no mineing.

Unless perhaps the situation becomes really desperate,as has been judged to be the case with the COAL INDUSTRY,and a partial cleanup is deemed satisfactory.Ar least all the hillbillies in West Virginia will soon have lots of nice flat land where thay can play football or even farm if they can haul in some topsoil.Grass and timber does grow fairly well on most of the mountian top sites when the mining is done according to current standards.

Rebuilding a landscape to original and rebuilding houses at extraordinary expense right now is insanity.

Such thinking once established and incorporated into the decision making process leads to absurdities.Suppose we tried to restore West Virginia to her original wild and wonderful condition?

I am highly sympathetic to the green movement in general but econuts have held up renewable energy progress to a great degree themselves by focusing on minor losses of habitat and wildlife while retarding construstion of renewable energy facilities that will SAVE far more habitat and wildlife,albeit in different places.

That cleanup money could buy perhaps as much as a hundred thousand acres of privately held land well worth inclusion in our parks system and overall, the environment would be in much better shape.

Incidentally I have read Diamond exhaustively and regard him as an intellectual giant,and his work is a a major part the foundations of my world view.

But he can't change the law of dininishing returns. If I had his phone number I would discuss this with him.;-)

However, the residents didn't make the mess,

Actually, they did, b/c the residents were the workers at the mine, right?

Furthermore, it's not like residents would just receive all the money from the Superfund used on some local cleanup;

No, they wouldn't, but that's beside the point.

$900 million / 300 million people = $3; whoop-dee-doo

Well, in that case no single federal spending account is a problem, b/c it is always quite small per capita. But they do add up.

In addition, since we're playing H. economicus here, why would politicians spend more money than they have to on cleanup when they could use it to give tax breaks to their political donors instead?

Well, politicians are known to make laws that are costly. It's not their money, after all.

Finally, the residents have to drink that water; if it's polluted, they get sick, their crops wither and their animals die.

Nonsense. The city may get an extra human and an extra domesticated animal cancer per 10 years or so. (I just chose an arbitrary number, so I won't "prove" it. If that does not suit you, you can start by showing us the background radiation levels before and after clean-up-efforts in the region.) The crops will NOT wither.

People don't just want, but *need* clean water as a prerequisite for life.

Oh, the drama.

You simply assert that cleanup is done to orders of magnitude greater than necessary without any citation of supporting sources.

Do you want sources to the population count or to the $900 million? These numbers are all you need to draw the conclusion, right?

most of the time these sites simply go without any reclamation at all,

And that is probably rational.

What sense is there in cleaning up some sites orders of magnitude better than needed when there are potentially orders of magnitude more sites needing cleanup?

You seem to have a lot of faith in politics and beurocrats. My argument is that the cost-benefit analyses have not been done, or aren't used to make the best use of money. You are asking why and my answer is that I do not know.

Perhaps it's worth pointing out that what we're talking about here is radon gas. The mine tailings are similar in their radioactivity to ordinary crushed granite, with the same level of radiation hazard. They were seen by the residents at the time as good fill material for house foundations. They would be, too, except for the problem of radon accumulation in tightly closed houses -- Moab in winter. There's no problem with the tailings in the open air. And no problem in the river. It flows over equally radioactive boulders all along its course.

The "cleanup" is expensive, since its first step is demolishing or physically moving the homes that were built on the tailings.

Somebody must have gotten a sweet contract to do that, because my first idea would be to jack the houses up, remove the basements and construct sealed foundations out of modern materials.  I bet ThermaSAVE would have been happy to bid on prefab materials for that one.

Was that comment directed to me? Because I was referring to the costs of cleaning up mines generally, not any particular mine or material. Radon gas isn't so bad, sure, but as Jared Diamond writes, most pollution from mines is in the form of various metallic acids that aren't so harmless.

It wasn't directed to you or the general comments you made about mine wastes. It was about the specific issue of uranium mine tailings in the area around Moab that Michael originally commented on. I remember it because my folks were still living in Colorado at the time the problem became a news story. I read about it in the Denver papers. A lot of locals considered it a prime example of an unnecessary government boondoggle. But because it was "radioactive waste", it was handled with full protocol for toxic wastes.

Mine cleanup is a complex issue. The degree of problem and the difficulty of remediation -- or the need for it in the first place -- depend on the type of mine and the minining practices employed. Rock tailings, like those around Moab that Michael was citing, are mostly a problem only to the extent that they scar the mountainside where they're dumped. Nothing grows on them for a hundred years or so, just like nothing grows on a natural scree slope above timberline. The nasty cases are where cyanide leaching was used for gold, and you have old settling ponds that hold some seriously toxic gunk.

I hear there are getting to be a lot of those around shale gas drilling sites as well.

There's also acid runoff from mine drainage. Oddly enough, it doesn't usually result from any contaminants left in the mine from the mining operation. It's formed naturally by the action of air and water seeping over exposed rock surfaces, when the rocks contain sulfate minerals. (Or is it sulfite? Don't remember. Ah, well, so it goes.)

Sulphide, with a 'd'.

Is Dr. Dittmar pro nuclear or opposed to nuclear?

If you could not figure this out so far
may be I managed to present an "objective" analysis.

regards Michael

My impression, quite frankly, is that you are starting from a strongly anti-Nuclear position and are more interested in fitting the facts to this than being objective. I believe you did an ASPO 6 presentation predicting shutdowns, quote:

http://ihp-lx2.ethz.ch/energy21/november2708.pdf

Only a “divine intervention” can prevent the uranium shortage during the
next few years! 5-10% of the reactors will be out of uranium by 2009/2010!

Not happened yet.

Nice. :-)

Well, there is not much point in discussing this post. It says that we're currently using reserves for nukes, and that this can't go on forever - but that's all well known. As Engineer-poet pointed out, it's easy to expand fuel extraction from primary sources. No problem, end of story.

(Btw - most of the new plants will be Chinese. Does anyone think they haven't thought about fuel availability?)

I actually think it IS possible for short term shortages to develop, but this is entirely the result of commodity markets being so short termist. If any national government wanted to ensure Nuclear fuel security, it could easily put out a contract (say $250/lb) for X amount of Uranium per year, I strongly suspect that the mining companies would bite their hand off, and they could secure supplies for decades, and furthermore pretty much everyone using Uranium could do this.

Good point. And yet another place where the marketplace fails miserably and the government has to step in when it really counts.

You don't even need government to do it, you can do it yourself at a profit.  If you think uranium is undervalued, buy it or buy futures.  The unused mining capacity of the USA last year was enough to provide the starting fuel load for at least 3 of the 20 reactors in the permitting or planning stages, so you CAN make a difference.

This is assuming that the nuclear industry itself hasn't already lined up its sources and this is already factored into today's prices.  If that's the case, the brokers will make a killing at your expense.  The question comes down to, do you believe Dittmar's projection enough to put your money into it?

What money?

Given most power companies sign onto long term fuel delivery contracts, and most fuel providers leverage against futures contracts along with production and delivery for several years down the road, I'd say that the people whos livelyhood depends on uranium avaliablity directly are allready aware. Given the futures market isn't exploding, I'd say that there is no imminent shortage of uranium.

All nonsense.

Irrefutable argumentation, there, jep.

Some things are just too nonsensical for me to really bother with. Perhaps I should shut up in those cases, but I don't, obviously. The short-sightedness of markets is really over-rated, and to my knowledge, reactors with access to the global uranium market have never stood still due to fuel shortage.

When the stock-market reacts heavily on quarterly results, some people draw the conclusion that the market is short sighted. However, the stock's price swings are typically not due to the current results, but due to a changed long-term outlook. Quite often, results are worse than expected and the stock soars, and the other way around.

Yeah, if you can explain short-term stock market swings, it would be a great enlightenment. For a while some of the odder jags made sense when I heard about the "buy on the rumor, sell on the news" dictum. But mostly it just seems random and bizarre.

So do you really think that markets are immune to bouts of irrational exuberance and other group think syndromes?

I think its fair to say markets have failure modes. They aren't intelligent, they're resource optimization strategies that produce far better results than beurocracies. Trying to outperform the market is like trying to win against the house. Sure the house loses sometimes.

But government has failure modes as well. Its best to stay clear of ideological rhetoric and realize these are simply tools. Markets deliver products at good prices so long as certain conditions of transparency and regulation to enforce honest brokering. They can spiral out of control and deliver poor prices from time to time, but then governments can deliver poor products as well. I'm sure we'll be in a rush to dump markets when we have omnibenevolant omniscient beurocrats to replace them. Untill then we'll muddle around in policy fiddling making things marginally better or worse than it is today.

Simply saying inane ideological exclamations condeming markets however, tars one as more than a bit foolish.

not yet!

so far only 1%/year less KWhe from nuclear electric energy (2006-2008)
2009 does not look great so far either.

but why don't you predict a trend yourself?

I am curious who will be more wrong!

michael

I don't make predictions where insufficient knowledge exists, since there isn't much point in doing so.

It is clear that nuclear power has been largely neglected in terms of R&D and long term planning. The same could be said of many areas of infrastructure in the post 1979 'neoliberal' era, which is defined by a running-down of existing capital goods (be it power production, oil production, water, soil, whatever) in the name of 'economic efficiency' and short term profit. You don't need an oil drum article, or series therof, to notice that.

Had nuclear power been properly developed instead of being effectively frozen in time, we would be moving towards a fully-nuclear electric grid powered by breeder reactors of one form or another right now; with almost zero CO2 and minimal waste (and minimal mining if any). This is still possible.

The only points I can garner from your posts is that old nuclear reactors are being retired faster then new ones commissioned (although this looks to be changing), and that we have a 'Just in time' delivery system for Uranium in which price spikes and spot shortages are technically possible. Just like for pork bellies. Neither point really has much to do with the future of nuclear power.

The real future of nuclear power is fundamentally down to politics; will politicians be sufficiently foresighted to put the investment guarantees in place to expand nuclear power now, or will it take blackouts and sky high prices before action is taken? I see no physical/scientific constraints on how far nuclear power can be expanded, only political ones.

If you prefer to call the short term nuclear future,

the topic of chapter I and II of my papers to be determined by political decisions
made some years ago one can agree perhaps about that.
(the real reasons for the political decisions might be interesting as well!)

But for now:
Do you agree with me about the consequences of them for the next 5-10 years.
a roughly 1%/year decrease in the number of TWhe up to 2013 and more after?

michael

Do you agree with me about the consequences of them for the next 5-10 years.
a roughly 1%/year decrease in the number of TWhe up to 2013 and more after?

I expect plant up rates and life extension to receive increasing attention. I also expect the operators of low capacity factor plants to implement the procedures and training techniques that have brought most U.S. plants up from 60% to 90% capacity factor. These effects combined with some new plants should more than compensate for closings.

Please add your list of

TWHe per year for the near future as well.

as I said it will be interesting to see who will be most wrong!

michael

ps.. now that most nuclear plants are at 90% efficiency
(mainly because one learned that it is better not to regulate their power perhaps)
it will be difficult to continue the increase

You are confusing efficiency with capacity factor (a chronic error, I might add).

Other posters have mentioned the power up-rates for existing plants.  If the average thermal efficiency is increased from 33% to 37%, US nuclear generation would increase by approximately 100 TWh/yr with no change in capacity factor.  Increased thermal power from reactors would push this up further, without any new plants.

Actually, technically, if thermal efficiency increased *without* an uprate that would be correct. But most 'new' nuclear energy in the last 10 years is by uprates, and uprates in fact do increase capacity. Which is why there are some plants that get 104% capacity ratings.

ok,

you want to be picky on a few words you have learned from the documents
fine with me! yes its called officially capacity factor! happy

what you talk about is thermal heat --> electric
or the carnot efficiency if you want to use correct wording! (try to be as correct as you want others to be

now for some normal use

you can define efficiency from the ratio up time / total time (and over a year)

but never mind!

I think most readers here understood!

michael

It is clear that nuclear power has been largely neglected in terms of R&D

Per elsewhere on Post #1, nuke R&D is *STILL* 51% of OECD energy R&D !

Nuke has hogged R&D for energy (90+% for many years) for half a century !

Nothing could be further from the truth !

Nuke builders committed hari kari. They destroyed their own industry by massive cost overruns, multi-year delays and Zimmer & TMI. The fault lies not in nuke critics, but the nuke building industry itself.

Alan

BTW, the first five new nukes in the USA will get the same incentives as wind.

Per elsewhere on Post #1, nuke R&D is *STILL* 51% of OECD energy R&D !

This is a bit too little, it should be at least 75%.

Nuke builders committed hari kari. They destroyed their own industry by massive cost overruns, multi-year delays and Zimmer & TMI. The fault lies not in nuke critics, but the nuke building industry itself.

Red tape was responsible for most of the delays and overruns, right? The two-step licensing process where you couldn't know if you'd be allowed to start a finished plant didn't really encourage investment.

don't know if you'd be allowed to start a finished plant

Build a low quality plant and you SHOULD be denied an operating license. Happened at Zimmer (rumor was one of the TVA plants had been given a warning).

A proper safeguard for the public.

Alan

I don't think it is worth it. The operators has every incentive to avoid accidents and the public weren't especially hurt by TMI.

Many operators have every incentive to maximize next quarter's profits.

Gulf States Utilities was one of several utilities that was on the brink of bankruptcy while operating a nuke.

Relying upon the "enlightened self interest" of utilities is NOT a viable safety program !

Alan

You are absolutely correct about the safety issue.If there is any one place in the world we need hard nosed safety regulators with no sense of humor and the authority to say "shut it down now" it's at a running nuke.

That's the only realistic way to prevent cutting corners to save money.

It's a lot cheaper to do everything right than shut down,even though doing it right can be expensive.

But still dirt cheap in a world short on oil that will see motor transport move to ng as the oil dries up.

In my not so humble common sense opinion ,any one who thinks that since it is now possible to build affordable ng trucks and cars that they won't be built by the tens of millions has his head up is ass-or else maybe he just believes in really good ,really cheap batteries.

I'll go with the ng scenario,as it allows bau.I can't see an otr truck running on batteries within any meaningful time frame,although it might be possible to load up a tractor(whch moves slow,needs tractive deadwieght,and seldom goes more than a mile or two from its nightly home) with a few tons of batteries-if we don't hit peak lead or lithium or whatever.

And no politician is going to have the balls to tell Joe sixpack that he can no longer buy a new f250 4by 4.It might at best be able to slap a sizable luxury tax and fuel tax on such vehicles. That luxury tax and fuel tax is a lot to believe in all by itself.

Natural gas will go thru the roof within a few years unless the downhill economic slide continues and although I don't foresee a hot economy ever again in my lifetime the world ain't LIKELY gonna ROLL OVER AND DIE any time soon,barring WW3.

TEOTWAWKI IS A POSSIBILITY,like a heart attack,not a foregone conclusion like death by old age.

Any nuke that is built now is sure to be a world class bargain later in a world of ever rising ff prices,assuming the uranium is there.

And the "real" price of nukes,as well as construction time, will fall a lot if designs are standardized,which seems likely.

In my not so humble common sense opinion, any one who thinks that since it is now possible to build ng trucks and cars that they won't be built by the tens of millions has his head up his ass - or else maybe he just believes in really good, really cheap batteries.

You don't even need to build new cars. Any car driving on unleaded gas can also drive on natgas. This is what is done in Argentina. They buy American cars and modify them to cars driving on natgas (so-called nafta) using a $500 kit.

Of course, you give up a good part of the trunk, because that is where the nafta tank goes. Also, all of these cars have dual functionality, i.e., you start the car on unleaded gas (because the cold engine doesn't start so well on nafta), then you drive around for a minute or two, and then you switch over to nafta.

A tank of nafta gives you a range of about 120 km in Argentina. Thus, if you happen to run out of nafta before you arrive at the next gas station, you simply switch back to unleaded and continue to drive until you come across a gas station.

All gas stations in Argentina sell both unleaded and nafta. Of course, this is an investment decision that other countries would have to make if they wish to follow the Argentina model.

Also, the catalytic converter of these US-built cars is optimized for unleaded gas, and not for nafta. A catalytic converter for nafta would be about three times more expensive, because it takes about three times more precious metals (rhodium, palladium ...) to build catalytic converters that work correctly when you drive around on nafta. Argentina simply doesn't care. It's a huge country with few people in it ...

In Argentina, investing $500 in the conversion kit makes economical sense, because nafta is (in Argentina) about three times cheaper than unleaded gas per driven km, and so, everyone does it.

Francois,

I agree,but the conversion here is several times more expensive and therefore I foresee most of the ng vehicles here in the US being new ones as we don't yet have much of a retail ng fueling system and gasoline is still plentiful and cheap.

This situation will change soon,or I'm the one with my head up my ass.My wag is that flex fuel gasoline/ethanol /ng vehicles will be common in dealer showrooms within ten years or so.

Most likely heavy duty diesel/ng engines will start eating into the commercial diesel market first in a noticeable way,and the cars will follow.

Most likely heavy duty diesel/ng engines will start eating into the commercial diesel market first in a noticeable way, and the cars will follow.

Nope. I don't think so. Dual fuel unleaded/ng is a no brainer, because unleaded gas and natgas can coincide in the fuel injection system. Diesel/ng on the other hand is much more tricky, because mixtures of diesel fuel and natgas have a tendency to explode.

Bolivia is trying this. They sell a converter set for diesel engines to run on natgas also. However, I don't know much about how they solve the problem of avoiding explosions, and so I am a bit sceptical.

Francios,

When Catepillar and Cummins integrate the fuel systems on the drawing boards,there will be few if any problems.

The trucks come first because otr trucks are typically driven well over two hundred thousand miles per year for the first five years or so ,and a hundred thousand or more for another tewnty years at least.And such a truck gets anywhere from three to nine miles per gallons,depending on the circumstances.Further more they are serviced at least when new by real mechanics,not the high school drooputs commonly employed by car dealers and local garages.

The lifetime fuel cost SAVINGS are many times the lifetime fuel COSTS of an automobile DUE TO THE ENORMOUS AMOUNTS OF FUEL USED BY SUCH TRUCKS.

I drove a big Catepillar truck on a construction job in the mid seventies that consistently used over a hundred and fifty gallons per shift,and it ran two shifts per day,six days a week.That truck is probably still running on a mining job someplace in the third world.

such a truck gets anywhere from three to nine miles per gallons,depending on the circumstances.

I believe Walmart plans to get 17 MPG with aggressive aerodynamic changes - once you get over 45 MPH, aerodynamics rule.

I suppose it can be done,especially if speeds can be held down and streamlining is really incorporated into the design.Plus Walmart trucks are probably not loaded so much by wieght as by volume limitations,thereby being a little light on the average to start.
Plus thier drivers are among the lowest paid and therefore it is easier for Walmart to economize on fuel at the exspense of drivers time.
Its an ambitius goal.

Ah, here's the quote from Engineer-Poet:

"Wal-Mart is looking to get 13 MPG out of its fleet of semis using improved tires, only one driven axle and full fairings from the cab to the box and under the trailer. That's better than some big SUVs."

So, 13 MPG, not 17. Still, not bad.

Both natural gas and LPG can be used to co-fuel a diesel engine via "fumigation" (introduction into the intake air).  Here is a Louisiana state web page on the subject.  One of the benefits is a large reduction in particulate emissions under high load.

If there is any one place in the world we need hard nosed safety regulators with no sense of humor and the authority to say "shut it down now" it's at a running nuke.

Mac, I agree with 99% of what you say, but you might consider this.

A friend, a senior mechanic at a major airline mentioned that he received his certification to taxi the aircraft. After an engine change he takes it out to the end of the runway and runs it up. He is a private pilot and flies an airplane of his own construction that requires far more skill than the airliners.

He said, “Do you know how easy it would be to roll onto the runway and take off?” I said, “Yes, do you know how many people you could kill with a 747 and a full load of fuel?” He said, “Maybe 50,000.”

I asked if he had to pass an FBI background check, no, a written psychological test, no, an interview with a psychologist, no. These are all things you need to work in a nuclear plant.

Modern nuclear plants are designed with negative temperature and void reactivity coefficients to make a Chernobyl like power excursion impossible. They have robust containment buildings, lacking at Chernobyl. Next generation plants have a core catcher that will contain and re-solidify a full meltdown.

If I were a terrorist loose in a nuclear plant I could kill a few people and damage some very expensive equipment, but I cannot think of any realistic way to kill people off site, can you?

Many other industries pose a greater hazard, think chlorine, MIC, LNG and biologicals.

This is often my point when I argue safety, while important, dominates far too much concern in discussions of nuclear power. When bananas are considered radiotoxic spills by LNT rules in nuclear power plants, its time to realise the door is made out of iron and start focusing on where walls are made out of paper.

Bill,I agree with all you say but neverthe less I stand my ground,and although I am no engineer or other professional in the energy or safety field,I have actually worked inside six different plants as a maintainence mechanic of one sort or another.

An individual with a grudge could not as you say cause a major accident but there is always a way to cut corners,and always somebody to figure out how.

I'm just an ok driver,and in a car someday I might cause an accident that kills say ten people if I hit a loaded van.

Your airline pilot is held to a very high standard because he may indeed kill thousands if he crashes.

A major nuclear accident could concieveably rupture a western style containment although this has never happened.If it does,nuclear power is dead in the west.

But even another accident of the TMI kind,which did no significant harm to any person or the environment could set the industry back another twenty years AGAIN.And for what it's worth ,I believe there would have been no TMI or Chernobyl accidents if the safety men I met otj had been on THOSE JOBS.

Example of a shortcut:People were hanging film in the containment about the pipes and valves near a steam generator(to be exposed by opening a shielded box with a robot and withdrawing a very hot source) to check lots of valves and pipes silmantaneously.Other people were working in other areas but not nearby.

Since I was known to be an asshole for doing it by the book,the engineer in charge put me in charge of making sure everybody else had time to finish thier jobs and evacuated the general area.Two supervisors on the film crew tried to get me,buddy buddy, to tell the other guys they had to leave cause they were holding them up.

Since I didn't work for them(half of the reason I was chosen for this temporary task) it was no problem for me to say no,but they got hot.I just kept saying nocando until I got the call from every body on my list that they were out and the confirmation call fron HP that they were out of the containment,by name and by badge number.

Of course the engineer waited for my call to ok the xray work.

Now I don't even know what the other guys were doing ,but it could have been important.

Maybe they were checking safety equipment,and maybe a mistake would have been made if I told them that by virtue of my tiny temporary authority they needed to hurry it up.

The amount of money that a running nuke brings in in an hour will pay for all kinds of doubly and triply redundant personell to make sure things are done right.

And when they close the big doors ard fire her up after a shutdown,she can stay on line for a year straight flat out,sometimes longer.Especially if everything was done right.

... another accident of the TMI kind, which did no significant harm to any person or the environment could set the industry back another twenty years AGAIN. [emphasis addded]

http://www.counterpunch.org/wasserman03242009.html

People died--and are still dying--at Three Mile Island.

As the thirtieth anniversary of America's most infamous industrial accident approaches, we mourn the deaths that accompanied the biggest string of lies ever told in US industrial history.

As news of the accident poured into the global media, the public was assured there were no radiation releases.

That quickly proved to be false.

The public was then told the releases were controlled and done purposely to alleviate pressure on the core.

Both those assertions were false.

The public was told the releases were "insignificant."

But stack monitors were saturated and unusable, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission later told Congress it did not know---and STILL does not know---how much radiation was released at Three Mile Island, or where it went.

Using unsubstantiated estimates of how much radiation was released, the government issued average doses allegedly received by people in the region, which it assured the public were safe. But the estimates were utterly meaningless, among other things ignoring the likelihood that high doses of concentrated fallout could come down heavily on specific areas.

Official estimates said a uniform dose to all persons in the region was equivalent to a single chest x-ray. But pregnant women are no longer x-rayed because it has long been known a single dose can do catastrophic damage to an embryo or fetus in utero.

The public was told there was no melting of fuel inside the core.

But robotic cameras later showed a very substantial portion of the fuel did melt.

The public was told there was no danger of an explosion.

But there was, as there had been at Michigan's Fermi reactor in 1966. In 1986, Chernobyl Unit Four did explode.

The public was told there was no need to evacuate anyone from the area.

But Pennsylvania Governor Richard Thornburgh then evacuated pregnant women and small children. Unfortunately, many were sent to nearby Hershey, which was showered with fallout.

In fact, the entire region should have been immediately evacuated. It is standard wisdom in the health physics community that---due in part to the extreme vulnerability of human embryos, fetuses and small children, as well as the weaknesses of old age---there is no safe dose of radiation, and none will ever be found.

The public was assured the government would follow up with meticulous studies of the health impacts of the accident.

In fact, the state of Pennsylvania hid the health impacts, including deletion of cancers from the public record, abolition of the state's tumor registry, misrepresentation of the impacts it could not hide (including an apparent tripling of the infant death rate in nearby Harrisburg) and much more.

The federal government did nothing to track the health histories of the region's residents.

In fact, the most reliable studies were conducted by local residents like Jane Lee and Mary Osborne, who went door-to-door in neighborhoods where the fallout was thought to be worst. Their surveys showed very substantial plagues of cancer, leukemia, birth defects, respiratory problems, hair loss, rashes, lesions and much more.

A study by Columbia University claimed there were no significant health impacts, but its data by some interpretations points in the opposite direction. Investigations by epidemiologist Dr. Stephen Wing of the University of North Carolina, and others, led Wing to warn that the official studies on the health impacts of the accident suffered from “logical and methodological problems.” Studies by Wing and by Arnie Gundersen, a former nuclear industry official, being announced this week at Harrisburg, significantly challenge official pronouncements on both radiation releases and health impacts.

Gundersen, a leading technical expert on nuclear engineering, says:
“When I correctly interpreted the containment pressure spike and the doses measured in the environment after the TMI accident, I proved that TMI's releases were about one hundred times higher than the industry and the NRC claim, in part because the containment leaked. This new data supports the epidemiology of Dr. Steve Wing and proves that there really were injuries from the accident. New reactor designs are also effected, as the NRC is using its low assumed release rates to justify decreases in emergency planning and containment design."

Data unearthed by radiologist Dr. Ernest Sternglass of the University of Pittsburgh, and statisticians Jay Gould (now deceased) and Joe Mangano of New York have led to strong assertions of major public health impacts. On-going work by Sternglass and Mangano clearly indicates that "normal" reactor radiation releases of far less magnitude that those at TMI continue to have catastrophic impacts on local populations.

Anecdotal evidence among the local human population has been devastating. Large numbers of central Pennsylvanians suffered skin sores and lesions that erupted while they were out of doors as the fallout rained down on them. Many quickly developed large, visible tumors, breathing problems, and a metallic taste in their mouths that matched that experienced by some of the men who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, and who were exposed to nuclear tests in the south Pacific and Nevada.

A series of interviews conducted by Robbie Leppzer and compiled in a “a two-hour public radio documentary VOICES FROM THREE MILE ISLAND give some indication of the horrors experienced by the people of central Pennsylvania.

They are further underscored by harrowing broadcasts from then-CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite warning that “the world has never known a day quite like today. It faced the considerable uncertainties and dangers of the worst nuclear power plant accident of the atomic age. And the horror tonight is that it could get much worse.”

In March of 1980, I went into the region and compiled a range of interviews clearly indicating widespread health damage done by radiation from the accident. The survey led to the book KILLING OUR OWN, co-authored with Norman Solomon, Robert Alvarez and Eleanor Walters which correlated the damage done at TMI with that suffered during nuclear bomb tests, atomic weapons production, mis-use of medical x-rays, the painting of radium watch dials, uranium mining and milling, radioactive fuel production, failed attempts at waste disposal, and more.

My research at TMI also uncovered a plague of death and disease among the area's wild animals and farm livestock. Entire bee hives expired immediately after the accident, along with a disappearance
of birds, many of whom were found scattered dead on the ground. A rash of malformed pets were born and stillborn, including kittens that could not walk and a dog with no eyes. Reproductive rates among the
region's cows and horses plummeted.

Much of this was documented by a three-person investigative team from the Baltimore News-American, which made it clear that the problems could only have been caused by radiation. Statistics from Pennsylvania's Department of Agriculture confirmed the plague, but the state denied its existence, and said that if it did exist, it could not have been caused by TMI.

In the mid-1980s the citizens of the three counties surrounding Three Mile Island voted by a margin of 3:1 to permanently retired TMI Unit One, which had been shut when Unit Two melted. The Reagan Administration trashed the vote and re-opened the reactor, which still operates. Its owners now seek a license renewal.

Some 2400 area residents have long-since filed a class action lawsuit demanding compensation for the plague of death and disease visited upon their families. In the past quarter-century they have been denied access to the federal court system, which claims there was not enough radiation released to do such harm. TMI’s owners did quietly pay out millions in damages to area residents whose children were born with genetic damage, among other things. The payments came in exchange for silence among those receiving them.

But for all the global attention focused on the accident and its health effects, there has never been a binding public trial to test the assertion by thousands of conservative central Pennsylvanians that radiation from TMI destroyed their lives.

So while the nuclear power industry continues to assert that "no one died at Three Mile Island," it refuses to allow an open judicial hearing on the hundreds of cases still pending.

As the pushers of the "nuclear renaissance" demand massive tax- and rate-payer subsidies to build yet another generation of reactors, they cynically stonewall the obvious death toll that continues to mount at the site of an accident that happened thirty years ago. The "see no evil" mantra continues to define all official approaches to the victims of this horrific disaster.

Ironically, like Chernobyl, Three Mile Island Unit Two was a state-of-the-art reactor. Its official opening came on December 28, 1978, and it melted exactly three months later. Had it operated longer,
the accumulated radiation spewing from its core almost certainly would have been far greater.

Every reactor now operating in the US is much older---nearly all fully three decades older---than TMI-2 when it melted. Their potential fallout that could dwarf what came down in 1979.

But the Big Lie remains officially in tact. Expect to hear all week that TMI was "a success story" because "no one was killed."

But in mere moments that brand new reactor morphed from a $900 million asset to a multi-billion-dollar liability. It could happen to any atomic power plant, now, tomorrow and into the future.

Meanwhile, the death toll from America's worst industrial catastrophe continues to rise. More than ever, it is shrouded in official lies and desecrated by a reactor-pushing “renaissance” hell-bent on repeating the nightmare on an even larger scale.

Harvey Wasserman has been writing about atomic energy and the green alternatives since 1973. His 1982 assertion to Bryant Gumbel on NBC's TODAY Show that people were killed at TMI sparked a national mailing from the reactor industry demanding a retraction. NBC was later bought by Westinghouse, still a major force pushing atomic power. He is the author of SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030, is at www.solartopia.org. He can be reached at: Windhw@aol.com

Nice conspiracy theory.

Nice conspiracy theory indeed.

If there were all these sick and dead people and deformed animals,etc,there must also be a few graveyards full of reporters who wwre murdered and done away with quietly to keep them from running thier pieces.

And then of course thier families were done in ,or bought off ,or......
And the CIA or the FBI calls on thier employers and tells them THEY ARE NEXT if they runm a story about the missing reporters.......

I do believe that there are quite a large number of hungry lawyers with teeth big enough to eat Goldilox in one bite in this country now,and then as well.

And there are dozens of doctors and insurance companies signing death certificates and paying off on policies,and clerks in courthouses collateing the data and sending it on it's way.

It's easy to take a few facts and spin them into another Da Vanci Code but it's not so easy to sell it to ME.

And then there is the fact that after Reagen left office ther have been some democrats in charge from time to time,who would LOVE to tar and feather both the right wing and the nuclear industry and run them out of town on a rail.

Try it as a novel ,it might just sell if you sub it out to a good writer.

Thanks for taking the time to write this. There are LOTS of negative events that regularly are suppressed because the knowledge thereof threatens one group or another — often the government.

The notion that facts are regularly hidden from interested parties is part of why the courts continually protect journalists to the extent they do in large part because said protection is enshrined in the constitution. In other words, to get at the truth was seen as valuable enough to afford constitutional protection by the drafters:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

From 2005 through 2007 I was a member of a group presenting "The State of the World" at a conference and one factor we reported on was corruption, which is really equivalent to "conspiracy" in that it is intended to remain hidden and it is a breach of integrity. There are many, many instances of groups of people breaking the law and then covering their tracks.

The U.S. currently ranks 20th out of 180 counties on the corruption perception index by Transparency International:
http://www.transparency.org/content/download/32776/502129

Global Corruption Report

Read through their reports and it's easy to see that the world is FILLED with real conspiracies that are being uncovered all the time. We have given the job (in part) to the press to help bring them to light.

Here is an interesting post answering the question "What examples are there of 'conspiracy theories' that turned out to be true?"
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=468046

There are several juicy ones in there.

Again, thanks for educating me on TMI. My practice is to verify before I repeat something I've learned (and certainly before I go on stage and talk about it) but I'm inclined to give your report the benefit of the doubt given the sources you've cited.

jeppen clearly has no knowledge in this area so it's safe to ignore his comment.

Here is an interesting post answering the question "What examples are there of 'conspiracy theories' that turned out to be true?"
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=468046

There are several juicy ones in there.

Like the "conspiracy theory" about Imelda Marcos having many shoes, and it turned out she actually did have many shoes! Ok, now I believe in conspiracy theories. That post was really, really bad.

People died--and are still dying--at Three Mile Island.

teogawki, your reference has done an impressive job of combining the lies and distortions about TMI into one document.

According to anti nuclear folks the disposition of nuclear waste is one of our biggest problems. There is an ongoing pilgrimage of reporters with cameras to Chernobyl. Their videos always end with a shot of a portable radiation meter sitting in the grass downwind of the plant clicking furiously.

Where are those videos from TMI?

Precisely why is his evidence not enough? Isn't it likely that this sort of release of radiation won't provide what you are asking for and the story must be pieced together in a different way than Chernobyl?

My wife, who is is a public defender, all the time must defend clients using indirect evidence the prosecutors have provided. Often she loses based on that indirect evidence because, well, most of her clients are guilty as hell and the evidence is sufficient for a conviction. It is pure Hollywood that a conviction can't occur based on circumstantial evidence alone:
"Evidence can be divided into direct or circumstantial. Direct evidence proves the point without the need to draw any conclusions. Circumstantial evidence requires the jury to draw a conclusion that some relevant fact occurred...Circumstantial evidence may be used to establish any element of a crime."

http://www.riohondo.edu/LEO/AJ/AJ104/aj104u3.htm

If you insist on direct evidence, you are using a standard higher than our court system requires. If you pursue this line you are taking, it would indicate to me that you have lost objectivity in this conversation, which is the conclusion I've already drawn with Jeppen.

Precisely why is his evidence not enough? Isn't it likely that this sort of release of radiation won't provide what you are asking for and the story must be pieced together in a different way than Chernobyl?

anngel, No, in fact it is impossible. People have lived for generations in high radiation environments with no increase in cancer or mutations.

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5631#comment-528295

So how does the much lower exposure from TMI produce death and destruction?

Radiation is GOOD for you.

Your closing statement at link was:

People have been living in these high radiation areas for generations. If LNT is valid why haven’t they been wiped out or riddled with cancer?

Because LNT would predict only somewhat higher levels of cancer, and much of that would be past reproductive age.

Much of Bangla Desh was well water with dangerous levels of arsenic. By your argument above, arsenic must not be a risk after all; just look at how many people are living in Bangla Desh !

All the proponents of this do NOT have a deep interest in biology, cancer research or public health, but are blinded by a devotion to nuclear power.

Alan

Alan, arguing the merits of LNT at the edge of the line is hardly productive. We take bigger risks every day crossing the street. Its not weather radiation hormesis is true or LNT is true or hey, quite possibly neither and theres simply a threshold below which there isn't any effect. Its simply that below this threshold its all statistical noise and is good as fiction so arguing about it or even making policy on it is a waste of time.

We have much larger measurable risks with mercury poisoning, but below certain levels it becomes statistically meaningless to attempt to quantify the risk.

If you insist on direct evidence, you are using a standard higher than our court system requires. If you pursue this line you are taking, it would indicate to me that you have lost objectivity in this conversation, which is the conclusion I've already drawn with Jeppen.

This is nonsense. If there is semen in a rape case, for instance, then DNA matches all but decides the case. And we have recently seen a string of aquittals in old sentences based on DNA, right?

Few things are as easy to measure and fingerprint as radioactive releases, so this is a question of science and measurements, not of "circumstantial evidence". No way in hell could TMI be a killer without it being known.

Butterflies likewise are incredibly dangerous killers for their contribution to dangerous global weather patterns.

Well, then we disagree, I guess. Let's go my route, and then if there are two TMIs within 30 years, let's reevaluate.

No thanks, in case it is another Chernobyl, or worse.

BTW, there is *NO* better way to kill new nukes than another TMI (unless it is another Chernobyl).

Alan

No thanks, in case it is another Chernobyl, or worse.

Alan, thats simply impossible. You'd have to design a plant intentionally to make it worse than Chernobyl. I know you're freaking paranoid about nukes going bad but you had a giant graphite moderated reactor with a positive void coefficient and scram rods that actually had graphite risers that increased the reaction before shutting it down before even getting to the part where there wasn't any containment building or the part where the moderator catches fire and burns after the reactor hits 40GW without any cooling.

The only place there could be another chernobyl is in the old post soviet republics where they have some RBMK's they haven't retired yet. Those things aren't ever going to be built again.

Alan, thats simply impossible

It has been several decades since I studied the "Maximum Credible Accident"

The argument was that today's safety standards are excessive. So lets build some low quality nukes and see what happens.

One scenario; an "out of spec" earthquake coupled with loss of control (wiring severed between control room & reactor; almost happened during Brown's Ferry 1 fire).

Out of spec earthquake means either:
1) earthquake stronger than design,
2) movements do not correspond to design parameters despite earthquake being only XX strong
3) Lack of engineering review misses flaw in build (delta from design, happens all the time)
4) Flaw in engineering software allows faulty design

Say, slow leak in pressure vessel, crack in containment structure and several electrical fires (with some super heated steam leaks for good measure). Diesel tanks for emergency generators are leaking too. All with zero active wiring between control room and reactor. Imagine Mr. Murphy in control from there.

I have a fair degree of confidence with today's US nukes, and more with the next generation. But drop the safety standards and my confidence will drop with them.

Best Hopes for Ever Improving Safety standards,

Alan

You still cant get chernobyl level Alan. You can, if you align everything just right, you can have something bad. But then you're still limited to the maximum power of the reactor because the water is the moderator and its in its maximum critical state, unlike RBMK's. In an operating RBMK its not in its maximum critical state so you run the risk of power spikes because of voids, and then boom 40GW driving a steam explosion and a graphite moderator catching on fire.

Now you can paint a nasty picture, and if you align everything right with the winds dumping radioiodine all over the place with its associated thyroid cancers; In heavily populated areas you might even have much higher casualty rates, but then Chernobyl could have had the winds blowing strait at Kiev as well. But you cant have the huge explosive dispersion and burning graphite nastiness that an RBMK will bring you. If you want to argue that there's risks, fine. But a Chernobyl type accident in the west just isn't in the cards.

You still cant get chernobyl level Alan

Ok. let me see if I can convince you that it can.

From memory, both TMI & Chernobyl has relatively fresh fuel and were "mid-size" reactors. Let us suppose that the earthquake happened 18 days before scheduled refueling and in a reactor with twice the U-235 (perhaps higher enrichment or more tons of fuel). So x16 as many fission products, Pu, etc.

(You focus on spike peak power, I focus on fission byproducts as a risk factor).

Earthquake disrupts local communications. Inside containment quickly reaches 100+ C from steam leaks and electrical fires. Pumps turned off. Reactor vessel has small superheated steam leaks to keep from "blowing" immediately but raises temperature (i.e. weaken steel) in containment structure, which is itself leaking through small opening (say a door). Core begins to melt as top of core becomes exposed as water leaves via superheated steam, releasing volatile fission byproducts (say 1600% as many as Chernobyl had). Uranium begins to separate from zirconium & steel due to specific gravity in melt. Added energy from increased reactions at bottom of melt plus LOTS of fission decay heat as well, remember that this is old fuel).

Temps between containment & reactor vessel get hotter, enough to weaken steel. Finally melt of core weakens bottom of reactor vessel and a "steam boiler" explosion cracks bottom. This is enough to seriously breach earthquake and heat weakened containment structure and release all volatile fission products from damaged core, and all remaining core is damaged in "steam boiler" explosion.

Location and prevailing winds ? Significantly worse than those at Chernobyl. Earthquake damage limits efforts to reduce civilian exposure.

Oh, and Michael Brown's nephew is in charge.

Overall damage ? > Chernobyl

Remember, we had an earthquake as the stands were filling for a World Series game. Worst case does sometimes happen.

Alan

From memory, both TMI & Chernobyl has relatively fresh fuel and were "mid-size" reactors… So x16 as many fission products, Pu, etc.

From my memory the Chernobyl accident happened due to a botched experiment at the end of a scheduled run.

Finally melt of core weakens bottom of reactor vessel and a "steam boiler" explosion cracks bottom. This is enough to seriously breach earthquake and heat weakened containment structure and release all volatile fission products from damaged core, and all remaining core is damaged in "steam boiler" explosion.

Provide details of how this works. Chernobyl went to 100 time rated power which provided enough energy to blow the roof off a conventional building and eject 1/3 of the core. Even so, with an appropriately designed containment building Chernobyl would not have killed anybody.

Water moderated reactors shutdown when the water is ejected from the core. Reactor vessels are surrounded by several feet of steel reinforced concrete shielding. The buildings are equipped with redundant containment spray systems that contain chemicals that scrub the atmosphere of chemically active fission products like iodine. Gen III plants are passively cooled.

After a nuclear weapon goes off the resulting radiation comes largely from the short lived fission products. The majority of fission products have short half lives.

That is why Hiroshima and Nagasaki are less radioactive than Denver and it explains the logic of fallout shelters. Radiation levels fall of dramatically in the first hours and days.

When a reactor operates the short lived fission products begin decaying as soon as they are formed and approach equilibrium concentration within a few half lives. At end of core life there are more long lived fission products, but short and intermediate lived fission products, the vast majority, are in equilibrium soon after startup.

The most common iodine decay products are 135 (half life 6.6 hrs) and 131 (half life 8 days). These were in equilibrium at TMI.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission_product_yield

Iodine 129 (half life 15.7 million years) accumulates with time. Only one atom is produced for every 10 atoms of I 135 and the long half life results in a low dose rate.

Steel weakens dramatically with increased temperature. See World Trade Centers.

Without controls and without pumping, a conventional reactor will accumulate energy. A slow leak prolongs the time, allowing steel to weaken further till the accumulated heat energy (like Chernobyl, it just takes longer. Time replaces the power spike) cracks the reactor vessel. Steam that would have gone to the turbine is slowly going into the containment structure.

The containment structure has been damaged by the "out-of-spec" earthquake and then weakened by prolonged exposure to heat.

Iodine is the worst but hardly the only volatile (at elevated temperatures) and toxic fission product.

BTW, Bill, this was not addressed to you. You are incapable of being convinced of anything that questions nukes. You even picked up the "radiation is good for you" "theory".

It was addressed to Dezakin who "takes some convincing" but will sometimes come around.

Alan

Steel weakens dramatically with increased temperature. See World Trade Centers.

The weakness does not occur until the temperature rise is equally dramatic (and you don't have to tell me, this happened in my back yard a few weeks ago).  See this representative table of yield strength vs. temperature.  Notice that it doesn't even start until 400°F, and strength is only down slightly at 800°F.  If you think you are going to get the reinforcing steel in a concrete containment building up to 800°F in a steam-leak accident when the operating temperature of the reactor inside it was well below that, I would love to have some of what you're smoking to share next weekend.

Normal steam temps for nukes are (from memory) 300 C (wet steam), but in a PWR on the other side of the heat exchanger it is a bit hotter.

But in the example no heat is being extracted by the steam generators and there is no control over the reaction. The only heat loss is by two stage (& relatively small) leaks; Reactor Vessel > Containment & Containment > You & me. I suggested one door as the leak from the containment to the public. This release will create an asymmetric temperature profile (reactor leak on one side, twisted door on the other side will heat up one side of the containment more).

In addition I specified electrical fires inside the containment. Extra joules there.

An uncontrolled reactor stuck at operating settings with minimal heat extraction (plus plenty of heat from decay) sitting for several hours will get quite hot. Perhaps 3 to 4 GWthermal with (almost) no place to go ! 800 F is on the low end for the interior of the containment, especially if the vessel leak > containment leak.

There is significant thermal mass in the containment so time is also required to saturate it (and there will be a heat gradient across the containment, the steel on the outside will be cooler than on the inside. Containments I have seen put the concrete of the outside, so that will help insulate the steel and keep it hotter.

Alan

Alan, if you’re going to play nuclear engineer please get an introductory textbook and read it.

no heat is being extracted by the steam generators and there is no control over the reaction.

The control rods are held up by electromagnets. If any parameter goes out of limits the current is automatically cut off and neutron absorbing rods drop into the core by gravity stopping the chain reaction.

Any large break in the system would allow the water to flash into steam and be ejected. When the water flashes to steam the neutrons are not colliding with water molecules and slowing down which reduces their probability of causing a fission. The chain reaction fizzles out.

Pressurized accumulators automatically pump water containing boric acid into the reactor to cover the core. The boron absorbs neutrons and prevents a restart of the chain reaction even if the rods are still out.

I suggested one door as the leak from the containment to the public.

The doors are extremely robust, they are shut during normal operation and a pressure differential is maintained to detect any leak.

In addition I specified electrical fires inside the containment. Extra joules there.

As with all electrical installations power cables are protected by circuit breakers that will open under fault conditions. The amount of power required to run emergency equipment is relatively small.

An uncontrolled reactor stuck at operating settings with minimal heat extraction (plus plenty of heat from decay) sitting for several hours will get quite hot. Perhaps 3 to 4 GWthermal with (almost) no place to go !

Its not like a motorcycle engine with a stuck throttle. If the emergency protection system does not shut it down the operators will shut it down and if they do not shut it down the negative temperature coefficients will quickly shut it down.

Even if your scenario was possible it would be several hours before significant venting began. The short lived fission products would be largely decayed. Operators could vent the containment building through the attached building which would provide lots of surface area for chemically active fission products to plate out. These buildings are generally equipped with HEPA filtered vents to stop hot particles. They could turn on the sprinklers for additional scrubbing. The release offsite would be a tiny fraction of Chernobyl.

The control rods are held up by electromagnets. If any parameter goes out of limits the current is automatically cut off and neutron absorbing rods drop into the core by gravity stopping the chain reaction.

The "out-of-spec" earthquake could jam the control rods, the power on that circuit could stay on for "a while" (I have reviewed electrical plans for nukes, but not with that in mind).

The pressurized accumulators I have seen are outside the reactor vessel (20 & 30 year old memory) and they crack in the earthquake, spilling most of the borated water on the floor, and are the source of leaks from the reactor vessel.

The slow leaks keep water over most of the core for several hours. Plus latent heat from fission product decay with nowhere to go.

I have walked through containment doors at several plants and have thought whether they would withstand earthquakes. It is not too common to have work crews or inspectors inside the containment while operating (most nukes I have been in were under construction or refueling), but one guy forgets to close the door while running for his life, or another tries to enter, being a hero, and steam kills him, leaving the door open. Or earthquake racks door frame, etc.

Les than perfect engineering (remember debate started with "nukes have too much safety") enables some circuits to stay live. There has been a move to get away from oil filled transformers and switchgear, but any oil in a containment "not good".

The diesel tanks have leaks after earthquake, so limited emergency power. Operators have lost most/almost all control over anything. Major earthquake has disrupted operations and Michael Brown's nephew is in charge.

All of your measures are simply not implemented (panic, control wiring N/A, confusion, poor training & poor ad hoc problem solving), the emergency generators run out of fuel before the "steam boiler" explosion.

And this is 18 days before refueling, the 6-12 months and up half life radioisotopes have accumulated.

Alan

The "out-of-spec" earthquake could jam the control rods

There are easy ways around this:  drop the rods before the quake hits the reactor.  Japan is already doing this with the Shinkansen, using reports from remote seismometers to stop trains before a quake has a chance to derail them.  At a speed of 3 km/sec, seismometers 15 km from the reactor could give 5 seconds of warning of the S waves' arrival.  That's 3 seconds time to confirm the data from the faster-moving P waves and 2 seconds for the rods to fall.  For more lead time, put the seismometers farther away.

The afterheat problem is nowhere near as bad as you paint it either.  The references I've got state ~1% of full power after a cool down period of not more than 3 hours (linky, Figure 3).  For a 1.6 GWe reactor, that's perhaps 45-50 MW of heat to deal with.  In an extreme event with complete meltdown with failure of the reactor vessel, 50 MW is going to be dissipated by rapid boiling of all the water on the floor.  Chernobyl's melt didn't escape the building; TMI's meltdown didn't even damage the reactor vessel.

Last, your scenario assumes that everything can go wrong and will do it all at once.  Single points of failure are one thing, but Murphy is never that lucky.

Bill, am I incorrect in thinking that both TMI and Chernobyl were unexpected? Here's my understanding of what happened:

TMI was caused in part by warning systems that overloaded the operators with false warnings, causing them to not pay attention to a real warning as quickly as they should have. This was an unexpected operator error caused in large part by bad design. This bad design wasn't understood, and therefore the operator error was unexpected and unpredictable.

Worse, the bad design could be described as an over-reaction to safety concerns, and therefore inherently unpreventable, and something that can be expected to recur as further safety attempts are made.

Chernobyl was, in part, caused by over-confidence on the part of operators who had just received a safety award. A perception of improved safety caused a decrease in actual safety. Again, this would appear to be a feedback between safety attempts and actual safety that is difficult to prevent or predict.

There is an advantage to systems that are smaller, and whose failure is less catastrophic*.

*catastrophic - defined as something that is uninsurable due to the potential size of losses.

Bill, am I incorrect in thinking that both TMI and Chernobyl were unexpected?

The Chernobyl reactor, RBMK 1000, was well known to be a dangerous design long before the accident. The TMI accident was calculated to be low probability, and since we have not had another, it is proven to be low probability.

Worse, the bad design could be described as an over-reaction to safety concerns, and therefore inherently unpreventable, and something that can be expected to recur as further safety attempts are made.

Accidents often happen as a chain of events or factors that combine to result in an accident. The two primary factors at TMI were limited instrumentation and inadequate training. The TMI reactor was designed to be solidly filled with water at all times. That was achieved by maintaining the pressure above the saturation pressure (boiling point) of the water. The operators failed to do this and there was no system to warn them.

Instrumentation and training have been improved and next generation plants will have direct measurement of water level.

There is an advantage to systems that are smaller, and whose failure is less catastrophic*

Obviously true, and there is an advantage to systems that are larger, and whose failure is less catastrophic. You have to weigh the advantages against the disadvantages.

Nuclear power provides clean economical dependable affordable power. It saves thousands of lives per year that would be lost to the emissions of the additional coal gas and oil that we would be burning if fission did not exist. It saves billions of dollars each year in fuel bills by reducing the amount and the cost of gas oil and coal compared to what we would be using without fission. These are big advantages.

If we could build a perfect plant and train perfect operators, nuclear power would almost be too cheap to meter. Dig a hole in the ground, drop in a reactor vessel. Build a turbine and cooling tower on the surface and crank it up.

We recognize that perfection is not going to happen, so we design them to crash without hurting anybody. When an airline pilot makes a serious mistake people die, when a reactor operator makes a serious mistake stockholders get a headache.

If airliners could be designed to fly straight into the ground at 500mph without killing anybody that would be a huge improvement, right? But what would we pay for that improvement? The fatality rate for cars is about 30 times that of the airliner. If the increased ticket price shaves off 10% of the passengers who decide to drive, more people die, and our quality of life is diminished.

If we take emotion and ignorance out of the equation fission is our best option at this time. I think we should be spending $100 billion per year pushing every technology as hard a possible, and if something better is found that would be great.

(You focus on spike peak power, I focus on fission byproducts as a risk factor).

Spike power is important here. Its what caused a good fraction of the core to simply be vaporized.

Earthquake disrupts local communications. Inside containment quickly reaches 100+ C from steam leaks and electrical fires. Pumps turned off. Reactor vessel has small superheated steam leaks to keep from "blowing" immediately but raises temperature (i.e. weaken steel) in containment structure, which is itself leaking through small opening (say a door). Core begins to melt as top of core becomes exposed as water leaves via superheated steam, releasing volatile fission byproducts (say 1600% as many as Chernobyl had).

You're painting a fiction Alan, and a contrived one at that. All the volitile fission products were released at Chernobyl, and a good fraction of the core was vaporized, which is simply impossible in a western reactor. It cant get hot enough from simple decay heat and with a busted pressure vessel no moderator.

If you try real hard you can paint higher thyroid cancer incidence rates by playing with weather and a plant thats real close to a metropolitan area.

Uranium begins to separate from zirconium & steel due to specific gravity in melt. Added energy from increased reactions at bottom of melt plus LOTS of fission decay heat as well, remember that this is old fuel).

Uh, you're getting your physics confused here. Stop painting scare stories that have nothing to do with reality. It doesn't happen this way, and you might want to think about why before you engage in such fiction.

Alan,
The guys who think things can't POSSIBLY go wrong should read The Black Swan,especially the story about the insurance and the tiger.

I'll bite. I think that shutdowns will be matched by increased availability, so there will be no net production loss from the current fleet. The world-wide additions from new plants is scheduled as follows:

2009: 4 GW
2010: 5 GW
2011: 6 GW
2012: 12 GW
2013: 13 GW

Let's assume some delays and smooth this out, the we'll get a second derivative of about 0.5% per year. So 1% in 2010, 2% in 2012, 3% in 2014 and 4% in 2016. In my mind, this is quite conservative.

just to clarify

1) you assume that the new 4 GWe planned for this year 2009 will not be achieved
but only 2 GWe new installed. What about electric energy produced relative to 2008 (e.g. the 2601 TWhe)
2) for 2010 you say that 1% more electric energy compared to 2008? or to 2009
and so on

thus 2009 = 2625 TWhe
2010 = 2650 TWhe
2011 = ?
2012 = 2700 TWhe
2014 = 2775 "
2016 = 2875 TWh

right ?

If yes, it seems that you agree with my upper limit estimate from chapter I.

regards Michael

Well, no. My thinking was more like additions of 2 GW in 2009, 4 in 2010, 6 in 2011, 8 in 2012, 10 in 2013 and so on. That 2,4,6,8,10... is more conservative than WNA's compilation of planned starts which amounts to 4,5,6,12,13... My smoothed out additions would give rise to this:

Year GWe TWhe
2008 373 2601
2009 375 2615
2010 379 2643
2011 385 2685
2012 393 2740
2013 403 2810
2014 415 2894
2015 429 2991
2016 445 3103

This might turn out to be quite conservative - I consider real results more likely to be higher than lower.

thanks!

I would like to see similar honesty from others
who criticize what I wrote (without reading what I wrote)

and within the next few years we can compare my numbers, yours and others.

In fact it would be nice if you could add your view on how the required amount of natural uranium
will come along. 445 GWe by 2016
in comparison with my Table 3
and the Mcquarie numbers in Table 2

michael

I assume breeding ratios will be better for the new reactors in comparison with the average in the existing fleet, perhaps a 20% better fuel economy? Then I guess burnup will improve a bit in existing reactors too. But I won't bother to do another table, but I guess production will improve 20% until 2016 and fuel need (in natural uranium equivalents) will expand by some 15%.

Btw, I think your critics are generally being honest.

If you could not figure this out so far
may be I managed to present an "objective" analysis.

Its obvious enough that english isn't your first language and your command of it is shoddy, but I dont think that means what you think it means. Either that or you're grossly delusional.

The data from Rossing speaks for itself on long term uranium production capacity. And the short term is easily met by tailings enrichment; But it wont have to because there is not going to be any short term uranium shortage either. Now you're asserting based on inconclusive partial data that there is going to be an immenent shortage of both uranium and enrichment capcaity and claiming to be objective.

Hah. But you do make the flowers grow; One by one, row by row.

Which country has the most uranium reserves?
That country will rule the world in 100 years.
After the Oil age, we will be in the nuclear age.

Thorium is also a nuclear fuel.  I recall a recent analysis which claimed the USA has about 190,000 tons of reserves, and India appears to have enormous amounts of it including an entire beach made of thorium ore.  Thorium does not appear to be a limiting factor for much longer than the next century.

I keep reading posts about Thorium. Do any commercial nuclear reactors use Thorium as a fuel? Are any planned?

advancednano linked to this NextBigFuture post which includes a link to Thorium Power's efforts, scheduled for sale ~2021.

Predicting that far into the future is dubious at best. If the technology is proven, then it should be available for sale now. If the technology is not proven, then it may never be. Sounds similar to nuclear fusion viz its 30 years into the future and always will be.

So you're saying all useful technologies ever have allready been developed and theres nothing that can be improved on?

Start over.

I don't think I'm saying that, not with my interprtation of the english language in anycase. I am saying you cannot predict to such a degree of accuracy when a technolgy will be available if it is not already developed. Technologies are usually ready long before they become comercially viable. The microwave oven is a good example of an available technology waiting to be exploited, nuclear fusion is a good example of wishful thinking.

Which country has the most uranium reserves?
That country will rule the world in 100 years.
After the Oil age, we will be in the nuclear age.

Much the way that Saudi Arabia rules the world now?

(P.S. Sorry, I couldn't resist. I am actually very pro-nuclear. But the world is not so simple...)

Keeping my word, part 2:  On to plutonium.  I will not be long with this, because it is not overly significant to nuclear power in the near future, but there are some very large errors which it is important to address.

During the reactor operation, the U235 concentration will be reduced down to roughly 1%. At the same time, Pu239 builds up to an equilibrium concentration of about 1%. The Pu239 is formed by neutron capture of U238 isotopes and subsequent nuclear β decays. During the normal reactor cycle, the Pu239 component contributes up to 30% of the produced fission energy. After a few years of operation, the fissionable material has been reduced to about 2%, and some new fuel is usually introduced. Consequently, the used fuel rods still contain an interesting amount of fissionable material of U235 and Pu239.

Dittmar appears to think that the only isotope of plutonium created in LWR fuel is Pu-239.  He could not be more wrong.  There are at least 5 isotopes present in significant quantity after a typical cycle of 50,000 megawatt-days of power production:

  • Pu-238, which is an alpha emitter but not fissile with thermal neutrons.
  • Pu-239, the isotope of interest for weapons.  Weapons-grade Pu is 93% or greater Pu-239.
  • Pu-240, which is formed in about 36% of all thermal-neutron capture events in Pu-239.  This isotope is non-fissile and has a very high rate of spontaneous fissions (440 fissions/sec/gm).  The spontaneous neutron emissions from Pu-240 make it unsuitable for use in weapons, as they would be very likely to predetonate and not produce a reliable yield.
  • Pu-241, which is fissile.  It is also the precursor to Am-241, used as an alpha source in smoke detectors.
  • Pu-242, which is produced in about 25% of thermal-neutron captures in Pu-241.  It is not fissile and has a low thermal-neutron capture cross section, making it more or less a dead-end product.

All isotopes of plutonium are fissile in fast-neutron reactors, however.  The Pu in LWR fuel burned to 50,000 MW-d/t is about 56 wt% Pu-239 (p. 55; it is a smaller fraction of the total actinides), with Pu-240 comprising about 27% of the total Pu.

World-Nuclear.org claims all plutonium is a proliferation concern, but the facts do not support that; the technical complications of the use of PWR plutonium in a weapon are so severe that not one nation has ever based a program on it.  The proliferation states of Iran, Pakistan and N. Korea have based their programs on weapons-grade Pu created from rods irradiated briefly in research reactors (same as the US effort at Hanford) or enrichment of U-235 to weapons grade.  A critical mass of ~10 kg of the above Pu would have about 2700 g of Pu-240, emitting roughly 2.7 million neutrons per second; in contrast, 100 kilos of U-235 (approximately 2 critical masses, as in the Little Boy bomb) emits roughly 1 neutron/sec.  Making an implosion system which can assemble a supercritical mass before a chain reaction is initiated by SF is difficult even with weapons-grade plutonium, and there is no prior art dealing with reclaimed PWR material for proliferation states to steal.  Last, MOX fuel can be restricted to states with existing weapons programs and large power production, such as the USA, France and Canada.  This can reduce the proliferation risk of reclaimed plutonium to roughly zero.

I do not understand your comment.

Are you saying that not the roughly 30% of the produced fission energy comes from Pu239?
I took the number from some WNA documents and said "about 30%".

I do not understand why the other produced Pu isotopes are relevant in this context.
They are for bomb builders yes of course and for the problems related to long term nuclear waste
and perhaps many other related issues.

Concerning the proliferation.

I am not too interested in the details of nuclear weapons, beside that I want to see them disappear
as fast as possible and forever. Yes, Pu bombs are made as you say ``easily" with a nuclear (prototype) reactor
and almost impossible to control if a country wants to hide.

your list of countries forgot to mention one which has perhaps the highest probability on using the bomb
on another country. Why can't you mention this country in your list?

For the Pu produced in the fuel rods. Yes it seems that bomb builders prefer the other technique.
My article to say it again was not about bomb making.

to end my reply

It seems that you agree MOX is not the preferred reactor fuel!

michael

I do not understand your comment.

I'm not surprised.  I don't think you understand your subject material.

Are you saying that not the roughly 30% of the produced fission energy comes from Pu239?
I took the number from some WNA documents and said "about 30%".

No, I'm saying it's irrelevant.  Some of the produced fission energy comes from Pu-241.  What difference does it make?

your list of countries forgot to mention one which has perhaps the highest probability on using the bomb
on another country. Why can't you mention this country in your list?

If you mean what I think you mean, that country is the target of terrorism and has been the target of several wars of attempted genocide over the last 61 years.  It is not the source of the proliferation problem, which involves centrifuge technology pilfered from France and bomb designs transferred from China.  That you raise the issue is just one more example of your tendentiousness.

It seems that you agree MOX is not the preferred reactor fuel!

I'm saying that you are correct on this one point:  MOX is largely irrelevant, because the capacity to create large amounts of it in the near future does not exist.  In the long run, I think oxide fuels of all kinds will fall by the wayside as the world shifts to molten-salt reactors.

perhaps it would help if you stop insulting!

michael

It is my limited and unclassified understanding that the North Korean bomb is composed of less than ideal Pu isotopes that resemble PWR reactor Pu.

I can design a low efficiency, low yield atomic bomb from the Pu isotope mix coming from a PWR (especially if I can control the life cycle and position within the reactor).

Alan

But it is MUCH easier and cheaper to simply set up a little graphite pile "research" reactor and produce bomb material specifically, so why would anyone, including a "rogue" nation, use a power reactor process?

It could be easier to divert used civil power fuel than start with a new "research reactor".

Non-state would be bomb makers are one group (the Colombian cocaine cartels are now building semi-submarines and moving towards the real thing).

A nation after a revolution, and UN sanctions, may find a new anything built with imported materials is more difficult than using the used fuel lying around. (What if the Shah had finished three of his proposed civilian power reactors before being overthrown ?)

I would be tempted to insert a rod of thorium into a civil reactor and chemically separate out U233. Not quite as good as Pu239 and with a mix of U232, dangerous to handle. But the easiest path I see for a minimum effort bomb.

I see as over reaching the claim that civil reactors cannot be used to make atomic bombs.

Alan

Placing a rod of e.g. thorium oxide in a PWR wouldn't give you what you want, for several reasons.  Th-233 decays to Pa-233.  The desired product is U-233, which requires a second beta decay.  However::

  1. Pa-233 is a strong neutron absorber.  It will act as a poison, while going to Pa-234.
  2. Pa-234 decays to U-234, which is not fissile (another neutron poison).
  3. The fraction which decays to U-233 will undergo a considerable amount of burnup, including formation of U-232 by (n, 2n) reactions.  U-232 is chemically identical to U-233 but is not fissile and decays to Tl-208, which is a powerful gamma emitter.

What you'd wind up with is a reduced power output (perhaps detectable by remote sensing) and a product which is dangerous to handle, emits radiation which fries electronics and is easily detectable from a distance.  Putting it back in a reactor works perfectly, but a bomb?  There are much better ways, which is why nobody's pursuing that one.

Pa-233 has a half-life of 27 days, so relatively low neutron density will prevent significant double capture. And given the short half life, I wonder if it as big an issue as you allege.

The low neutron density could be created by several ways (slide it in the CANDU reactor for a week, and exchange for another while holding it out for 2 months, coating with boron, lead, any good neutron absorber, etc.). One only needs 16 kg for critical mass (a few extra kg for primitive geometries).

The same strategy reduces the amount of U232 (which I noted would make U233 strategy dangerous to handle).

If I were on the panel deciding how to make an atomic bomb with minimal effort, I would still advocate this approach.

Alan

That works for a research reactor or CANDU, which can exchange fuel elements while in operation.  It doesn't work for a PWR, which has to go to cold shutdown and pull the reactor vessel head to swap anything out of the core.  The advocates of PWRs had non-proliferation as one of their bullet points, and they were right.

Using geometry (adjoining fuel bundles full of thorium, or even boron, creating a "cold" corner of the nuke with reduced neutron density) and/or mixing in a neutron poison, such as boron, lead, etc. can lower the neutron density to severely reduce double captures of neutrons (at least for a few half lives of 27 days).

Cutting the neutron density by just half to 3/4ths should be enough (without looking up and calcing neutron cross-sections) to effectively eliminate both U232 and U234 and still give a decent yield of U233. Just increase the ratio of single to double neutron captures >:-)

And seven months after refueling, have a forced outage (EASY to fake) and quietly remove the "cold corner" fuel rods and put in a new set. Hold the extracted rods for a year or two and let the short lived isotopes decay, and then chemically extract Uranium from the thorium.

Upon further thought, a better method is to slip containers of coated thorium into the pressure vessel, attached to a couple of wires (redundancy) and let it sit there in an area with lower neutron density between those damned forced outages ! No "refueling", just depressurization, undoing the bolts on an access port and pulling the radiated containers up and letting fresh ones down while they "fix" the cause of the forced outage. Patriotic volunteer required.

Have another forced outage in five or six months (so as to not create too obvious a pattern).

Had the Islamic Republic of Iran inherited a few civilian nukes, I strongly suspect that they would have bred U233. Yes, it would have taken several refueling cycles

Nuke supporters "overstate the case" in claiming non-proliferation. But quite true for wind turbines, solar and geothermal.

Alan

Had the Islamic Republic of Iran inherited a few civilian nukes, I strongly suspect that they would have bred U233. Yes, it would have taken several refueling cycles

U233 just doesn't work that well. India's been trying for a while, as did the US with operation teapot with poor results. I see what you're suggesting but it'd work far better to just use DU and purex for plutonium extraction.

I had not thought of that, and DU is not THAT hard to get (some restrictions).

Alan

If that's so, does that mean that the proliferation cat is out of the bag?

Pretty much :-(

For anyone with a civilian nuclear reactor that is (Libya was handicapped by not having one).

Alan

What if they don't have a civilian nuclear reactor?

My question is: does preventing the spread of nuclear power generation make a big difference to preventing nuclear weapons proliferation?

Your earlier comment seemed to suggest that depleted uranium was obtainable by just about anyone. That would seem to suggest that preventing the spread of nuclear power generation make not make a big difference to preventing nuclear weapons proliferation? - is that what you meant?

My rule of thumb is that any determined state can develop an atomic bomb if given enough time (North Korea is pretty pitiful for technology and resources).

One key is to add as many obstacles as possible to slow down the process and let politics (which change over time) finally stop the bomb.

South Africa developed six atomic bombs, and then scrapped them when the regime changed color.

Libya was on it's way when it decided that an atomic bomb was not in their national interest after all, and came clean.

IMO, a civilian power reactor can be leveraged to reduce the time to develop an atomic bomb; they do aid proliferation. But, in a judgment call, not enough to warrant not building them in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Bulgaria, etc.

Alan

Alan

Pu-238, which is an alpha emitter but not fissile with thermal neutrons.

I recently learned it is fissile with fast neutrons however, and in fact would be weaponisable. The only problem is the very severe self heating would mean the warhead would have to have a large active cooling device atached to it. The notion of wrapping a bunch of explosives around a red hot lump of plutonium doesn't sound like a fun afternoon.

Keeping my word, part 3:  On to uranium enrichment and reclaimed uranium.

The United States Enrichment Corporation has 11.3 million kg-SWU/year of enrichment capacity.  The EIA does not appear to track inventories of depleted uranium and its tails assay, but as DU has relatively few uses we can assume that > 50% of it remains in inventory and is available for reclamation.  We can also assume that the low price of uranium meant that a high tails assay (of U-235) was allowed; call it 0.35%.

Let us further assume that the tails are re-enriched to produce a fuel stream of 3.75% enrichment and a new tails stream of 0.15% enrichment.  Given these assumptions, I used this spreadsheet columns A-E (warning, OpenOffice spreadsheet format) to reach the following conclusions:

  1. 18 tons of uranium at 0.35% enrichment is required to produce 1 ton of product at 3.75% enrichment.
  2. One ton of product requires ~12170 kg-SWU of enrichment work.
  3. The USEC's capability of 11.3 million kg-SWU/year can produce 929 tonnes/year of fuel given the input and tails assays.
  4. The annual input required to produce this much fuel is ~16700 tonnes.

I could not find a given number for the fuel load of an AP-1000 reactor, but based on the statement that 120,000 kg-SWU are required to produce a fuel load I came up with 28 tonnes of product (spreadsheet columns G-K).  The USEC's enrichment capability is sufficient to produce some 33 fuel loads per year from tails at 0.35% assay.  Most of the USEC's capacity is currently unused, so it would appear that the entire fleet of new reactors currently planned or tentative in the USA could get their initial fuel loads from re-enrichment of the existing inventory of DU (no new mining required) in less than 1 year of work of the Paducah plant.

If you have hard information to the contrary, I welcome corrections.

EP,

Having been burned before by forming an opinion based on the statements of only one or two people I must withhold judgement as to the future uranium supply.

But you sound as if you have "got your xxxx together" and I hope you are right as I am a firm believer in nukes.The future price of coal and oil and natural gas will in my estimation make any nukes built now world class bargains if they come in anywhere near thier bids,and the fuel is either on hand or contracted well ahead.

Nobody who knocks the nukes seems to give gredit to the industry for the savings we realize as a society because nuclear juice depresses the sale of coal and natural gas.

I am no energy expert by any means and I don't have enough interest to try to come up with my own figures,but I expect that minor drops in production ( as soon as the economy turns around) will result in major spikes in the prices of coal and ng, as is well documented the case with oil,and commodities that I know something about ,such as corn or wheat.

In such a situation the output of a nuke could easily be worth many times it's actual cost,although it would be spread over the entire country and therefore not obvious to either the layman or the boosters of wind and solar whose scenarios depend to some extent on not noticeing this diffuse but very real cash saving.

Come on you wind guys and you solar guys.How much MORE would we be paying for ng and coal if we had no nukes?

And no crap to me please about being anti renewable,I have stated often that any wind solar and geothermal that can be built shoud be built in my opinion.:)

I would be very interested in seeing this topic explored here ,even if the treatment must be primarily speculative.

Somehow I think that the reality of the cliff on the tail end of the Hubbert Curve is just not a reality to the anti nuke folks who otherwise seem to get it in regard to ff depletion.

Civilization as we know it in the states can probably continue (severely crippled before too long, most likely)if the grid stands.If the lights go out,I guess I will have to quit farming,the little I still do,and just stand gaurd over our few crops with a deer rifle until my luck runs out.Unless OBama brings the boys home and assigns a couple to me.I guess we could feed a couple by ramping up the gardens and chickens,etc, or if they are willing to try an apple diet.

I talk Darwinism from the intellectual viewpoint but I would really hate to kill somebody,let alone getting it myself. A couple of guys to do my dirty work would be just the thing,I would lose a lot LESS sleep that way.

I have worked in nukes and unless they take a direct hit from the other kind of nuke they will probably stay on line whereas the gas and coal plants may not in the event of a war or a Black Swan.And if my guess is correct,a week w/o power in NYC or LA is enough to bring the whole house of cards down.

I am not sure about what you are asking.

do you doubt the requirement of 170 tons of natural uranium equivalent to operate a 1 GWe
reactor for roughly one year?

If not the numbers are easy to figure out.

how much capacity exists and is planned for depleted uranium and its uranium 235 content.
(side remark depleted uranium send to Iraq and other countries is not easily recoverable!)

michael

I am not sure about what you are asking.

You can say that again.  You do not understand your own subject matter.

do you doubt the requirement of 170 tons of natural uranium equivalent to operate a 1 GWe
reactor for roughly one year?

I'm telling you what you should have known before you started writing:  the amount of NU required depends on the level of enrichment and the tails assay.

I plugged some numbers into my spreadsheet and found that the yield of 3.75% EU is 10.6% of the NU feed at 0.35% tails assay, and 15.6% of the NU feed at 0.15% tails assay.  At a tails assay of 0.35%, 170 tons of NU will produce 18.0 tons of 3.75% EU.  At a tails assay of 0.15%, only 116 tons of NU is required to produce 18.0 tons.

If not the numbers are easy to figure out.

Indeed they are, which is why I have figured them out for you.  They invalidate your thesis.  Let me state this in plain language:  YOU ARE WRONG.

This is why I see your posts as an embarrassment for The Oil Drum:  they reinforce the impression that it will publish anything which agrees with the "doomer" mindset, no matter how many errors and self-contradictions it has.  This destroys TOD's credibility on everything, including peak oil.

Michael,
When discussing uranium supplies two additional issues need to be included 1) replacing some uranium with thorium
2)reactor performance with using a lower U235 content fuel to stretch supplies. If say twice as much energy can be generated using a higher U235 burn-up with only a 5% drop in peak reactor power this could allow present supplies to go much further. This would only be done if uranium costs became much higher than $150/Kg.

When discussing uranium supplies two additional issues need to be included 1) replacing some uranium with thorium

Why?????

Because breeding thorium to uranium in the blanket of a slow spectrum nuclear reactor is a potential big time source of uranium.

Dear Roger et al,

How much uranium 235 or Pu239 could be replaced in theory
and in the existing reactors with Thorium?
and how much is Thorium currently contributing?

My understanding is that right now it is so little that one can ignore it.

A further support for my hypothesis comes from the troubles in India with their "standard" reactors

they did not replace the missing uranium (from the embargo) with their supposed huge thorium resources.

for the long term future options
perhaps we can delay the thorium discussion for my chapter IV article and
concentrate on the actual situation with civilian and military secondary reserves.

michael

Michael,
I hope that when you discuss thorium resources you include the data of the Shippingport PWR when it was run as a breeder using Thorium and Uranium.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf62.html
Perhaps Thorium is not being used now because of the cheap re-cycled U235 from bombs. At last this needs to be considered.

You can tell from his question ("How much uranium 235 or Pu239 could be replaced in theory and in the existing reactors with Thorium?") that he doesn't know about Shippingport.  Further, he's probably not interested; he is working backwards from his conclusion and selecting only the data which fit.

This is why I, a pseudonymous blogger with no particular expertise in nuclear matters, am having so little difficulty blowing his claims out of the water (often using his own references as sources).  Both he and Dr. Cellier should have the sense to be embarrassed.

Both he and Dr. Cellier should have the sense to be embarrassed.

Not in the slightest. I stand by my decision to publish this article (and the previous one) in their current form. Michael started out with a set of very clearly and precisely formulated questions, and offered very solid data to support his conclusions.

He is not talking about the far future or the possible potential of nuclear power once additional resources and reactors shall have been developed. He only talked about a realistic outlook for the next few years, and that outlook is indeed bleak.

It is simply a fact that we currently consume 60,000 tons of uranium equivalent per year, whereas we only get 40,000 tons out of the ground. It is simply a fact that, of the remaining 20,000 tons, about 50% come from civilian sources, whereas the other 50% come from military sources. It is simply a fact that there are only about 50,000 tons of civilian reserves left that will last us for another five years. It is also a fact that the military reserves currently used come mostly from Russia and that the contract under which these reserves are being delivered will expire by 2013.

That is all that Michael is stating in this article, and this message deserves to be made publicly known.

Thanks for the clear summary. Seems pretty straight forward to me.

Engineer Poet,

You are not embarrassed when you read your comments?

Your comments are marked by a lot of polemics, in fact, they are polemics with a few numbers in it. Michael Dittmar certainly disobeyed debate-rules, when he called you anonymous, however in your speech is so much disgust besides these numbers, that it is indeed highly tendentious (and maybe silly, I don't know). If M. Dittmar did not understand your questions, mayby it is because you don't want to be understood, you just want to roll down you "enemy".

I am not an expert of this subject, however I would like to build up my mind on it. M. Dittmar has written a coherent article and someone who has also some expertise or seems to have (you in case) comes along with canons loaded with polemics.

For the moment I am inclined to believe that Dittmar is far more right than you are and that we should maybe turn our attention to something that is more certain to help us in the future than something for which it needs "experts" to figure this out (I am an expert myself in other fields and I know how to bend the truth so that it fits my wishes or the one's wishes who payed me). From my own experience I know that it is always very easy to destroy a work and that it is very hard to do the work from scratch. Maybe instead of your polemics you take this chance and produce an article of the same quality that proves that nuclear fission is the bright future.

-Snomm

Edit

As I have heard, at least in Germany there are 7 nuclear power plants out of 19 are off the grid, so maybe Dittmars prediction was not so wrong at all?

I am not an expert of this subject, however I would like to build up my mind on it.

Recommend you trust EngineerPoet over Dittmar. Really.

M. Dittmar has written a coherent article

But not consistent with the facts, even his own sources.

someone who has also some expertise or seems to have (you in case) comes along with canons loaded with polemics.

How would you respond to someone who consistently tried to mislead you on some important matter?

From my own experience I know that it is always very easy to destroy a work and that it is very hard to do the work from scratch.

Indeed.  This is because there are infinite ways to undertake a task in ways which cannot work, and many fewer which can.  Dittmar set out to paint a picture of the imminent demise of nuclear power due to lack of fuel, and forgot his pigments.

I am not a nay-sayer; you'll notice that my work here is calling the nay-sayers on their facts.  And I do promote ideas of my own.  Look at my posting history, particularly this.  That least piece took quite a bit of kicking around in the back of my head, plus all of my spare time for roughly a month.

Maybe instead of your polemics

Calling someone on their errors, omissions and misrepresentations is not a polemic; if there is anything controversial about Dittmar's own sources, to give one example, he shouldn't be relying on them.

you take this chance and produce an article of the same quality that proves that nuclear fission is the bright future.

That one is also kicking around in the back of my head.  However, I do not get paid to do this.  I have no academic position, no grants, no stipend.  Nothing I write here can be published for profit; there is no market for it.  It is my gift to the world.  It will get done when I get around to it, which is when the Muse moves me.

I disagree. The tone of the article and the omission of very simple mitigating factors seems intenionally misleading (not to mention his rabid comment that ask the community please not to discuss this matter). I am nowhere near close to even an armchair expert on nuclear power (I visit this site partly because I want that knowledge... not this propaganda), but even I can see the cherry picking and the biased rhetorical manipulation.

This article is trash. If TOD publishes blatant propaganda like this (and then allows the authors to try to quell areas of discussion in the name of "saving them for later"), it will lose a lot of readers, me among them.

This sounds harsh, and maybe like a stupid lame threat from a single reader no one cares about--and maybe it is--but really, this article is pretty bad.

Quote

``The tone of the article and the omission of very simple mitigating factors seems intenionally misleading"

why don't you quantify your statement?

michael

Tone: Cherry-picked data as pointed out above. General tone of pessimism fueled by these few non-randomly-selected data points. You don't really seem to have approached this by looking at possible challenges to the thesis you decided on before the article is written. Why do I suspect this? .... bring us to...

Mitigating Factors: I thought this had been covered. In addition to the things Engineer Poet (far more knowledgeable and articulate on the matter than me, and I don't pretend otherwise) brings up, and especially that you don't look at reasons why mining has been slow and why it might very likely pick up (an odd omission), I would also (as I said above) just generally add that you set up an article about short-term uranium supplies, never clearly mentioning that this is only short-term, and when that is pointed out, you tell us not to talk about it. I don't care if it is part of a series... people reading this may not know that, and they read this, and it is easy to walk away with the idea that uranium peak is imminent and a nuclear economy is folly. It is not clear in the first and last paragraph that this is about short-term supply only.

Sorry if my above comment was vague, but I thought the criticisms had been covered. My specific objection was about what seems the likely reason why, which in my mind, is propaganda (find data to support a thesis) posing as science (using data to arrive at a thesis).

I don't care if it is part of a series... people reading this may not know that, and they read this, and it is easy to walk away with the idea that uranium peak is imminent and a nuclear economy is folly. It is not clear in the first and last paragraph that this is about short-term supply only.

People might get the same idea of the author's opinions from Part I:

... it seems already now very difficult to stop the slow nuclear phase-out, with an annual decrease of about 1%, that has been observed during the past few years.

... only scenario (3), the slow phase-out, seems to be consistent with the current data. This trend might even be strengthened by the current financial world crisis, ... In addition, it is evident that unpredictable events such as earthquakes, accidents or wars can only result in a capacity decrease.

I don't care if it is part of a series... people reading this may not know that, and they read this, and it is easy to walk away with the idea that uranium peak is imminent and a nuclear economy is folly.

For the record, that is my concern also.

The USA alone has 17 new reactors with permits applied for, and another 3 applications anticipated.  The changes in the licensing process some years back eliminated some of the bureaucratic roadblocks (the operating license is automatically granted if the terms of the construction license are followed), but it is not hard to see some anti-nuclear administration using a manufactured fuel crisis to slam the brakes on these efforts.  The Obama administration specifically has a lot of support from coal interests, and has just denied loan guarantees for a new centrifuge enrichment plant in Ohio.  This may just be good sense (refusing to finance a business with large cost overruns), but if Dr. Dittmar's insinuation [that the USEC's gaseous-diffusion plant in Kentucky may have far less than its claimed capacity] is correct, it has a far more sinister interpretation.

I tend to agree.

TOD has been in a death (doom) spiral for the last year or so in my mind with respect to the quality of the content.

This article is just propaganda lightly wrapped in a few conveniently selected facts to suit an agenda.

Twelvepack,

I wasn't into this stuff on the net a year ago,still mainly into books then due to lack of broadband and lack of time.

But the articles here are at least two orders of magnitude imo better than any other similar site,on average.

And I see the occasional article such as the one on space based power as an opportunity for the rest of us as followers to rip such proposals into such small shreds that any followers of the site lacking in a knowledge of the sciences or technology can see space based power for what it is-a fantasy.

I learn more from the comments than from the articles myself,and post provocative comments sometimes just to see the refutations that usually follow.That's when I really learn something.
I could spend two weeks in a good university library or a month trolling the net and not learn half as much about uranium supplies as I can learn from this one article,especially as I have come to trust some of the regulars such as Alan who are professionally knowledgeable abd objective to a very refreshing degree.

But just in case there is a BETTER site,how about the link?

Exactly. TOD is unique in this respect.

Every news media outlet on the Internet these days offers readers the ability to comment ... but very few comments are usually offered, and no one ever reads them. People read newspapers because of their articles, not because of the comments.

Here at TOD, the situation is entirely different. The articles, albeit original in and by themselves, are only the seeds that lead into a rich discussion that is almost always full of excellent information -- information that is often much more valuable than the information provided in the original article.

But just in case there is a BETTER site,how about the link?

Kirks blog, easily, along with its discussion forum. Comprehensive engineering discussions, little vitriol or grandstanding.
http://thoriumenergy.blogspot.com/

Yep, you beat me to it. :-)

This site has picked up ~80% of the time I used to spend on TOD:

http://www.energyfromthorium.com/forum/index.php

The solutions to avoid power-down related to the back-slope of the fossil fuel age are within our grasp (IMHO) as are methods of decreasing global carbon intensity. This site is trying to solve these problems by promoting/developing viable solutions.

While TOD is still an excellent source of info with some posters having extremely insightful POV's, it just seems to be slanted more towards doom than I believe is justified these days.

[TOD] just seems to be slanted more towards doom than I believe is justified these days.

That irritates me quite a bit too, and I'm even responsible for some of the stuff posted here.

BTW, I just tried to register at energyfromthorium.com and got a bunch of errors which are obviously wrong.  Worse, when I tried to report the problem to the administrator, the admin mail address bounced!  It makes me wonder if anyone there has a clue.

He only talked about a realistic outlook for the next few years, and that outlook is indeed bleak.

If the situation is so bleak, it begs the question why some 3.5 million lb/yr of US yellowcake production was idle last year.  That is just one example of cherry-picked data he uses.

A bleak situation would be cause for a lot of activity.  Full operation of all mines and mills is one.  Re-enrichment of existing tails to extract more usable uranium is another.  We see none of this; plenty of capacity exists, but it is unused.

That is all that Michael is stating in this article

No, he's stating much more than that.  He's claiming that the entire world-wide nuclear industry is run by idiots who cannot arrange for their needs to be met on schedule.  He's also implying that the uranium futures markets have no savvy investors buying futures in anticipation of this supply crunch (NYMEX reports December 2009 at $49/lb).

What's more likely:  the experts and managers in the industry, with centuries of collective experience and their careers on the line, have all screwed the pooch, or a post-doc in high-energy physics from ETH isn't giving us all the facts?  Using Bayesian statistics, which likelihood increases after some of those facts have been brought to light by people like random engineers?

The two parts of this series so far have asked us to ignore the man behind the curtain.  It is an obvious attempt to mislead, and I will not stand for it.

"He's claiming that the entire world-wide nuclear industry is run by idiots who cannot arrange for their needs to be met on schedule."

Ummm, if you hadn't noticed, you are on The Oil Drum whose existence is based on the premise that much of industry and government is run by idiots who cannot arrange for their (and our) needs to be met on schedule. Yours seems like an odd critique of an article in this forum.

Unless we should always just assume that all those in charge of every industry--investment banking, real estate...are completely competent and could never ever make catastrophically bad decisions that would tragically affect us all?

That analogy did occur to me, but there is a very important difference:  the bulk of the world's oil export capacity is under the control of a cartel which tightly controls information about its reserves and is known to be lying.  While it may be possible that e.g. Kazakhstan is doing this, it beggars belief to think it about Australia.

Bankers are another matter entirely.  US mortgage bankers were essentially forced to make bad loans, and were rewarded for it.  It was a massive failure of policy, which you're not going to hear about because the persons responsible for the disastrous policies are the ones in power at the moment.

I'm willing to disagree with you on that one. I consider the ENTIRE failure was the fault of the republican congress and senate of the last Clinton era who eliminated all effective regulatory oversight of the banking and mortgage insurance industry. The ONLY difference between Canada and the US re-(the problem) was regulation and oversight. Only one smaller of the Cdn banks (CIBC) got caught holding only $325 million in bad paper, less than one quarter's profit for them. Bidding wars are still common for residential real estate in Toronto, though those areas affected by the auto industry are still suffering.

Lengould,

If you will post an address I will BUY you a copy.

I do appreciate the offer and sorry I'm late getting back to you but on Thursdays or Fridays each week my time is consumed travelling from where I work to where I live ... (I know, a huge waste of auto fuel but alternative transport is simply execrable, even Cdn fuel prices cannot force me onto it). I love any opportunity to improve my knowledge, and would welcome reading your material if the offer still holds. Regardless, communicate anyway, sounds like we have much in common (I'm a lifetime political conservative, though a social progressive and economically "radical free market", eg. governments should exploit free market incentive structures to encourage investment for profit into paths which benefit all members of society fairly, learn as you go, no pre-established conditions). My email address is "lengould (@) sympatico.ca" .

Lenny, my man, on this we can certainly agree.

Dohboi,

Would you like a free copy?

All you need do is post an address!
This is neccessarily a limited time offer as the issue will be off the shelf shortly and I am a poor hillbilly.
It is simply amazing how people can be so open minded and objective in one respect and yet believe anything they hear in another so long as it suits thier politics .

Thanks for your generosity. But isn't it available on line?

You can read all about the persons responsible for that policy failure and how it came to be in the
last issue of the National Review.

If you (the rhetorical you) are open minded enough to open a conservative publication.The same issue has a long article on he state of the state of California and will read like Kunstler candy or a well written discussion about the long downhill slide here on the oil Drum if you just pretend it's an NYT's piece about republican governers.

All ya need is a slightly open mind and a plain brown wrapper to bring it home......

LOL! I like your sense of humor.

Oh, I'm used to those plain brown wrappers.  Do you have any idea what it took to get Free Inquiry magazine into eastern North Carolina?  If the locals saw it, they'd have been on my doorstep trying to save me all day and all night.

Thanks for the heads up. I'm an omnivore when it comes to reading (otherwise how could I stand reading all of the rightwing dreck you good fella's dredge up? ;-P). I just find the stuff on the ridgid right (and also too frequently on the left, I'm afraid) so predictable it usually isn't worth the effort.

No need for brown paper back (for that publication, at least ;-))

I'll carefully conceal it in the WSJ I regularly pick up.

Dohboi,

I just knew somehow that you really do have an open mind.

You gotta plow thru a lotta dreck from both ends of the spectrum to get at the truth.

The fiscal crisis has been building since the thirties at least,when the first big programs were put in promising benefits to be paid out of future taxes by future taxpayers to then present days giftees .

And of course the pubs had a lot to do with the current crisis.

But they had a LOT OF HELP,and they are getting all the blame.

Even an eggsucking hound is entitled to a fair hearing BEFORE YOU SHOOT HIM.

Of course Limbaugh and his sort are wrong about many things but that is not a rational reason to assume that they are ALWAYS WRONG.

I would probably not have heard much about a lot of liberal snafus unless his kind picked at them until the rest of the media were forced to cover them.

A number of very powerful democrats are as deeply involved in this mess as any republican,but I can't post the story here ,it's too long and the wrong forum.

"A number of very powerful democrats are as deeply involved in this mess as any republican"

No argument from me on that front.

Significant agreement from me also. I see the problem less one of "republican bad democrat good" (obviously untrue) as one of the rise of radical free-market economics, a philosophy which had/has dignificant support from buth sides of the US political spectrum, eg W. Clinton. Ayn Rand, the Austrian School, Chicago School, Reganomics are all examples, convinced that an economy can operate properly with zero regulation, zero progressive taxation, zero potentially privately profitable services provided by government (education, roads and transport, energy, prisons, medical care) and that under such a regime, people who get wealthy deserved to get wealthy and the proof of that is simply the fact that they got wealthy, circular reasoning error if I ever saw it.

"a very important difference: the bulk of the world's oil export capacity is under the control of a cartel which tightly controls information about its reserves and is known to be lying."

Riiight. And the nuclear industry, with its long and deep connections to the military, is not the least bit secretive about anything and has never mislead the public about anything.

You're stretching credulity beyond the breaking point, there, my good man.

Alert! Alert! Americacentrism detected!

.

I case you didn't notice, that wasn't a completely serious comment. ;)

But still, there is a tendency among many Americans not to look beyond their borders: "if it doesn't work here, it can't work anywhere".

My humble apologies, Star. I certainly was talkin' 'merican there.

Scandinavians are, of course, above all ill repute. It must be those bracing cold winters and hot saunas that keep 'em so darned honest?

I hope you are aware that Karl Rove has Norwegian ancestry. ;)

"If the situation is so bleak, it begs the question why some 3.5 million lb/yr of US yellowcake production was idle last year."

I couldn't see that 3.5 million lb/yr figure in the link you gave. However, I did see that last year's mine production was 15% down on 2007.

Is the spare capacity just claimed capacity (rather like the claimed capacity of Saudi oil production) or is it real capacity? Has that capacity ever been reached for a significant period of time and, if so, were there any problems in operating at 100% capacity for an extended period? I doubt whether any production or refining operation of any resource ever operates at capacity over an extended period. If I'm right, what is the purpose of referring to claimed capacity, rather than actual production or, at best, likely sustained peak production?

The 3.5 million pounds is the difference between total ISL capacity (12 million lb/a) and production (8.5 million) from this page.

Ask yourself the purpose of referring to refinery utilization, and I think you'll answer your own question.

It is simply a fact that we currently consume 60,000 tons of uranium equivalent per year, whereas we only get 40,000 tons out of the ground. It is simply a fact that, of the remaining 20,000 tons, about 50% come from civilian sources, whereas the other 50% come from military sources. It is simply a fact that there are only about 50,000 tons of civilian reserves left that will last us for another five years. It is also a fact that the military reserves currently used come mostly from Russia and that the contract under which these reserves are being delivered will expire by 2013.

It seems to me that you and Dr. Dittmar are getting things backward. Your story is that we're not producing enough uranium, have been covering the deficit from military stockpiles, but soon — OMG! — we're going to run out of those too.
"All die, and oh! the embarrassment."

In fact, it's the other way around. In the wake of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia have been running down their military supplies of fissile materials by converting 'Megatons into Megawatts'. This had the effect of displacing a large fraction of civilian uranium production for over 20 years. Now the end of that is coming. Accordingly, the price of, exploration for, and production of uranium are all going up.

It's certainly possible that there will be some glitches in the short term, as production ramps up, but that says nothing about the prospects for nuclear power in the long — or even the medium — term.

It's certainly possible that there will be some glitches in the short term, as production ramps up, but that says nothing about the prospects for nuclear power in the long — or even the medium — term.

... and neither does Michael's article. What his article points out is that we have a "flow through" problem ahead of us that will hit us around or shortly after 2013. He points out that especially those countries that rely heavily on nuclear power for their generation of electricity without having in place uranium mining operations of their own, i.e., countries such as France, Sweden, and Japan, will be particularly vulnerable to this problem.

Certainly not France. French centrifuge enrichment is nearly online and Eurodif gasseous diffusion hasn't begun dismantling yet nor will it be dismantled for years. If theres a shortage in the uranium market, France will have an enormous amount of enrichment capacity and depleted uranium to draw upon while more mines open up.

MICHEALD,

Maybe the guys in India have'nt switched to thorium yet because the business aspects of the switch don't yet make sense,especially if they have concluded that they can ramp up thier uranium supplies fairly soon.

And although I am no expert I will hazard a guess hat working out the details is going to be a time consuming and costly process that might involve some reactor modifications and extensive down time.

Later ,newly built reactors might incorporate the necessary features neede to use the thorium fuel or a fuel mix incorporating considerable thorium.

Bullshit.
Thorium has been a nation security objective for 30 years in India and now they just dropped it.
It's not working techically as they announced and I posted a while back.

If you want to burn thorium build heavy water reactors and add thorium for reduced efficiency.

There are 20 in Canada, 18 in India, 2 in China and 4 in South Korea. Thorium is not presently fueling any of them.

There are 439 nuke power stations in the world only 10% could use any thorium at present.

Well, actually there are 22 HPWR power reactors in Canada. You also left out Argentina, Brazil, Romania to name a few other locations.

Understanding is that the Hwater reactors can burn a lot of different stuff fairly efficiently, esp. Candu because of on-power re-fueling. Expect the issue is far more economics than physics.

One possibility for CANDU is to use reclaimed PWR uranium (~1% U-235) blended with 30% ThO2 to achieve 0.7% U-235.  The breeding ratio might be less than 1, but if it's greater than the breeding ratio for U-238 the fuel would still be stretched considerably.  The leftover uranium could be recovered from the spent fuel the same way and recycled.

EP
Do you think it will be possible to replace the existing reactors and "hot" plumbing such as steam generators in existing plants economically while saving the turbines,containments,cooling towers and other big money infrastructure?

And would the amount of space and its configuration be adequate to up grade to new generation reactors?

Given the large differences in design between the 70's plants and the latest, I doubt that it would be worthwhile to try to re-use containments.  Each re-installation would be different, so the NRE would be quite a bit higher than building new.

Molten-salt reactors might be an exception to this.  The minuscule size of a MSR at even a low power density of 150 kW/liter (20 cubic meters for 3 GWth, a cylinder about 3 meters diameter and 3 meters tall) could fit into just about anything even if it was built as a single unit.  If you built a bunch of 600 MWth modules and re-powered plants with those, no problem; a 600 MWth module at 150 kW/l might be about 1 meter diameter (without the breeding blanket and neutron shield) and a bit over 5 m tall.  You could probably squeeze those in through the existing doors in the structure.  If the containment building was big enough to hold several standard modules and the associated hardware, I don't see any show-stoppers.  A PWR containment building is going to be vastly over-spec for a reactor with a coolant that is not pressurized and can't burn, of course.

The biggest issue might be uprating the steam turbines to handle higher temperatures and pressures.  MSRs run hotter than LWRs, so something would have to handle hotter input steam.

What a tenditious article. I love it! Bring on the climate change article! Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by Al Gore as a way for him to get rich off of Hollywood Ultra- Liberals.

I bet the entire issue is more about economics than physical production constraints. Currently, there is more or less sufficient fuel for the world's reactors for the next few days or so.

Who cares about next month, anyway?

I don't know about the outlook for Uranium production over the next three to ten years, but it will likely be a lot less than people expect. Why?

- Less investment funds available to start and operate mines to the point of return (on investment).

- Less funds available to companies to process ores into fuel.

- Current fuel/reactor technology is obsolete, wasteful and expensive. In a deflation, the returns on natural fuel diminish (less cash customers for electricity) but costs rise relatively.

- A less favorable subsidy environment. In real terms, most governments are insolvent; they are trying to beggar 'growth' from their neighbors while all deflate. While some grow, it is at the expense of those that don't, there isn't an expansion to provide excess funds for all subsidies.

- BTW ... Most countries are subsidizing the bank business, not the power business.

- NIMBY. Do you want a Uranium mine down the block from you? Neither does anyone else. Again, the US government cannot 'buy out everyone' like they did in the heyday of the 'Red Scare'. One reason is the success of current de- nuclearization efforts. With the cold war won, it is hard to ramp up weapons- grade production and its step- child, civilian nuclear fuel production. Let the lawsuits fly!

- The power plant liability issue is due for a return to center stage. No blanket liability, no US nuclear industry. With the government rapidly going broke, who will pay when 'Scofflaw 7' melts down?

Don't tell me it won't happen. It's inevitable, people make mistakes.

- Reactor construction slowdown. @ $10 a pop, new reactors (of an obsolete design) are no investment. Building reactors is risky, particularly with lots of people living nearby. There are water issues, waste issues, evacuation issues, and that pesky liability issue. Each of these would justify an article. All of this orbits closely around the question that NOBODY EVER ASKS!!!!

What is the electricity going to be used for?

During the cold war, weapons material production was the priority, which favored the (obsolete) pressurized water reactor designs; it wasn't a question of what the use of electricity was, it was rather, what will the nuclear fuel be used for besides H- bombs. Bomb making was a national security given. This 'given' no longer exists.

As the depression wears on and people are schooled into doing with less there will be much less need for power stations of all kinds. People without money cannot afford electricity!

What is needed is an integrated use/production/distribution approach. Supporting comsumption (waste) while ignoring the other components with the ol' head in the sand approach is useless in a deflation environment.

Utilities need to retire coal power stations coupled with a stringent conservation program. Cutting electric use in half (removing the required Mw's of coal generation), replacing the remainder w/ nat gas and use existing nukes as the balance necessary, replace all FF with solar/geothermal/wind w/ gas load balancing. Consumption would be prioritized; residential lighting first, electrified rail, street/security lighting, and further prioritize downward from those three. Most people can live without A/C and commercial electric use is very wasteful.

Again, this is not an option, it is inevitable. We can act pre- emptively or let circumstances act for us.

A footnote: lurking behind all these nuclear shenanigans is that nemesis the 'eel-ectric car'.

Fuhgettaboutit!

Cars happened (like a biblical plague) because there was a trillion barrels of almost free crude lying around with nothing else to use it for. The 'free' oil begat 1.5 billion cars. What will $150 oil (or equivalent) or smokingly expensive electricity beget?

Go ahead, go ahead and answer that one, car people!

You're too US-centric in your outlook. Your "vision" may happen in the US, I don't know, that's up to you. However, Germany, France, Canada and Japan have already recorded growth quarters and declared the recent short recession over, and at least Canada's carefully planning at leas two new reactors already. Bids are in, closing's being slightly delayed by this downturn. I know, that's heresy on this site, but so be it. Go ahead, have your fun.

Ontario Power rejected all bids for two new nukes.

Alan

Gotta love those bureaucrats, they have all the answers.

Germany, France, Canada and Japan have already recorded growth quarters and declared the recent short recession over.

Well, I guess that's that.

Happy days are here again. Let's party.

"Germany, France, Canada and Japan have already recorded growth quarters"

Hmm, "recorded" has an air of finality about it. GDP estimates always get revised. Personally, I'd wait for at least the next revision before being so certain about it.

What you seem to be saying is that correlation doesn't imply causation. This is certainly true. Michael's analysis is based on observations of past behavior, and he uses correlation techniques to make predictions about the future. Thus, if the price of nuclear fuel were to go up sufficiently, then mining operations could and would increase.

Several of the commentators argued that the observed mining limitations are more of an economical than of a physical problem, i.e., meeting the demand by drawing on military supplies didn't happen because of a lack of ability to produce more fuel from uranium mines, but rather, it was the other way around. Since military reserves were available that weren't needed any longer, the price of nuclear fuel was depressed enough to make additional mining non-profitable.

Does it really matter, which interpretation of the observed data is correct?

What we do know is that the price of uranium fuel pretty much followed that of fossil fuel, i.e., when the oil price exploded in 2007, the same happened to the price of nuclear fuel ... and yet, no increased uranium mining resulted from these higher fuel prices.

Why is that?

The reason is probably that starting up new uranium mines or increasing the output of existing mines requires substantial up-front investments that take time to get, and that the price of the fuel didn't stay up long enough for these investments to materialize.

What happened in the summer of 2008 is that demand destruction finally set in and brought the price of fossil fuels down ... and with it also the price of nuclear fuel. In fact, demand destruction set in faster for nuclear fuel than for fossil fuel, because nuclear fuel is more expensive to produce. Why bother with nuclear, if we can produce enough electricity from coal at a lower price?

So once again, does it really matter, which interpretation is correct?

For market forces to work, causation is not important. Correlation is enough. The market adjusts its prices primarily in response to the actual situation concerning demand and supply. It doesn't care about the reasons for that situation. The picture is tainted a bit by the influence of speculators, who do take their own assessment of reasons for the actual situation into account in their investment strategies.

Will the price of nuclear fuel rise in 2013 and beyond due to the shortfalls that Michael predicts?

In a recent piece, I analyzed the situation about the price of fossil fuels. The same applies to nuclear fuel, as the two prices are coupled. As long as fossil fuel is cheap, nuclear fuel cannot become very expensive. I argued that the price of oil cannot rise much above $200/barrel (at the current Dollar value), because the market cannot take such high prices. We would be spending a too high pecentage of our total GDP on energy. Thus, demand destruction will keep the price of oil down below the $200/barrel price (except for possible short spikes). This also limits the price of nuclear fuel.

I agree with the argument that more military nuclear resources will be converted to civilian use after 2013, because it is available, and it may be cheaper to use those supplies than to increase mining operations. Both the US and Russia will be sufficiently hungry for cash that they'll be happily parting with their military nuclear reserves for the right price.

There is a question what this will do to the economies of countries like France, Sweden, and Japan that will need to buy these nuclear fuels from the US and Russia after 2013 at a substantially increased price.

What we do know is that the price of uranium fuel pretty much followed that of fossil fuel, i.e., when the oil price exploded in 2007, the same happened to the price of nuclear fuel ... and yet, no increased uranium mining resulted from these higher fuel prices.

I'm pretty sure that's wrong. There was a dramatic increase in uranium prices that did parallel the rise in oil prices, but I believe it peaked well before oil prices did, and declined specifically because it resulted in a flurry of interest in new mining activities. Perhaps the actual mining output did not rise, because it wasn't immediately needed, but the market was convinced that it would rise if prices continued at such a high level. So they dropped.

I'm pretty sure that's wrong. There was a dramatic increase in uranium prices that did parallel the rise in oil prices, but I believe it peaked well before oil prices did, and declined specifically because it resulted in a flurry of interest in new mining activities. Perhaps the actual mining output did not rise, because it wasn't immediately needed, but the market was convinced that it would rise if prices continued at such a high level. So they dropped.

Yes, the nuclear fuel price peaked already in the summer of 2007, i.e., about a year earlier than the oil. The reason is that nuclear fuel is more expensive to produce than fossil fuels, and therefore is more vulnerable to demand destruction.

I agree that the high nuclear fuel prices of late 2006 and early 2007 must have led a good number of people to think about an increase in mining activity, but the inertia in the system made it impossible to act immediately, and the same will happen in 2013, i.e., it is illusory to assume that mining projects can/will be ramped up over night. It will happen eventually, if and when the market conditions are right, but a temporary nuclear fuel shortage is still to be expected in 2013/14.

Whether or not that shortage will result in an increased production later will depend on the state of the general economy. As the 2013/14 time period coincides with the projected end of the oil plateau, the recession may be so severe by then that the demand for the commodity may shrink faster than the supply.

... nuclear fuel is more expensive to produce than fossil fuels ...

Actually a lot less expensive, of course.

(How fire can be domesticated)

it is illusory to assume that mining projects can/will be ramped up over night.

None of the other components of an operating nuclear plant can be either, so why the worry about fuel?

For a July 2015 startup, suppose fuel rods are installed April 2015, delivered March 2015, assembled from pellets starting December 2014.  Pellets are sintered from LEU oxide September 2014, LEU oxide delivered August 2014, converted from LEUF6 June 2014... you get the idea.  If it's 5 years from breaking ground to first criticality, that 2015 plant is going to have the golden shovel treatment next summer.  Somewhere around that time somebody is going to turn a Memorandum of Understanding about fuel deliveries to an actual contract, and money will change hands.  Nothing is going to happen overnight, or needs to.

The reason is that nuclear fuel is more expensive to produce than fossil fuels, and therefore is more vulnerable to demand destruction.

Your first statement is wrong and your conclusion doesn't follow.

Steve,

Two hundred dollar oil will begat hundred mpg tiny ice cars,war, and enough wind and solar to recharge a hell of a lot of electrics.If the wind ain't blowing,you'll just have to put off your trip to Walmart till it is,or be a little more careful about getting caught with a dead battery.

And it looks as if ng will save our automotive butts for another decade at least.

I'm not saying that's a GOOD THING,just that it's going to happen.

As an investor in real estate I would start seriously looking at rentals to hold for a while within ten miles of so of lots of jobs-they will probably fetch a good rent premium when gas is ten bucks and short range plug ins are common.

Unless of course i were a believer in teotwawki.

We might even see a new incarnation of the company house-business owners may buy up some apartment buildings or condos near thier facilities for the use of thier employees.

I think you're not sufficiently including the impact of a contracting economy on, well, everything, including the dollar, investment decisions and so on. It is yet to be seen whether we have entered a depressionary spiral. I think we have. Everywhere I look practically people are either going bankrupt, losing their homes or paying down debt — they are hunkering down.

On top of that, we could likely use just 5% of the world's productive capacity to supply basic needs. The remaining capacity was built as a consequence of the fossil-fuel party we've been having. I believe Marx said something or other about this mechanism ;-).

We have yet to see the impact millions of unemployed (and growing) will have on the world, I think. We are like the cartoon coyote hovering in the air before he falls.

Mac,

The measure of your argument can be made by simply looking and asking around.

Ask your friends and associates and they will tell you; nobody has any money!

The world/USA is filled with 'credit' and 'loans' but no cash. Only some old- timers (who are dying) and some government employees have enough cash to live the middle- class life. The great bulk of the rest of the world's citiznes are engulfed in their own debts. With no cash, the financiers with access to credit can bid up oil/energy to $200 per barrel, but the people who actually use it cannot - or will not - pay. Over longer terms there is no support for $200 oil.

Pick a country; China! Ghina has savings, right? Yss, some people in China have savings, most don't. China is a third- world country where most people eke out a living on a few dollars a day. A lot of China's savers are poised to lose all when the real estate and equities markets crash.

Ditto, America. The billionaires have cash, and gold, foreign currencies and real estate. How about anyone else?

Our modern world was built to scale. Before industrialization the humans used craft methods. Humans made very small numbers of beautiful things that the users treasured. Even commonplace items like hammers and saucers were carefully and quite well done. The craft ways made expensive goods that few could afford. Prices were high because of the high costs of inputs, mainly materials and skilled labor.

With industrial process came low prices. The equilibrium price - the price where the market for a good is 'cleared' or the good sold in its entirety - fell to very low levels that allowed large numbers of people to become customers. At the same time, manufacturing created increasing numbers of wage earners, who would buy these new, inexpensive goods. Aside from the deterioration in quality, a critical issue to lower equilibrium price is that input costs must also be very low. If input costs rise, then the finished good's price must also rise. If it rises too high, its original 'low price' market disappears. The equilibrium market shrinks, the margins contract.

What happens next is the shrinking margins must be added to the other input costs. In America, the tactic to adjust has been to send high- wage jobs to a low- wage country. This reduces marginal costs and keeps prices low. However, doing so shrinks sales as there are fewer wage earners with money to buy the goods. This tactic is simply an expedient that becomes self- defeating to businesses that use it.

Contracting margins is the stumbling block of the electric utilities and the car makers. They are all in a deflation trap, the difference this time is the rising input cost is petroleum. It really cannot be substituted for at the same time it is absolutely necessary. The effect on the economy makes this less of a credit or even an energy crisis (which is one reason peak oil or energy costs aren't in the public eye) rather a profit crisis.

Increased marginal costs - mainly of petroleum - have eroded the profits of businesses. These cannot raise prices because they lose customers. With fewer sales, the entire edifice of sales- driven wage earning growth crumbles. This is what is happening now!

In the energy industry, the costs of ramping up electric production come face to face with the great problem of declining use of electricity! How can building multi- billion dollar generating plants hope to square with this? Raising KWH costs to recover costs will cut demand further, more costs, more demand cuts, eventually the utility has too few customers to support 'stranded' costs.

Same with the cars. Demand is falling because of increasing input costs, mostly embedded fuel costs beginning in 1999. There is probably as much petroleum in a car as there is steel; it's thousands of parts and employees - plus dealers and services and the highway auto 'ecosphere' - all float on a mighty ocean of petroleum. There is petroleum to the car before the car is even assembled. Price one not in dollars (which are subsidies) but in crude oil. Calculate the cost of a car with oil- per- car cost increasing 500%, as it has done since 1998!

This is why the car business is finished, because the 500% is just getting started. Even when overall money costs decline - because of cash value deflation - the relative price in oil per car will continue to increase. As it does, the number of customers for the car will decline, more costs mean more declines. Eventually there will be too few customers to support the massive stranded costs of all the factories, shipping terminals, ocean- going ferries, rail cars, dealerships, garages, highways, bridges, tunnels, gas stations ... whew!

This process has been underway for at least ten years. The entire 'bubble economy' has been a strategy since the 1970's (Japan) and 1980's (USA) to 'hedge' increasing energy costs. Energy costs and 'independence' have been an industrial factor since 1973 and the Arab Oil Embargo. The same hedging tactic is being tried right now in 'cheap labor' China. It cannot work, it won't work, it never has worked. All that is left is the destruction of money economies trying to make the unmakeable work.

Don't believe me, go outside and look around. See for yourself. Look at how many solar panels are on roofs and then look at the number of roofs. Look how many small- and plug- in electric cars there are and then look at 4x4's and SUV's. The stranded costs are in the roofs, the 4x4's and SUV's. The costs can't 'disappear' they have to be paid. As business and government keep trying to support the status quo, and more costs are added to the total due. These added cost take away every single chance that nuclear energy or electric cars can ever be more than a topic of conversation @ The Oil Drum!

In fact, without funds = and profits = flowing to manufacturers, their ability to afford to make small electric cars disappears. No big cars means no small cars; the stranded costs cannot be recovered by the smaller profits of the electic cars. If the cars are priced high enough to cover costs, the cars are too expensive for their intended customers to afford. This is already the case with the hybrids that sell at premiums to equivalent ICE cars.

With nuclear energy, the costs are enormoue. Additional spending toward more capacity is a fatal error. The outcome is unfinished plants @ massive costs sunk and no chance to either finish the plants that would in any case produce electricity that is too expensive for anyone to afford.

This is deflation. People have never lived it and don't understand it. It's not like 'anti- inflation'. It is an entirely different economic life- form. It cannot be hedged against, it cannot be 'cured'. This deflation cannot be solved by large- capital massively costly inputs, which have triggered the problem in the first place. The only solution is less.

The simple and only solution, all else is folly!

Great post! Thanks, Steve, for taking the time.

The world/USA is filled with 'credit' and 'loans' but no cash. Only some old- timers (who are dying) and some government employees have enough cash to live the middle- class life. The great bulk of the rest of the world's citiznes are engulfed in their own debts.

You want to know a "secret"? The sum of debt and credit is zero. Western middle class produce stuff worth around $30,000 per capita per year, which is very much sufficient for a middle class life.

A lot of China's savers are poised to lose all when the real estate and equities markets crash.

We don't eat money or live in money. We eat food and live in houses. We, globally, produce enough real material wealth to support our lifestyles (obviously, since we live them and aliens doesn't give us stuff), and we can potentially produce much more. Cash flows are just lubricant, tokens we use for organization. It isn't the real wealth, just a representation of it.

In America, the tactic to adjust has been to send high- wage jobs to a low- wage country. This reduces marginal costs and keeps prices low. However, doing so shrinks sales as there are fewer wage earners with money to buy the goods. This tactic is simply an expedient that becomes self- defeating to businesses that use it.

This is not supported by facts. Western countries, even those who does not indebt themselves like America, have managed to increase jobs AND GDP per capita while shipping jobs to low-wage countries. Actually, economic theory, derived from and supported by real-world statistics, show that such job exports are benificial for both sender and receiver country.

In the energy industry, the costs of ramping up electric production come face to face with the great problem of declining use of electricity! How can building multi- billion dollar generating plants hope to square with this? Raising KWH costs to recover costs will cut demand further

Electricity use is expanding, in a slightly longer perspective than a year. Electricity use is expected to rise again in 2010 in the US and we'll return to a few percent expansion yearly world-wide.

The stranded costs are in the roofs, the 4x4's and SUV's. The costs can't 'disappear' they have to be paid.

This is nonsense. These things aren't costs, stranded or otherwise. They're assets. They have already been produced.

by the smaller profits of the electic cars. If the cars are priced high enough to cover costs, the cars are too expensive for their intended customers to afford.

No, they are not. There's plenty of money for electric cars. In 1995, it took 31 weeks of median family income to buy a average car. In 2009, it takes just 22 weeks. We have enormous headroom when it comes to cars.

With nuclear energy, the costs are enormoue.

No, they are not "enormoue". Nuclear energy is cheap.

Additional spending toward more capacity is a fatal error. The outcome is unfinished plants @ massive costs sunk and no chance to either finish the plants that would in any case produce electricity that is too expensive for anyone to afford.

Again nonsense. As soon as a nuke is built, energy is produced with VERY little effort, and the effort it took to build it is history. That is PRECISELY the kind of investments we need to do.

This is deflation. People have never lived it and don't understand it. It's not like 'anti- inflation'. It is an entirely different economic life- form. It cannot be hedged against, it cannot be 'cured'.

Again economic nonsense. Inflation can be cured by printing money.

The only solution is less.

The only solution is more, actually.

I think it all depends on the health of the economy (how's that for an obvious statement?).

Looking more closely, I think this bubble has a lot of deflating left in it. The consumer (which apparently represents 70% of the U.S. economic activity, however this fellow points out some glaring errors with that calculation) I think is currently in stage 2 below.

Stages Leading to Depression Thinking
Stage 1: Spend freely because the future will be bigger than the past; promotions, higher housing values, etc. mean going into debt is considered 'safe'
Stage 2: Watch spending; wait and see if there will be a recovery; mixed signals coming from various places
Stage 3: Clearly no recovery is forthcoming; treat every dollar as precious and buy only what's absolutely needed. Debts are discharged in any way possible whether by choice or otherwise.

Once "the consumer" reaches stage three, that portends a major shift in investment decision thinking. At this point no businessman in their right mind takes even the relatively 'normal' risks we have seen the past few decades.

There is some evidence of this shift in thinking already. Several green business consultant friends are reporting their sales calls go something like this:

Green Business Consultant: Hi, I can save you money and make you look good to your employees and customers by saving energy and going green
Prospect: Really? If you can't tell me how to survive the next two quarters, I really don't have time for you.

This psychological shift will have an enormous impact and will make sure big mutli-billion dollar projects are whittled down in number.

There will be a few more boondoggles, of course, there always are because sometimes the inertia is too great (see the restored Energy Department funding for hydrogen for an example).

Orlov captures it well in his only marginally tongue-in-cheek blog post:

The combined weight of all these boondoggles is slowly but surely pushing us all down. If it pushes us down far enough, then economic collapse, when it arrives, will be like falling out of a ground-floor window. We just have to help this process along, or at least not interfere with it. So if somebody comes to you and says, “I want to make a boondoggle that runs on hydrogen” — by all means encourage him! It’s not as good as a boondoggle that burns money directly, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Boondoggles to the Rescue

Building more nuclear plants at the cusp of Energy Descent and the next (and, to my mind, final) depression certainly qualifies as boondoggles. I think the money and energy is better used for other purposes (like moving heaven and earth to get off oil, coal and uranium).

P.S. Thanks for the post Steve, I think it's well thought through even if jeppen doesn't.

Building more nuclear plants at the cusp of Energy Descent and the next (and, to my mind, final) depression certainly qualifies as boondoggles.

I think you'll say the same thing during some minor recession in 2021.

Calculate the cost of a car with oil- per- car cost increasing 500%, as it has done since 1998!

I've seen different numbers. Obviously it depends on the size of the car to some degree.

This article - http://tinyurl.com/llp5vc - says (p. 2):

20,000 MJ + 190,000 MJ per tonne of car

If one MJ is 0.00017060421187678 BOE, that's:

3.4 BOE + 32.3 BOE per 2,200 pounds of car

Most cars in the U.S. today weigh more than 2,200 pounds. My Honda CRV weighs a bit more than 3,300 and my wife's Acura TSX does too. So by this formula both of our cars come in at almost 52 BOE.

I'd take those numbers with a grain of salt, as they're not related to the actual form of energy input.  If you took it as electricity, a 1.5 tonne car would have almost 85,000 kWh invested in it.  That's close to $8500 in energy alone at typical prices.  This energy certainly isn't in the steel.  A quick search turns up ~230 kWh/ton of electricity for a mini-mill and 475 kWh/ton for an integrated mill.  Even aluminum is only about 14500 kWh/ton, and that's all electric.

BTW, re "teogawki":  the end of <blank> as we know it?  None of the "g" possibilities I can think of are obviously correct.

Steve, even if credit and cash are in short supply, somebody is going to be paying for electric power and there will be something to trade for LEU.  If LEU is cheaper per kWh than coal, the LEU producers will be paid.  Bet on it.

Steve,
Maybe you failed to notice but I did qualify my comment with "unless you believe in teotwawki",as you obviously do.

I read all your stuff with great interest,as you support your positions well,and of course you may be right-I have stated here several times that I take the possibility of teowawki seriously.

I even spend a good bit of time preparing for it-just in case!

But from the first I have been a believer in survival here in the states,tough times,stagnation,grossly lowered expectations,all that I have said here before.

I also have maintained from the first(much earlier than most others here) that Uncle Sam will pay his way out of his hole by printing as much funny money as is needed to get the job done and FIND a way to get it into circulation.How about a ten thousand dollar stimulus check next spring for every citizen?Personally I think any body who thinks inflation can't trump deflation is simply delusional and has not stopped to think that adding zeros to fiat money is not a hard thing to do-and that if a FEDERAL JUDGE backed up by federal marshalls says that you WILL ACCEPT THIS BILL AS PAYMENT,you will EITHER ACCEPT IT or THE GAME IS OVER ANY WAY,one way or another,and the discussion is academic only.

So if you have picked up a house dirt cheap,and life continues,you stole it,figuratively speaking,because after the inflation,the debt is essentially cancelled if you borrow NOW.

And if you pay cash,your cash would have been inflated out of existence if life continues,and worthless if it doesn't.And it may be confiscated by one means or another if things deflate badly enough any way.Best convert any excess cash to a hard assett of some sort useful to you later.I'm long on diesel fuel ,ammo(for trade mostly,in the worst case) fertilizer,tools,boots,coats,nails nuts and bolts .......

You heard it from OFM-life will be tough and prices will be inflated and growth will be a word applied mostly to shade trees and tomatos and little kids but the world will not end.Commuting costs will sky rocket and houses located right will be very good investments-if bought cheap.Of course I may be off a lot on my timing,and I may be wrong altogether.

But I don't think so.

ps all bets off once war erupts but if we win inflation rules just the same

Thorium has been a nation security objective for 30 years in India and now they just dropped it.
It's not working techically as they announced and I posted a while back.

This is, at best, an oversimplification and missrepresentation of a very complex situation. It has a lot more to do with politics and diplomacy than it does with technical issues -- though they do interact.

India has not dropped its committment to long-term nuclear self-sufficiency based on Thorium. But the US has long opposed India's program, and has used sanctions to try to maneuver India into becoming a client of the US LWR reactor industry. With mixed success.

Rather than opening this can of worms here and trying to sort it out, I'm just going to suggest this link. If anyone has other links that they consider better sources for detailing the situation with India's nuclear program, please post in a reply.

a client of the US LWR reactor industry

WHAT industry ?

One reactor maker is 20% owned by Shaw, that is about it. GE has not started a new reactor in (SWAG) a dozen years. Combustion Engineering and B&W are basically out of the game.

Alan

Here they seem to think thorium is still on.

(How fire can be domesticated)

That particular advanced heavy water reactor exists only in the mind of this dork.

What really STINKS about India's nuclear 'thorium' program with CANDUs is that it is a totally transparent lie.

The CANDU reactor given by Canada was used to provide fission materials for their atomic bomb the 60 kt 'Smiling Buddha' 1974.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiling_Buddha

And 1998, they exploded a similar 'peaceful' hydrogen bomb.

http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/India/IndiaShakti.html

So much for the Peaceful Atom.

Yet the nukers want us to believe that this is all for the greater energy good of India.

Gimme a break.

This coincides roughly with the year 2013, when the annual delivery of 10,000 tons of natural uranium equivalent from Russian military stocks to the USA will end.

The USEC failed to buy Russian warheads for conversion to reactor fuel because the USEC felt it to be contrary to their best economic interests. This irresponsible behavior was reported by Joseph Stiglitz, who noted that we should make every attempt to secure this material which is otherwise at risk for proliferation. [Who says that the Russians might not sell a bomb? Dulles offered the French two bombs before Dien Bein Phu.]

Help me out here, people. Does this mean my cornucopian dream of a massive nuclear build-out over the next 40 years is bullshit? Aw no, don't say that!

well, yes, that is somehow the conclusion from the real data about nuclear energy
as it is right now. For the long term future lets see what comes in the next two chapters

this dream better ends soon!

interesting cartoon. Fits nicely with the statements one can find
from the big uranium players like Rio Tinto, Cameco, Areva Uranium one to name just a few.

These people do not care too much about what happens beside their extraction
of valuable minerals somewhere.

Niger seems to be a special nightmare story for the locals!
There are other similar ones from many other countries and regions in africa and elsewhere!

michael

These people do not care too much about what happens beside their extraction of valuable minerals somewhere.

Oh dear God... do I really need to point out who places value on these minerals? Let's start with me on my end of the kyeboard and you on yours.

Yes, that's what they care about. We pay them to care.

Michael,
A very good exposition of why we will be facing a uranium shortage in the NEAR future!

1.) Mixing HEU from weapons into natural uranium to 3.5-4.5% in LWRs saves a lot of money in processing. It seems less uranium processing(isotropic separation) is going on! Why if there is an imminent nuke rennaisance?

2.) It needs to be emphasized how much uranium fuel needs to be loaded into these new reactors just to start them up. The 500 tons is a bit confusing because you only need 300 tons of enriched LWR fuel and your natural uranium burn up rate of 170 tons per Gwa turns into 22 tons per Gwa of fuel or a burn up rate of 50 Gwd/MTU. Initial fuel charge alone of a dozen new reactors will take 12 x 500 = 6000 tons of natural uranium (+10% of annual world production)--'size of the tap'!

This is strong evidence of a looming shortage!

3.) It's also interesting that uranium mining is so concentrated 90% in just six countries. How will these few countries be able to radically increase their production to serve world appetite for uranium? If it was well distributed then a giant increase would be easier.

Have there been a lot of new uranium mines opening up?

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-the-return-of-the-uranium-boom
http://www.denverpost.com/ci_9747966

And there's the problem that worldwide ore concentrations are falling except in Canada.

Australia seems slow to increase uranium mining.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/06/12/2596025.htm

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_ura_pro-energy-uranium-production

I would also add that most of the new plants are in China, South Korea, India and Japan which lack domestic deposits.
Russia is not a big uranium exporter but Kazakhstan is.

Doesn't look good for the nukers!

It's also interesting that uranium mining is so concentrated 90% in just six countries. How will these few countries be able to radically increase their production to serve world appetite for uranium?

Uh, by processing more ore?

Actually, the fact that uranium mining is concentrated in just a few countries is prima facia evidence that there is no shortage of uranium, and won't likely be one anytime soon.

Why, you ask? Well, because it most likely means that the mining industries in other countries haven't considered it worth looking. The market isn't large, and it's well served by the handful of sources that are producing.

The geochemistry of ores and ore bodies is well understood. It's not my area and I claim no special expertise, but according to what I've read of the processes that lead to the formation of uranium in ore bodies, you wouldn't expect uranium ores to be especially rare or concentrated in just a few unique locations. The processes of dissolution and precipitation involved in forming uranium ores are pedestrian, and the conditions for forming uranium ores exist and would have existed in many regions over most of the world. Nothing as exotic and rare as the kimberlite pipes that brought diamonds up from the deep earth in only a few places.

Any country that is large enough to have varying geological regions is likely to have exploitable uranium ores. Whether it's economical to go find and develop them depends on the going price for uranium and how it's expected to develop. If uranium were really in short supply, you'd see the hills crawling with prospectors with geiger counters, and there's be tens of thousands of small mining operations spread all around the world.

Roger,

You forgot to add a comparision to the concentration of major oil ,ng,and coal reserves.;)

A few minutes search indicates that there are uraniun deposits ready to go lacking only mining permits in places where there are no other mines of any kind.

Once the depletion issue takes an UNMISTAKEABLE bite out of everybody's backside,the permits will be forthcoming unless the one thing that never changes,changes.

Actually, the fact that uranium mining is concentrated in just a few countries is prima facia evidence that there is no shortage of uranium, and won't likely be one anytime soon.

70% of the world's conventional oil reserves are in the Middle East/Persian Gulf. Are they flooding the world with their bounty? No.

Uranium resources less than .03% are not considered significant. Neither is the uranium in granite, shales, coal or seawater and none of these are being exploited except by some benighted Japanese scientists.

Here's a monograph on uranium in North America(Canada, US and Mexico), a very well explored region.

1/3 of the uranium resource is in low grade Florida phosphorite(<.0125%). The rest is concentrated in some relatively small areas(Saskatchawan, Ontario, Colorado Plateau).

http://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/b2141/b2141.pdf

Your theory that if you can't find something it must be superabundant is INSANE.

Uranium resources less than .03% are not considered significant. Neither is the uranium in granite, shales, coal or seawater and none of these are being exploited except by some benighted Japanese scientists.

Well, given Rossing mine in Namibia produces significant amounts of the worlds uranium at 300ppm when the world uranium price was five times lower than today, one might reasonably say that shale, coal ash, or phosphate mining isn't exactly a dead end. Its only uncertainty is weather there are even richer ores to pursue, one of opportunity cost as it were.

Simply saying these are low grade ores doesn't imply they aren't usable. The numbers clearly indicate they are, and profitably.

Rossing is the largest open pit uranium mine in the world producing 3700 t/yr (8% of uranium). It is mainly owned by Rio Tinto which also runs the old Ranger mine in Oz.
Rossing ore is .031%-it is low grade 310 ppm.
The fact is that Namibia is a poor country and mining accounts for 25% of government revenue.

The mine is expected to operate for 12 more years.
http://www.wise-uranium.org/umoproe.html

The amount of uranium in coal ash is 1-10 ppm.
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html
The amount of uranium in phosphate is 125 ppm(nobody is mining that).
The amount of uranium in Swedish alum shales is 200 ppm.
A plant producing 120 tons/yr of uranium for 5 year from 450000 tons of shales has been closed due to low prices. The only reason these deposits are considered at all is the presence of other minerals.

http://www.mineweb.net/mineweb/view/mineweb/en/page674?oid=22367&sn=Detail

It seems that you proved my point that uranium resources less than .03% are not significant.

The amount of uranium in coal ash is 1-10 ppm.

In some coal ashes its about 150-200ppm.

It seems that you proved my point that uranium resources less than .03% are not significant.

That was your point? I thought your point was that there was an impending shortage of uranium.

Sure at $130/kg 300ppm is the bottom in ore grades, but its not like $200/kg is unaffordable for utilities.

As you said, plants have been closed due to low prices. So whats your point again?

I think you're missing the point here.  The goal of processing coal ash shouldn't be the economic value of the uranium, it should be the conversion of toxic elements to inert and unleachable forms.  If uranium is recovered as a byproduct, it's one more profit stream along with the tipping fees.

Under-utilized enrichment, under-utilized mines (last year, the USA's mining operations only ran at about 70% of capacity), and all the other signs which show that there is no shortage of uranium.

You should have referred majorian to my comment part 3 above, where I showed that enrichment services are more than adequate to the task.  (This should be no surprise; the USA's systems were sized for cold-war bomb production.)  Nobody's scaling up mining and enrichment because nobody needs the fuel yet.  Spending a lot of money to make fuel with no buyer is idiocy.  When ground is broken for the reactors, contracts will be signed and money will change hands... THEN you'll see action on the fuel front.

Sounds like Catch-22, EP!
Nobody will mine or enrich uranium unless they complete new plants? And nobody will build new plants unless they have a secure supply of uranium.

Damn those anti-nukes!

Well, in fact there are 39 nuclear reactors(mainly in east Asia)
in various stages of construction but michael has shown that fuel stocks are decreasing. And it takes time to process fuel(ask the Iranians).

As with oil, the Red Chinese imperialists are desperately searching the world(not China) for uranium mine/refineries to supply their new nuke power stations.

http://www.nowpublic.com/world/chinas-cnpc-now-building-mega-refineries-...

It takes 500000 tons of rock to produce 1 GWa of reactor fuel so to produce 400 GWa of reactor fuel you would need dig 200 million tons of rock to get to 80000 tons of natural uranium to make about 10000 tons of LWR reactor fuel. That's a lot of rock--the US mines 1100 million tons of coal per year.

The idea that rapid increases in uranium mining will meet demand are ridiculous.

The yellowcake price last year was between $95 in January and $40 in December, now $47 but in 2007 was at $140. Unfortunately, it hasn't gotten high enough to spur the illusive nuke renaissance.
http://www.uranium-stocks.net/

Nobody will mine or enrich uranium unless they complete new plants?

Apparently you did not read or could not understand my first comment in this discussion.  Mining is on-going, at a rate sufficient to meet needs.  The USA had enough excess capacity to increase production by 40% (3.5 million pounds/a of yellowcake) but this was not needed.

And nobody will build new plants unless they have a secure supply of uranium.

The USA alone has 17 new reactors with permits applied for, and another 3 anticipated.

Let's take Dittmar's figures at face value:  170 tons/year of natural uranium required to feed a reactor, perhaps 260 tons to make the initial load of fuel.  If the prospective operators of these new reactors were concerned about supplies, they could all purchase ten years' supply of uranium (~1800 tons U, roughly 2100 tons of yellowcake per reactor) using less than 15 months of the country's excess mining capacity.  At prices currently below $50/lb, this fuel would cost them less than $20 million per reactor.

If you think Dittmar is right, you have an investment opportunity:  uranium futures.  Put your money where your mouth is.

It takes 500000 tons of rock to produce 1 GWa of reactor fuel

That rock doesn't even have to move, because you can circulate water past it to remove the uranium.

The idea that rapid increases in uranium mining will meet demand are ridiculous.

I disagree; the idea that the people who successfully get concrete, steel, reactor vessels, steam generators, turbines, generators, transformers, switchgear, and the toilets for the control building delivered on time would screw up the delivery of the fuel is risible.

EP
Do you mind running a quick calculation giving the total amout of enriched uranium that can come from the Cole farm in pittsylvania county va?

It appears that this lucky farmer is sitting on any where from ten or twenty billion bucks on up,depending on the price.

55,000 tons of uranium at $50/lb is what, about $5 billion of resource?

I'm clueless on this, but Rod Adams blogged about it.  I'd refer you to him.

EP,

Thanks for the link,I've got a great new bookmark.

And we have enough uranuim here in Va to run our four nukes for about a hundred years roughly just under this one farm,according to the author.

And the whole piedmont area is supposed to be a prime area to prospect.

The environmental hurdles will be considerable and the political ones even greater,but those four nukes keep one hell of a lot of lights on and they will be fueled come hell or high water,given the politics of this state.

But it might be quite a while before any mining is done,depending on the reliability of other supplies.

...you would need DIG [sic] 200 million tons of rock to get to 80000 tons of natural uranium...

This is enough to show you have no idea what you are talking about.

'Most uranium mining in the USA and Kazakhstan is now by in situ leach methods, also known as in situ recovery (ISR).'
http://www.world-nuclear.org/

I don't know why this is showing up as multiple blockquotes....

This is enough to show you have no idea what you are talking about......
I don't know why this is showing up as multiple blockquotes....

I do! Because you are quoting the trolling EP and his words are GOLDEN!

BTW, the US produces 2% of world uranium and the Kazakhs produce
11% total. So at most 13% of world uranium(assuming EP is correct and there's NO chance of that) is coming from leaching.

(you need to put a "/blockquotes" replace the " with open/close angle bracket, after the quote to close it off again.)

majorian: Have you checked that eg. Australia is not using in-situ leach mining, or is that just more of your nonsense? eg. even Wikipedia carries the following, found it two minutes with Google.

"The Beverley Uranium Mine, South Australia, is an operating ISL uranium mine and Australia's first such mine."
"The Honeymoon Uranium Mine, South Australia, due 2008, will be Australia's second ISL uranium mine."
"Remains of uranium in-situ leaching in Stráž pod Ralskem, Czech Republic"

The real irony is that there is a picture of the Beverly ISL mining operation already posted in this thread (it links to the world-nuclear.org page on ISL), and majorian is still not convinced.  Talk about selecting facts to match what you believe...

Beverly is a small operation--1000 tons per year compared to Olympic Dam at 5000 tons per year and Ranger at 4000 tpy.

In the US where most of the uranium mining is insitu you have SmithRanch Highland, Wyoming at and Crow Butte, Nebraska both owned by Cameco which produces 20% of the world supply of uranium-8500 tons( and owns most US mines). They also own a small leaching plant at Inkai, Kazakhstan.

It appears that Cameco gets less than 10% of its uranium from leaching(at the US operations).

http://www.wikinvest.com/stock/Cameco_(CCJ)

EP,
I guess you've fooled some folks with tales of a super-duper in-situ leaching process going to lead to vast increases in uranium production but it's only a sliver of uranium production.

And the unused 3.5 million lb/a leach mining capacity of the USA in 2008 was what, chopped liver?

Of course ISL is only a sliver.  It appears to be the marginal producer, because it can be brought into production rapidly; large rock mines take years to set up and have massive investments in infrastructure, but are probably cheaper per pound.  The question is what it takes to expand ISL mining, and the capital requirements appear to be small and the schedules short.  If US ISL miners could have sold another 3.5 million pounds of yellowcake last year, they probably would have.  Is there any reason to believe that the same situation does not apply world-wide?  This argues strongly that there will be no supply crunch.  Note that traders of uranium futures and builders of reactors agree.

1) Wrong, that's not why. That quote came from the link I gave to the World Nuclear Association website. I can provide other source links too, if you really want me to go digging. At any rate, why bother, since you obviously didn't read my post, if you made the claim that I quote EP there.

2) I said that most leeching in US and Kazakhastand was done by leaching, and what you take from that is that there entire combined prodction is the world max? Do I even need to point out the problem with this equation?

3) In-situ leaching is virtually the only Uranium mining being done in the US. It is the most cost effective way to get at certain low quality ores lodged in permeable rock. There is a lot of this low grade ore. The higher the price goes, the more it will be done, but right now, we don't need it. In-situ is very quick to ramp up. Fast enough to stop any short-term shortage? Maybe not... but pretty fast. I don't see ongoing blackouts due to uranium shortage in the US, esp given excess capacity and supply of natural gas.

3) So now you are a "troll" if you disagree with the majority opinion even though you are providing detailed analysis and discussion of the OP article using legitmiate references (often, as EP pointed out. That is "trolling"? Wow.

The yellowcake price last year was between $95 in January and $40 in December, now $47 but in 2007 was at $140.

Why did the price fall in a tightening market? Perhaps the experts negotiating the contracts know that the market is more adaptable than some non experts believe.

Why do you focus on the spot market which averaged $88.25/lb U3O8 in 2007, not $140.00, and accounted for only 20% of uranium sales in 2007 in the U.S.?

The average U.S. price actually paid in 2007 was $24.45.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/umar/summarytable1.html
.

the uranium from about 25 such bombs is sufficient to operate a 1 GWe reactor for one year.

Are you saying that a typical nuclear plant goes through the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb about every two weeks: that much energy is going out through the wires (and up into the air as heat)?

Are you saying that a typical nuclear plant goes through the equivalent of a Hiroshima bomb about every two weeks: that much energy is going out through the wires (and up into the air as heat)?

The Hiroshima bomb only split about 1.5 pounds of uranium, the rest was dispersed. A large nuclear power plant splits that much in about 6 hours.

well yes,

that is what the numbers say!

but 2 weeks are many seconds and the bomb did release all within
a few seconds at most.

michael

QUOTE
"As described in the previous section, roughly 540,000 tons of natural uranium equivalent can be associated with the military reserves of the USA and Russia."

These military stockpiles will be used for civilian purposes. The military needs a reasonably stable and productive civilian state to support itself. Political pressure to keep nukes on line will be huge.

The military value of thousands of nukes is limited, particularly in the current conflicts in Afghanistan/Pakistan/Homeland security. The military needs troops and aircraft not more nukes.

As Automatic Earth bloggers keep pointing out governments are bankrupt so selling some military uranium might be very attractive.

Max
(re-roofing an old watermill)

lets hope that you are right
and the bomb nightmare will disappear as quickly as possible!
and not by the method of Dr. Strangelove et al!

In this respect it might help to spread the word
that the nuclear disarmament of the USA and Russia is urgently needed in order to
keep the lights on.

michael

By 2015 the 70 Gigawatt day per ton fuel transition should be in full swing. So if current reactors are at 50 gigawatt day per ton fuel. The reactors that get switched over get 30-40% more efficient. Optimized ZIRLO fuel is being used in test reactors now and will have the 70 Gigawatt days per ton efficiency. Standard 70 GWD/t fuel is available now. Thorium power's fuel will not be ready for commercial usage until 2021. There is a lot of other technological improvement with fuel to stretch supplies.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/08/nuclear-fuel-transitions-higher-burnup....

Hitherto a limiting factor has been the physical robustness of fuel assemblies, and hence burn-up levels of about 40 GWd/t have required only around 4% enrichment. But with better equipment and fuel assemblies, 55 GWd/t is possible (with 5% enrichment), and 70 GWd/t is in sight, though this would require 6% enrichment. The benefit of this is that operation cycles can be longer - around 24 months - and the number of fuel assemblies discharged as used fuel can be reduced by one third. Associated fuel cycle cost is expected to be reduced by about 20%.

=======
Dittmar is projecting a fall in TWh starting in 2009 and being flat in 2010 etc... We can see soon enough that Dittmar is wrong.

I am talking about the natural uranium equivalent needed to operate a 1 GWe existing reactor
over a year.

the enrichment within the fuel rods might go up and larger time periods between exchange
can perhaps be achieved but the energy conservation law will not change!

you can see this actually from some plots at the WNA

http://www.world-nuclear.org/images/info/swedenfuelcons.gif

for my simple minded projections (yes you can cross check!)
please add yours and post them so we have more predictions!

for now have a look at
http://www.iea.org/Textbase/stats/surveys/mes.pdf
and look for nuclear and OECD total up to may 2009! -0.7% so far
may alone -1.4% compared with the "low of last year"

regards

michael

I'm sure that those of us who enjoy watching train wrecks would love to have you explain what this graph:

has to do with conservation of energy (it shows a small drop in uranium consumption as SWU/TWh is increased, no surprise at all).  If we had a pool going on the result, I'd put my money on "not even wrong".

Engineer Poet, you seem to have an axe to grind! Are you a nuclear scientist? It would be useful to a grown-up debate to know who you are and what qualifies you to take such a strong stance in your assertions. The author of this article clearly is a nuclear scientist. That by itself does not mean he is correct nor does it mean that you are not correct, but it would be useful to know more about you so that I - and others - can put your opinions in context. Thanks.

HAcland: Who EngineerPoet is and what his credentials are have nothing to do with the facts and arguments he presents. That's like saying that an argument on the existence of god is "more true" if it is presented by a priest rather than a layman.

I completely disagree. I am not, never have been and never will be a nuclear scientist. I know nothing what so ever about the fission process and the industry other than what I learn from others. It is therefore imperative to me forming a considered opinion on the subject to know the experience of the poster. I know that the author of the original article works in the nuclear industry. This lends veracity to his argument. It does not by itself mean that he is correct, so I like to find a contrarian opinion. But I would not ask my barber to rebut his thesis - so why should I accept an anonymous poster's word either? He might very well have a lot to give the debate but posting under a pseudonym does not lend as much weight to his argument as letting the world know his experience in the subject matter. Other wise what is stopping me, as a self-certified novice in this subject, from pretending I am an expert? The reason that TOD is such a good source of informed debate is because the posters who claim expertise do NOT hide behind pen-names.

And i am not sure why you have brought the meta-physical into your argument! That is by definition a matter of faith. In the debate about energy supply we are looking for verifiable facts, not articles of faith. Hence it is essential to have open, informed debate.

I know nothing what so ever about the fission process and the industry other than what I learn from others.

It's really tempting, but I guess I won't. Does indicate the problem though.

Well that is just flippant snobbery.

the point i make is that I learn from accredited sources. Is that such a hard thing for you to understand? While I keep an open mind on all things energy related and seek only the facts it seems as though there are many who - either because they have 'skin in the game' or because they are emotionally attached to a 'pro-nuclear' meme - are not willing to debate rationally. You appear to be one of them. Engineer Poet does appear to have knowledge of this industry so why hide behind a pen name?

Well, to most of us, it is obvious that the author of this post is emotionally attached to the anti-nuclear meme, while Engineer-Poet is relatively objective. But if you can't judge these guys based on the arguments they give, then you shouldn't listen to any of them, b/c none of them have any relevant credentials.

Maybe the "Poet" should reveal where he is invested........just on the off chance he may have a conflict of interest.

Maybe most Cornucopians have a vested interest in promoting denial and a continuance of BAU.

Maybe the "Poet" should reveal where he is invested...

Ahh, lets see, if he is invested in solar he is not putting his money where his mouth is, and if he is invested in nuclear he is a troll.

What is the correct answer? What are you invested in?

Lets just stick to the facts.

This is not about me in he slightest. What the hell difference would it make where I'm invested?
The facts or question is, is EP arguing from a conflict of interest.

See what you think if EP reveals his interests.

Lets, just for the fun of it, follow this sort of thought to its utmost ridiculous end, where all arguments are made only on the basis of monetary profit. It would matter only if the person is highly invested in a very illiquid asset (say being employed at a company that sells nuclear services, as the job is very illiquid) or attempting to do a pump and dump scheme. We can rule out pump and dump because there aren't any specific companies being mentioned exclusively, and I suspect if he was employed in the nuclear industry he would have relayed his experiences far earlier than this to color his arguments from a personal angle. I know I would.

Which leads me to conclude that this line of reasoning insinuating financial motivation is just plain stupid. You're dumb.

EP is a TOD Staff Member.
You being a rabid cornucopian quite understandingly leap to his defense, even though you have no clue as to what you are talking about.

A conflict of interest can lead to a biased argument.
Take for instance the TOD member X. He is a corn farmer, we know that and understand his pro view of the ethanol industry. We then can make our own judgement regarding the credibility of his arguments.

We can more easily understand why he has a particular point of view. Many other TOD members have made their interests known.

Then again I gave up reading your drivel long ago, didn't need you to declare anything.

I wonder if Bandits could maintain his position in the face of Treating irregularity, Starting the Cycle, The Cogeneration Stopgap, and Sustainability, Energy Independence and Agricultural Policy, to pick a few pieces out of my history of posted musings.

I'm not a staff member, I'm a contributor.  I can't edit stories other than my own and can't e.g. remove spammers.  My powers under the system are limited to:

  1. Being able to edit and submit stories myself, instead of mailing them to an editor for submission.
  2. Being able to read stories in the queue which are not yet published.

#2 would be useful for peer-review purposes, if TOD actually had a system of pre-publication review.  This is obviously not the case; it certainly would be desirable, but TOD's staff and contributors don't have the time or subject-matter expertise to do it consistently.  My own ability to put in 3 comments on the specifics before publication is due to (1) my noticing Chapter I rather late into the discussion period, and (2) a large amount of free time due to not having any work at the moment.

I was looking forward to getting rid of that free time; I had a prospect of working on a job related to bio-fuels (about as far from nuclear as you can get), but I didn't get the offer so I've been spending some of that time writing instead.

As for my personal assets, if I or the mutual funds I own have any interests related to nuclear power, I am not aware of them.  My personal angle is a desire for a cleaner environment, among other things; I would rather have several Fermi II's than the coal-fired complex in Monroe.

You're pretty funny writing that, since elsewhere in this thread I said:

Nothing is going to maintain BAU, which is reliant on an increasing supply of petroleum which no longer exists.

I'll say this about BAIWE (Business As It Will Evolve):  if you think peak oil is going to make the sun stop shining, wind stop blowing, or the 2.5 ppm of uranium and 10 ppm of thorium in earth's crust disappear, you are as sharp as a marble.

I learn from accredited sources.

Dittmar has no accreditation in nuclear power engineering. He may be affiliated with CERN, but that's a completely different thing, and irrelevant. The "N" doesn't really stand for "nuclear" any more. They still do experiments on parts of nuclei, but at enormously higher energies than those involved in nuclear power processes.

... it seems as though there are many who - either because they have 'skin in the game' ...

Just about no-one doesn't have skin in this game. The reason: fossil fuels are heavily taxed. Natural gas prices in the USA are on the order of $2.20 per gram-uranium-equivalent, before retail taxes but inclusive of government royalties in the range $0.28 to $0.37. Uranium itself has a recent price of $0.125 per gram. In Europe I believe natgas costs quite a bit more, maybe $4 per gram-uranium-equivalent, but don't know how much government takes. (Anyone?)

(How fire can be domesticated)

I have to be fair here:  I am informed that Dr. Dittmar is educated as a nuclear physicist, though his PhD is in particle physics.  He is not a nuclear power engineer, but I don't believe that any of the participants here is so qualified (I am not; I am a double-E with experience from working with people in all kinds of other areas).

This is a peace offering.  I am going to try to get away from personalities and concentrate on facts, which I hope we can agree on.  Interpretations may differ legitimately, and uncertainty may allow completely opposite (though tentative) positions.  If all we do here is agree on what isn't known, it will be a big step forward.

None of these matters require a PhD to dig through.  The skills appear to be more closely related to forensic accounting.  There is a huge amount of information here which is suggestive but is either not conclusive or too vague to interpret easily.  I can only speculate why; maybe some of it is concealed for reasons of national security or just obfuscated to serve some bureaucrat's purposes.

What I would beg Dr. Dittmar to do is to lead those of us who are skeptical about his conclusions (there are several of us) back to the specific data which supports them and follow the reasoning step by step.  I'd also ask him not to ask us to believe that mining companies are lying about their reserves or capacity, enrichment companies are lying about the condition of their equipment, etc.; this is the domain of conspiracy theorists, "chemtrails" nuts and anti-vaccinators, and it discredits everything it touches.

Thanks, EP. I very much appreciate this post of yours. Ultimately, we all want the same thing: to cut through the fog and get down to the truth. The more we can concentrate on what is known and what is not known, the better we will be off.

Nicely done :-)

One point, I assume that nothing runs at 100%, large projects are always delayed, random shutdowns, wars, revolutions, etc. occur, and that Mr. Murphy lives.

I also always order materials with a wastage factor.

The USGS recently cut the coal reserves estimate for the Powder River Basin in half (x10 more core drills, better software). I assume that reserve estimates will shrink some what by the time that they are mined.

And the new nuclear building industry has an unparalleled history with Mr. Murphy. I have difficulty "just assuming" that relationship has come to an end.

Best Hopes for Comity,

Alan

That's indeed a very reasonable statement and comment!

nobody should need a PhD to follow this!
(some parts are of course a bit technical true. Thats why I added some otherwise well known stuff in the articles.)

What I would beg Dr. Dittmar to do is to lead those of us who are skeptical about his conclusions (there are several of us) back to the specific data which supports them and follow the reasoning step by step.

That is what I was expecting in the first place

and just to make it clear, it was not me who drifted away!

Thus, lets go through the numbers I collected out of the
most official documents from the most pro nuclear organizations
in order to understand their warning to the "nuclear world"
as quoted in my article at a few places.
Here it is again:
(you might doubt that statement .. well the reference was given)

"At the end of 2006, world uranium production (39,603 tons) provided about 60% of world reactor requirements (66,500 tons) for the 435 commercial nuclear reactors in operation. The gap between production and requirements was made up by secondary sources drawn from government and commercial inventories (such as the dismantling of over 12,000 nuclear warheads and the re-enrichment of uranium tails). Most secondary resources are now in decline and the gap will increasingly need to be closed by new production. Given the long lead time typically required to bring new resources into production, uranium supply shortfalls could develop if production facilities are not implemented in a timely manner."

now I put the evidence from their own book
cross checked with WNA data and the uranium miners and the speculators (UXC)
and on and on.

What turns out

the situation is even more critical than the statement from the NEA/IAEA!

that's as simple as it can be!

Thus for those who want to keep the lights on
become an anti nuclear weapon activist with respect to the USA and Russia!
(most of the pro nuclear energy people are not! I hope of course that all oil drummers with this view
are already and since many years active anti nuclear weapon people).

ok EP et al

lets finally after combined 1000 or so messages come to a step by step
analysis on the numbers I have presented.

lets figure out if those numbers (from the official documents) are
lies or not.

once they are accepted as the best numbers we might have
lets go to the possible conclusions and
as I have proposed
make some quantitative predictions on how the situation
might evolve during the next 5-10 years.

only jeppen replied to this
and his predictions matches exactly with the one
I outlined as the maximum possible contribution
(e.h. +10% roughly by 2015/16)

compare this to the decline most of us expect from oil
and the still increasing world population with or more likely without significant economic growth
by that time!

and how can one avoid to not find a decline in energy use.

anyway lets go first through the numbers!

but here is my 5 cent question:

What is surprising to me is that
here on the oil drum facts after facts are presented that
the IEA and the oil companies have either no clues about the real situation
or a just spreading wishful thinking to the world media in order to keep people
sleeping.

But, in contrast the NEA and the IAEA as well the money makers in the
nuclear energy sector are assumed (by some) to be as close to angels as they can be.

Perhaps someone can explain this to me!

regards
Michael

Michael,

Forget about production and write a piece on CAPACITY.

Give us a link to the spreadsheet that lists the status of every mine and mill on the planet. How many are in standby waiting for higher prices? How many are operating at reduced rate waiting for higher prices? Show us how much U3O8 each utility has stockpiled and how many fresh fuel assemblies each utility has stockpiled or in manufacture.

Explain why all the experts at all the utilities have not independently identified this CAPACITY problem.

One very nice thing about uranium is that the price can go up several hundred percent without much impact on the cost of electricity.

Given the long lead time typically required to bring new resources into production, uranium supply shortfalls could develop if production facilities are not implemented in a timely manner.

What turns out the situation is even more critical than the statement from the NEA/IAEA!

And I keep telling you that your case is unproven.  Take ISL mining, and go back to the Layton presentation, page 11.  The Honeymoon mine has a projected capital expenditure of $60 million to produce 880,000 lb of U3O8 per year.  That's about 340 metric tons of metallic uranium per year.  Getting another 5000 tons per year of U would require perhaps 15 such mines, with a total capital expenditure under $1 billion.  This is a fraction of the cost overruns on the plant in Finland.  Do you seriously think that such a small issue is going to sink a nuclear construction effort of 20 reactors worth over $50 billion in the USA alone?  This is down in the noise.

Thus for those who want to keep the lights on become an anti nuclear weapon activist with respect to the USA and Russia!
(most of the pro nuclear energy people are not! I hope of course that all oil drummers with this view are already and since many years active anti nuclear weapon people).

I think that's your politics talking.  Your facts are not sufficient for that conclusion to follow.

But, in contrast the NEA and the IAEA as well the money makers in the nuclear energy sector are assumed (by some) to be as close to angels as they can be.

Who said that?  That is your straw man argument.  I just said that they're not idiots, and the factors which make oil reserve data so easily falsified are not present for uranium.

Hacland,

I suppose that if the WORLD would learn only from "accredited sources" we would be free of numerologists and astrologers,if it's the astronomers who get the accreditation and nit the other way around.

But this argument is not about something that can be dealt with by such means.If you believe otherwise,I suggest you think about the fact that the accredited geologists happily went along with the accredited economists and merrily assured us up until a few months ago that peak oil would not be a problem for us,we could leave it to our grandchildren.

Of course in those last few months I mention they have been rather busy sewing some fig leaves to preserve at least a shred or two of thier CREDIBILITY.

The fact that they have been grossly negligent will not affect thier comfy FEDERAL/PROFESSIONAL ACCREDITATION,salaries,benefits,or pensions as far as the mostly non existent system of accountability is concerned,but they may find thier well feathered nests falling apart as the economy falls apart-and thier incompetence may yet bite a large chunk out of thier own go along to get along fat butts if all thier unemployed relatives show up and park on he couch.

Hacland,
I don't know very much about the technicalities of nuclear power myself,but the main agrument here is far more geology and business oriented that it is nuclear physics oriented.

EP is entitled to his privacy if he feels the need for it.We can probably do enough digging on our own to find out who has the more realistic viewpoint,given all the links so kindly provided by both parties.EP may have a salary check dependent upon his keeping his mouth shut,or an ardently antinuke hot young blossom wife.Hell,he may even be a republican!And of course ANYBODY in his right mind would admit to being a child molester faster these days,especially in a forum of this sort.;-)

I myself am flying under false colors because I live in a place that cannot deal with my world view.If the local "right wing nut cases " (detested by some of the more vocal left wing nut cases who post here) find out I am a godless heathen darwin worshipping athiest they may not actually burn me at the stake or ride me out of town on a rail but they will be very distressed that I am headed for the eternal fires,start trying to save my heathen ass,and maybe even quit trying to line me up with thier widowed mothers.

This last is sort of important as I still hope to meet one trained to wait on me who has a lot of money,a sweet disposition, and poor eyesight.;-)

Hey,I'm not really serious,ok?I' ll gladly wait on HER if she has a really nice fishing boat and a new 4by 4 to pull it.

We could all stand to loosen up a little bit,staying stressed is bad for you.

EP may have a salary check dependent upon his keeping his mouth shut,or an ardently antinuke hot young blossom wife.

I wish!  Especially the salary part (I'm able to post during the day because NO ONE is paying me at the moment).

Hell,he may even be a republican!

Worse than that.  Not only am I a godless heathen EEEEvilutionist, I voted for Bob Barr last year, one of about 15,000 in a state which went massively for Obama.  I get it from both sides.

"Engineer Poet, you seem to have an axe to grind!"

I get the same impression.

The problems with nuclear are legion, not the least being the industry's history of proclaiming that it will bring perfectly safe, too-cheap-to-meter electricity to the nation forever.

Current claims sound very similar and it should surprise no one that those of us old enough to remember the earlier promises are suspicious this time as well.

The poor bastards have an uphill battle convincing us that, even though they were fantastically and tragically wrong about their bold claims in the past, this time they really are telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Your claims about the nuclear industry's claims are the main thing here that is tragically wrong. That and the process we use to determine the answers to technical issues.

That wasn't a claim, that was a speculation in response to a request for speculation.  It has been widely quoted out of context as a slur, including that ill-referenced Wikipedia entry (which you will notice does not cite the original source).  The original has been so often quoted out of context that it is almost impossible to find among the chaff; this helps perpetuate the falsehoods about it.

Ironically, it could easily be true:  nuclear fuel is so cheap that, once you've put down the capital for the plant and paid your monthly fee for the O&M, there really isn't any point in metering what you use as long as it's only your share.  It would be possible to keep your usage flat 24/7, charging your car and using your A/C to make ice at night, to avoid use of fossil fuel; you could pay your subscription fee for a continuous X kilowatts and be done with it.  However, the hassles of doing this as an individual consumer are not worth it.

Ironically, it could easily be true: nuclear fuel is so cheap that, once you've put down the capital for the plant and paid your monthly fee for the O&M, there really isn't any point in metering what you use as long as it's only your share.

Fuel for hydro, wind, geothermal, PV, CSP, wave, tidal is actually free (better than cheap) and O&M costs are in most cases even lower.

And yet no-one would seriously claim that any of those are too cheap to meter.

PS: Efficiency also runs on free fuel, even better: It actually saves fuel.

how about looking at some other predictions on energy sources that and energy usage that were wrong ?

Amory Lovins, supposed energy guru.
http://www.energytribune.com/articles.cfm?aid=676

Smil and others point out that Lovins has been wrong on numerous fronts. Four of Lovins’s claims are worth investigation.

1. Renewables will take huge swaths of the overall energy market. (1976)
2. Electricity consumption will fall. (1984)
3. Cellulosic ethanol will solve our oil import needs. (repeatedly)
4. Efficiency will lower consumption. (repeatedly)

Since 1973 in the USA the only energy source that has displaced fossil fuels by the largest amount is nuclear energy.

Lovins still claims that nuclear power “continues to die of an incurable attack of market forces. Since 1976. But nuclear power generates 400% more kwh now versus then.

Electricity demand “ratcheting downward”?

It’s clear that Lovins was wrong about renewable energy’s ability to displace fossil fuels. So let’s look at electricity demand. In 1984, Lovins told Business Week that “we see electricity demand ratcheting downward over the medium and long term. The long-term prospects for selling more electricity are dismal.” During the same interview he said, “We will never get, we suspect, to a high enough price to justify building centralized thermal power plants again. That era is over.” Except that it isn’t.

America’s electricity production has jumped by about 66 percent since Lovins made his declaration, rising from 2,400 billion kilowatt-hours in 1984 to just over 4,000 billion kilowatt-hours in 2005. And to meet that demand, utilities have built dozens of centralized thermal power plants.

Lovins refuses to admit that his forecast was flat wrong. In an e-mail, Lovins said he couldn’t verify the quote and that the Business Week piece was “widely misquoted.” In his initial response to the question, he said that “the general sentiment is correct in its historical context.” What that means, I have no idea. A few days later, after I sent him the full text of the Business Week story, Lovins sent another response, in which he again declared that the magazine had misquoted him and that “Cost and climate pressures and revolutionary efficiency techniques will ultimately make electricity demand stabilize and then decline in most states as it has begun to do in some. Most electricity is now wasted, and eventually economics wins. New central plants are uncompetitive and getting more so.”

Despite Lovins’s insistence that efficiency will lessen demand, electric consumption continues to rise. Between 1994 and 2005, according to the Energy Information Administration, electricity generation in the U.S. grew by an average of 2 percent per year. And in the hot summer of 2005, generation jumped by 6 percent compared to the year-earlier period. If electricity consumption rates continue growing at 2 percent per year, in about 35 years electricity consumption in the U.S. will have doubled. Electricity demand is growing so rapidly that in late 2006 the North American Electric Reliability Council warned that the U.S. could face a shortfall of 81,000 megawatts of generating capacity by 2015.

Cellulosic ethanol and biofuels

Lovins has consistently hyped the potential for biofuels to replace oil. And once again, he’s been proven wrong. Lovins has been advocating biofuels since his 1976 Foreign Affairs piece, in which he wrote that there are “exciting developments in the conversion of agricultural, forestry and urban wastes to methanol and other liquid and gaseous fuels.” He went on, saying that those fuels “now offer practical, economically interesting technologies sufficient to run an efficient U.S. transport sector.” Except that they don’t.

Some 31 years after Lovins said that biofuels “now offer” the ability to run the entire transport sector, corn ethanol provides just 1 percent of America’s oil needs. And that ethanol production requires the consumption of some 14 percent of America’s corn crop.

Those facts have not prevented Lovins from continuing his hype.

In his 2004 book Winning the Oil Endgame, Lovins declared that advances in biotechnology will make cellulosic ethanol viable and that replacing hydrocarbons with carbohydrates “will strengthen rural America, boost net farm income by tens of billions of dollars a year, and create more than 750,000 new jobs.” In his 2006 testimony before the U.S. Senate, Lovins declared that the U.S. could dramatically cut its oil consumption by using more natural gas “and advanced biofuels (chiefly cellulosic ethanol) for the remaining oil at an average cost of $18 per barrel.”

By nearly any measure, Lovins’s estimate is absurdly low. Producing ethanol for $18 per barrel implies production costs of just $0.43 per gallon. That’s about one-fourth the cost of producing gasoline in mid-2007 at a major oil refinery on the Houston Ship Channel.

Of course, plenty of other people are hyping the potential for cellulosic ethanol to make a major breakthrough.

After his 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth was released, former vice president Al Gore promised that cellulosic ethanol would “be a huge new source of energy, particularly for the transportation sector. You’re going to see it all over the place. You’re going to see a lot more flex-fuel vehicles. You’re going to see new processes that utilize waste as the source of energy, so there’s no petroleum consumed in the process.” Gore’s former boss, Bill Clinton, loves cellulosic ethanol, too. While promoting Proposition 87 in California in 2006, he declared, “These things are not expensive. We have this kind of biomass to make cellulosic ethanol all over America. It would increase income in rural America. It would increase income in rural California. It would stabilize the environment and improve our national security.”

Despite the hype, the commercial viability of cellulosic ethanol remains remarkably similar to the Tooth Fairy: it’s an entity that many people believe in but no one ever actually sees. And according to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, cellulosic ethanol remains years away from viability. In September, the agency’s Economic Research Service reported that while cellulose-based fuels hold “some longer-term promise, much research is needed to make it commercially economical and expand beyond the 250-million-gallon minimum specified for 2013 in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.”

Just for the sake of argument, let’s assume the USDA is wrong. And let’s further assume that given enough federal subsidies, cellulosic ethanol has a big technical breakthrough and expands at the same rate as what we’ve seen with corn-based ethanol. It took more than two decades of fat subsidies before the corn ethanol sector was able to produce 5 billion gallons of ethanol per year, equivalent to 1 percent of America’s oil needs. If cellulosic ethanol follows that same trajectory, it will be 2030 or so before it too will be able to supply just 1 percent of America’s oil needs.

So, just to recap, Lovins insisted back in 1976 that biofuels were capable of powering the entire transport sector. Three decades have passed. And it may be another two decades (or more) before biofuels can provide more than a small percentage of America’s oil needs.

The Jevons Paradox

The final – and most important – area in which Lovins has been consistently wrong is his claim that efficiency lowers energy consumption. And when it comes to arguing the merits of energy efficiency, Lovins’s prime nemesis is a dead guy – William Stanley Jevons – a British economist who in 1865 determined that increased efficiency won’t cut energy use, it will raise it. “It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuels is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.” And in the 142 years since Jevons put forth that thesis, now commonly known as the Jevons Paradox, he’s yet to be proven wrong.

I don't see 'is too cheap to meter' in your post, which was sort of repeated again by a nuclear-advocate on August 19th 2009...

And I can care less about specific people than about facts. After all: Energy is supposedly not a religion or a philosophy.

wrong is his claim that efficiency lowers energy consumption.

Well if that holds true, you may have to build new power plants with a lower efficiency in order to conserve fuel (aren't you worried that new nuclear power plants developers may try to increase the efficiency of their plants and thus waste fuel?).
And you may have to build cheaper and more cars cars with lower efficiency (at the same size) in order to sell more and conserve fuel at the same time.
And Switzerland may therefore not exist as it has a higher GDP per capita than the US and yet consumes half the energy the US does and is therefore almost twice as efficient as far as its energy consumption per capita is concerned despite its higher GDP per capita (high building standards increasing efficiency and an efficient public transportation system may have been responsible for this, but Jevons may know better).
http://www.iaea.org/inisnkm/nkm/aws/eedrb/data/CH-encc.html

"too cheap to meter" as has already been stated something incorrect stated by a few bureaucrats from several decades ago. Nuclear energy is being metered now. If any energy source gets cheaper then we will make more accurate meters.

there is the possibility of very cheap nuclear power if certain technology works out
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/08/mr-fusion-scenario-what-if-there-is.html

Something that would greatly reduce conventional costs is to factory mass produce nuclear fission reactors.

Plus laser enrichment (GE developing for 2012) can help lower costs
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/06/gas-centrifuge-versus-laser-uranium.html

The Silex process is inefficient for highly enriched uranium at this time

The up to ten times greater enrichment efficiency improves the energy efficiency of nuclear power and the cost efficiency of nuclear fuel and operations.

Economics of nuclear power
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html

In January 2007, the approx. US $ cost to get 1 kg of uranium as UO2 reactor fuel at likely contract prices (about one third of current spot price):
Uranium: 8.9 kg U3O8 x $53 472
Conversion: 7.5 kg U x $12 90
Enrichment: 7.3 SWU x $135 985 [Silex could reduce this by 3-10 times]
Fuel fabrication: per kg 240
Total, approx: US$ 1787 per kg of reactor fuel

If Silex drops prices for enrichment 5 times then $200 for enrichment. total cost down to $1200 per kg.

Areva figures early in 2008 showed 17% of the total kWh generation cost for its EPR being fuel costs, and these broke down: 51% natural uranium, 3% conversion, 32% enrichment, and 14% fuel fabrication.

At 45,000 MWd/t burn-up this gives 360,000 kWh electrical per kg, hence fuel cost: 0.50 c/kWh.

If assuming a higher uranium price, say two thirds of current spot price: 8.9 kg x 108 = 961, giving a total of $2286, or 0.635 c/kWh

China's bare nuclear reactor costs. recent reactors
CPI Haiyang 2 x 1100 MWe AP1000 $3.25 billion, so $1477/kW
CGNPC Ningde 4 x 1000 MWe CPR-1000 $7.145 billion, so $1786/kW
CNNC Fuqing 2 x 1000 MWe CPR-1000 (?) $2.8 billion, so $1400/kW
CGNPC Bailong/Fangchengang 2 x 1000 MWe CPR-1000 $3.1 bilion, so $1550/kW
CNNC Tianwan 3&4, 2 x 1060 MWe AES-91 $3.8 billion, so $1790/kW

If China succeeds with pebble bed reactorss or enables another design that can be made in China factories and shipped, then the US bare reactor cost could be more than halved.

Russia is making floating reactors that can built in russia and towed to other places and countries.

Thank you Nano!!!

This webpage from the Canadian Nuclear Society has some fairly authoritative background on the statement, which they attribute to Lewis L. Strauss in a "Speech to the National Association of Science Writers, New York City, September 16th, 1954", based on NYT archives [New York Times, September 17, 1954]

http://www.cns-snc.ca/media/toocheap/toocheap.html

What the speaker should have said, and apparently meant, was this co-timely statement from someone at GE.

To express it in the simplest terms: you can save a lot of money on fuel if you have an atomic power plant, but it will cost a great deal more to build than a coal-burning plant

So let me get this straight, when Strauss, then chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission said that electricity would be too cheep to meter, he meant that it will cost a lot more to build an atomic power plant than a coal-burning plant.

And somehow you know that this is what he really did mean.

Well, my hat is off to you, len. You are both a psychic and an arch-druid of spin. You have a bright future ahead of you in politics. Very impressive indeed.

It was ONE comment, made verbally, at a non-regulatory or non-legislative venue. Do you want to hear all the "promises" made by fossil-fuel pitchment like Lovins who people DO listen to??? See the comments above about his completely inaccurate "predictions".

What Lovins says or doesn't say has nothing whatsoever to do with it.

Nice attempt to change the subject when you're losing the argument, though. A classic dodge (not to say the last refuge of scoundrels).

The late Petr Beckmann on "Too Cheap to Meter"

TOO CHEAP TO METER: ANATOMY OF A LIE [[[[[[[[[[[[

...Where, then, did the phrase "too cheap to meter" originate?
It was used by Lewis L. Strauss in an address to the Ntl. Assn.
of Science Writers in New York on 16 Sept. 1954. The fact that he was
Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and not a member of the nu-
clear industry is a technicality, which would not in itself make the
statement a lie.
What makes it a lie is that he used it in connection with the
eradication of disease and other scientific marvels that he expected
to occur at some time in the faraway future. He first reviewed some of
the breakthroughs that had taken place in the 15 years before his
speech in 1954, including unlimited power and the ability to investi-
gate the working of living cells by tracer atoms. Then he came to the
sentence that contains the phrase and whose remainder is invariably
censored:
"It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in
their homes electricity too cheap to meter, -- will know of great
periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, --
will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the
air with a minimum of danger at great speeds, -- and will experience a
lifespan far longer than ours as disease yields and man comes to
understand what causes him to age."
That sentence, in its entirety, should be eaten by every brain-
washer who uses the "too cheap to meter" lie; it is EXACTLY the same
as accusing the medical profession of having claimed in 1954 that we
"will experience a far longer lifespan as we understand what causes us
to age."
As a matter of fact, as early as 1958 the nuclear industry did
explicitly warn that "atomic energy will never be too cheap to meter"
(more on this and the above in "Too cheap to meter," Background Info,
Feb. 1987, USCEA, 1776 I St. NW, Washington, DC 20006)...

I think the point is that the claim 'too cheap to meter' isn't widely banded about by anyone, but opponents of nuclear power set it up as a strawman.

It looks like wikipedia is tragically wrong. The term originated with Lewis L. Strauss in one speech in 1955; It didn't come from Walter Marshall. I certainly cant find any quotes anywhere of him ever saying it some three decades after Strauss's speech.

Well the term is actually much older: it comes from the 1920-1930's scifi novels. It was an explicit reference to these high hopes from back then. Unfortunately this reference is lost on most people, esp. after the "too cheap to meter" was abused by the antinuclear industry.

HAcland:  are you unable to read the graph and what it says?  Can't you see that it has nothing to do with the claim Dittmar was making for it?  Doesn't that make you question his credibility?

Michael Dittmar claims to be associated with CERN, which deals primarily with high-energy physics.  A search for his name on CERN's site turns up no results.  ETH lists him as a postdoc.  A Google search for his name turned up mostly ASPO associations.  Here is his page on scientificcommons.org.  His only writing on nuclear power appears to be a non-peer-reviewed paper on arXiv.org, available here.  His two guest posts so far appear to be taken directly from that paper.

High-energy physics and nuclear engineering are two very different things.  When someone's claims are contradicted by many facts and even their own sources, even a PhD does not give them authority on the subject.  Indeed, I think we can give Michael Dittmar about as much credibility about matters of nuclear power as we give Jonathan Wells about matters of evolutionary biology.

To quote the inimitable len:

"what his credentials are have nothing to do with the facts and arguments he presents. That's like saying that an argument on the existence of god is "more true" if it is presented by a priest rather than a layman."

Yes I am able to read the graph. Thanks. It does appear that what you say has merit.

Seeing as how you are now openly questioning Dr Dittmar's academic credentials and associated affiliations perhaps you might reveal to the readership your full name, your qualifications and your employer/tenureship. It is easy to critise Dr Dittmar, and you may well be correct, but at least he is prepared to allow you to 'Google' his CV as he does not feel the need to hide his identity. Why won't you allow us to determine your credentials too?

If you need his credentials, then that's your problem. Anonymity is generally a good thing, even if you lose a few authority-seekers along the way.

Seeing I dont know who you are or your credentials I dont need to consider your point on the importance of credentials.

Dear EP (hope that is not insulting!).

thanks for having done some google search about me!

Quote:
--------------------------------------
Here is his page on scientificcommons.org. His only writing on nuclear power appears to be a non-peer-reviewed paper on arXiv.org, available here. His two guest posts so far appear to be taken directly from that paper.

High-energy physics and nuclear engineering are two very different things. When someone's claims are contradicted by many facts and even their own sources, even a PhD does not give them authority on the subject. Indeed, I think we can give Michael Dittmar about as much credibility about matters of nuclear power as we give Jonathan Wells about matters of evolutionary biology.

--------------

do you know that journals (about certain topics) often do not accept alternative views?

it is not this free world you might imagine when million and billion dollars are involved!

michael

do you know that journals (about certain topics) often do not accept alternative views?

I’m with you 100% on this one. A journal and the Oil Drum rejected a politically incorrect review comment on wind power.

Usually when people go on about alternative views being suppressed, it's because they don't have sufficient evidence for them but are emotionally attached to them. For every ignored genius who turns out to be correct, there are thousands of people ignored because they were wrong..

Hi,

perhaps you could make a little analysis on how efficient / inefficient the peer review process
is. Especially when huge amounts of money are involved.

Unfortunately your hypothesis is not supported by many area of science.

but to conclude on the optimistic side

eventually the correct view wins in science!

it took Gallileo about 400 years to be rehabilitated
Darwin is still not 100% accepted
but at least for those close to the oil drum

King Hubbert is fully accepted
and he would have still have a hard time to be accepted in most
economic-geological peer reviews

michael

eventually the correct view wins in science!

Once again I agree completely. I think the internet is going to make the journals obsolete, at least those that fail to adopt this technology to accelerate the free exchange of ideas. Sites that filter thoughtful but unpopular points of view make the same mistake as some journals.

Michaeld,

For a man who would have a hard time getting into the journals,he sure does have a lot of people citeing him.

And iirc he got onto the faculty of a respectable school.

But of course you are correct that SOME journals might reject him for reasons having nothing to do with his work.

If he were alive,he could get into half a dozen top shelf journals as fast as he could type.

Usually when people go on about alternative views being suppressed, it's because they don't have sufficient evidence for them but are emotionally attached to them.

The two authors, two editors and a few others who reviewed the comment identified no problems other than “too long”. It is much shorter than the paper being reviewed which was riddled with errors.

I would be happy to send you a copy and you can point out the errors.

very simple!

what matters is the amount of natural uranium/TWh
no significant change since 1986!

that's all what is needed to know right now!
(you can compare with the figures I gave in chapter I
coming from the Red Book)

you can also calculate this number when you start form the amount of liberated energy per fission of U235.
and from this calculate how much uranium is needed per second
to have a 1 GWe (=roughly 3 GWthermal) power.

this is something (among other things) one learns to calculate in physics classes.

What is the problem?

michael

1986 world nuclear energy about 1300 billion kwh. Seems like nuclear generation almost doubled from 1986 to now.

It also looks as though it might have already peaked.

No, it didn't "peak" (don't be silly). The decline for last year was the shutdown of the 7 reactors in Japan following that earth quake in 2007.

Maybe. But there was a long plateau before that.

We can only be sure of peaks long after they are past. You may be right, but I may be too. Cascading catastrophes are likely to make major developments in any area (let alone one as capital intensive as nukes) very difficult in the coming years.

(And, by the way, I reserve the right to be as silly as I want to ;-P )

Its not a decline, which is my point, it's a one-off incident, that's it. Over all capacity increases every year with new plants and, more importantly for the immediate future, new uprates. OK, you can be silly, but just note it. Japan is building MORE nukes as we sit here, as is a host of other countries. They are not worried about U supplies.

And over building has never happened? Ever heard of the real estate bubble?

Again, thanks for the graph. It will be interesting to see nukes slide down the other side of that nice bell curve you present. Time will indeed tell.

Thanks, yes nice diagram!
trends are obvious right?

otherwise fuel needs per TWhe are not changed by this WNA plot.

michael

My projections are here (modified WNA. Added my projection of uprates in France, South Korea, Spain and USA). I posted my projections in images in the thread of your first posting but the images links were good for a while but then became broken. I am also expecting the continued work by nations with lower operating efficiency to be raised.

If all nuclear plants are able to increase their operating efficiency to the level of the US (91.5%) or South Korea (94%), then 370 billion kwh) would be added to current total nuclear power generation of 2600 billion kwh. When plants are well run and at high efficiency then uprating them makes more economic sense. Ukraine and Russia have significant amounts of nuclear and have a goal and spending money to increase operating performance. Ukraine has increased it some and is working with US partners. France is load following, so if demand increased then France can generate more power and increase operating efficiency.

From 1990 to 2006, world nuclear energy capacity rose by 44 GWe (13.5%, due both to net addition of new plants and uprating some established ones) and electricity production rose 757 billion kWh (40%). The relative contributions to this increase were: new construction 36%, uprating 7% and availability increase 57%. The increase over the six years to 2006 (210 TWh) was equal to the output from 30 large new nuclear plants. Yet between 2000 and 2006 there was no net increase in reactor numbers (and only 15 GWe in capacity)

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/07/nuclear-and-geothermal-updates.html

My predictions
2014 471 GWe, 2858 billion kwh
2017 560 GWe, 3900 billion kwh
2020 660 GWe, 4626 billion kwh

I am also expecting the mines in Khazakstan, Russia, Niger, Canada and Australia to come online roughly on schedule with 0-3 year delays.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/09/uranium-mining-forecast-to-2020.html

2012, 2013 is when my predictions start to significantly diverge. I am expecting reactor completions and India power up in 2010 and 2011. but random events like earthquake shutdowns, minor project delays etc... might make the picture less obvious. But definitely vastly different by 2014 and onwards. Also, China's plans could work really well and have another 20GWe beyond even the 86 GWe targer that I expect them to achieve by the end of 2020.

This is an interesting point !

Increased capacity factor by existing nukes increases fuel burn. A previously 69% capacity factor Ukrainian nuke suddenly goes to 94%, and burns more fuel.

Existing reactor uprates, AFAIK, involve a combination of improved thermodynamic efficiency (more electricity, no more fuel) and increased burn rates.

I wonder how many made the assumption that existing reactor demand was basically constant, and just how big a factor increased fuel use at existing reactors will be ?

Advanced nano stated that "his forecasts diverge" around 2012, 2013. Could you give a summary of those views ?

And what do you think of my opinion that a fuel shortage will result in derating existing reactors by extending the time between refueling and perhaps going to slightly lower enrichment ?

Thanks,

Alan

My statement of divergence is more than 10% difference which would more than any random real world events could confuse the results. Like how soon Japan turns all its reactors back on etc...

I expect reactor completions in 2010, 2011, 2012 and onwards and maybe a couple by the end of this year. But the few percentage points difference could be denied as not significant. My expectation actual diverges in 2009, 2010 but at the level of in the statistical noise.

I do not expect a fuel shortage. I agree with Engineer Poet that there will be no problem in fuel. Plus if there was a bunch of mining delays, getting more fuel from Russia's stocks is a matter of price. Companies that need fuel can get the US to cut a new deal at say double the price. I am quite sure Russia would cut that deal.

I might add that advancednano brought up something that is *more important than 'capacity'* for nuclear energy and that is 'availability'. In the plant itself, management and operations is only concerned about 'availability'. This leads to the French system which shows a relatively lower 'capacity' because they load follow. Being on demand power, if you were translated the capacity rating with availability...meaning nothing is stopping it from producing more or less energy, then the capacity factor would be equal too or higher than the United States.

French system which shows a relatively lower 'capacity' because they load follow

French load following is a pro-nuke myth. I have looked at the hourly #'s on the EdF website and they do NOT load follow (in any meaningful use of the word).

Fixed diurnal cycle maybe ?

Alan

Look closely at nuke generation by hour

http://clients.rte-france.com/lang/an/visiteurs/vie/prod/realisation_pro...

And load by hour

http://www.rte-france.com/htm/an/accueil/courbe.jsp

A low co-efficient of correlation.

Alan

Nu huh, check your own links. It helps if you know that the load following is often on the week-ends.

Wikipedia might be wrong, of course, but states this: "Drawing such a large percentage of overall electrical production from nuclear power is unique to France. This reliance has resulted in certain necessary deviations from the standard design and function of other nuclear power programs. For instance, in order to meet changing demand throughout the day, some plants must work as load following plants, whereas most nuclear plants in the world operate as base load plants, and allow other fossil or hydro units to adjust to demand. Nuclear power in France has a total capacity factor of around 77%, which is low due to load following. However availability is around 84%, indicating excellent overall performance of the plants."

Previously I did a couple of days at random, comparing load to nuke generation. The nukes ignored the secondary peak @ 6 PM and do not even follow the morning uptick or evening downturn.

Since these daily patterns are VERY well known, (only the amplitude changes), the conclusion is that French nukes do NOT load follow.

I could do a numerical analysis of how poorly the two curves match, but other things to do.

French nukes do NOT load follow !

Alan

I know some do Alan, or at least used to. I also know they shouldn't, its a bad idea. Its better to dump excess load into resistors than to play around with thermal shocks to the reactor and turbines and fuddling around with boric acid and whatnot. Nuclear fuel is just too cheap to go outside design parameters.

I know you think its a pro nuke myth. I'd like to think it currently is, because its a terrible thing to do to a good nuke IMHO. Just dump the load and someone will eventually realize you're giving away power at times.

I haven't looked at the French data, so take this FWIW. However, I do know a little about the power industry. Resources are always prioritized for load following, and nukes -- assuming that they are capabale of load following -- would be at the bottom of the priority list for load following. I.e., they would be the last resources to be shut down or have their outputs curtailed for lack of demand. And if demand fell low enough that output from throttleable nukes were cut back, then they would be the first resources to be turned up again when demand returned.

That's from simple economics. Nukes are guaranteed to have the lowest marginal cost of power of any dispatchable resource that the utility could draw upon. Very close to zero, in fact.

I believe that the correct statement about the French reactors is that their design allows for a reduction of output without actually shutting down. A useful and probably necessary characteristic when they are supplying a large fraction of a nation's electricity, but not something that would necessarily be obvious in the output record.

If you check week-ends and over longer periods, you see that they do. But of course, if possible, you let hydro do it, or some other country's resources.

Sorry, Alan, french nuclear load following is well known and there are multiple credible sources you can google that says as much. If you want to refute it, you need to do better.

If you want to refute it, you need to do better.

{sigh} TOD accepted practice, I agree

I went to the two sources, consumption is every 15 minutes; generation is by the hour. I chose the latest data, 22/8/09 for both and the half hour (XX:30) for demand.

After enough cut & paste to get carpal tunnel syndrome, I got the following data stream.

Generation is nuke, coal, gas/oil, hydro, total

Data analysis to follow "later"

00:00 - 01:00 38942 2606 60 4827 * 46435
  0:30 44171
01:00 - 02:00 38861 2480 34 4457 * 45832
  1:30 41272
02:00 - 03:00 39199 2137 0 3911 * 45247
  2:30 39954
03:00 - 04:00 39380 1736 0 3755 * 44871
  3:30 37371
04:00 - 05:00 39413 1498 0 3468 * 44379
  4:30 36410
05:00 - 06:00 39456 1431 0 2941 * 43828
  5:30 36440
06:00 - 07:00 39354 1499 0 2905 * 43758
  6:30 37373
07:00 - 08:00 39575 1862 0 3246 * 44683
  7:30 37213
08:00 - 09:00 39091 2460 0 3730 * 45281
  8:30 39730
09:00 - 10:00 39584 3016 1 4527 * 47128
  9:30 42778
10:00 - 11:00 39987 3252 56 5270 * 48565
10:30 44242
11:00 - 12:00 39444 3362 60 6945 * 49811
11:30 45373
12:00 - 13:00 39214 3459 59 7800 * 50532
12:30 46880
13:00 - 14:00 39183 3303 58 8124 * 50668
13:30 46283
14:00 - 15:00 39118 3214 58 7001 * 49391
14:30 45740
15:00 - 16:00 38775 3210 60 6124 * 48169
15:30 44569
16:00 - 17:00 38766 3288 60 5243 * 47357
16:30 43377
17:00 - 18:00 38520 3101 59 4767 * 46447
17:30 43165
18:00 - 19:00 38446 2875 59 4111 * 45491
18:30 44105
19:00 - 20:00 38157 2690 59 4121 * 45027
19:30 44280
20:00 - 21:00 38097 2632 59 4142 * 44930
20:30 42961
21:00 - 22:00 38136 2670 60 4243 * 45109
21:30 44544
22:00 - 23:00 38330 2761 57 4779 * 45927

23:00 - 24:00 38134 2744 59 4542 * 45479

There was only estimated consumption for the last two hours (I did not notice till I was almost finished).

Best Hopes for my right hand,

Alan

Please note that French nukes do NOT load follow, in any meaningful sense of the word.

The first number is the 1 hour delta in consumption, the second is the 1 hour delta in nuke generation. Raw table above gives other generation types (coal is remarkably stable).

  Delta from previous hour
        8/22/2009

        French
   Consumption   Nukes

1:30     -2899    -81
2:30	 -1318	  338
3:30	 -2583	  181
4:30      -961	   33
5:30	    30   -957
6:30	   933	  898
7:30	  -160	  221
8:30	  2517   -484
9:30	  3048    493
10:30	  1464    403
11:30	  1131   -543
12:30	  1507   -230
13:30	  -597    -31
14:30	  -543    -65
15:30	 -1171   -343
16:30	 -1192     -9
17:30     -212   -246
18:30	   940	  -74
19:30	   175   -289
20:30	 -1319    -60
21:30	  1583	   39
22:30	   532	  194	
23:30       82   -196	

I could do more numerical analysis, but the results are quite clear.

EdF /RTE just added the last two hours of data.

Alan

That was just one day. I downloaded the spreadsheets for 2009 and computed daily averages. Then I calculated average consumption and average nuke generation for the 205 days covered. Then I checked how many days the nuke generation and the consumption were in sync, that is when both nuke generation and total consumption were above their respective averages, or both below.

They were in sync 95.6% of the days. They were out of sync a few days late mars, early april when the daily averages were close to the total averages.

Sounds like day-of-the-week load following, rather than diurnal.

Yes, day-of-the-week and seasonal load following. If you have enough hydro, you don't need to do more.

I chose a random day (latest available) to numerate what I have seen in the daily graphs time and time again in France.

I did not "cherry pick" the data or means of analysis.

French nukes do NOT load follow.

"Load following", as commonly used (all the world except EdF perhaps) means that generation follows the load, on an hourly cycle at the longest. 15 minute is more common. And generation responds to the real load (thunderstorm goes over New Orleans on a hot August afternoon, -400 MW in a few minutes in an extreme example)

Everywhere in the world (AFAIK) there is a weekday peak around 6 PM in demand (as people come home from work, etc.), it is either a secondary or primary peak. Load following would increase generation to meet the anticipated demand.

In France, demand went up by 940 MW (normal & expected), nuke generation went DOWN -74 MW !!!

See also the 8:30 to 12:30 demand (strongly up) and nuke power (down, then retrace lost power, up slightly, then DOWN as demand increases from 10:30 to 12:30).

The EXACT opposite of load following.

I have a Mac and was not able to download the YTD files (in PC format) I wonder about your methodology. And, quite frankly, anything less than 99.x% is not load following.

The raw data does not support your hydro thesis, and France does not have enough hydro. What they have is, and should be, hoarded. Cheaper than buying from Switzerland :-)

Alan

French nukes do NOT load follow.

Alan. For somebody intensely focused on load following it is interesting that you twice resisted the opportunity to expound on the load following capabilities of your beloved combined cycle natural gas turbines.

http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/5677#comment-532361

Perhaps that is because they are very expensive and therefore used mainly for baseload power when there is not enough coal or nuclear to supply all baseload. That is a terrible waste of natural gas which could be put to much better use displacing oil in transportation.

Or perhaps it is because they lose efficiency when run off design point, or perhaps because they do not slew well due to the different time constants of the gas and steam turbines.

Nuclear plants will be the last to follow load because they have the lowest fuel cost, about one half cent per kWh in 2007, whereas gas fired generation will be the first called on to load follow because gas costs 5.67 cents per kWh.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html

Next generation nuclear plants have the capability to load follow but unfortunately it will not be needed for a long time in most locations.

Nuclear plants will be the last to follow load

I think that distinction belongs to wind power, which has zero fuel or other marginal cost.

Nick, windmills do not follow load, they do not add stability to the grid. They suck up stability from the grid. They depend on conventional plants to provide voltage and frequency stability and backup power. This is a valuable subsidy to wind that the windmills never pay for or include in their cost estimate.

You can build an all fossil grid, an all hydro grid, an all nuclear grid, but you cannot build an all wind and/or solar grid. You would need to include an enormous amount of storage to make it work, especially considering seasonal variation.

windmills do not follow load,

They could, in precisely the way nuclear plants do: you turn down the output when load is low, turn it back up when it's high.

Wind and nuclear have some almost identical problems: unneeded output at night, combined with high capital costs and low operating/marginal costs.

They depend on conventional plants to provide voltage and frequency stability and backup power.

True. They're available, so they're used. DSM would be cheaper.

This is a valuable subsidy to wind that the windmills never pay for or include in their cost estimate.

Not true. Conventional dispatchable power is explicitly paid for it's availability, with separate capacity payments. There's no subsidy.

you cannot build an all wind and/or solar grid.

You could, but you'd want maximum diversity of generation sources to minimize costs.

You would need to include an enormous amount of storage to make it work, especially considering seasonal variation.

No, your first recourse for mitigating intermittency would be geographic diversity; then DSM; then retention of cheap, rarely used biomass/FF backup, and only then storage. You'd probably also overbuild a bit, as France did with nuclear.

We've already discussed this elsewhere in this Post - see http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5677/532701

Not particularly useful or meaningful comments.

I did not find data on specific CCGT slew rates or partial load heat rates on-line. I have some knowledge of them, but never worked at a plant with CCGTs.

"your beloved combined cycle natural gas turbines".

Hardly. I promote pumped storage, HV DC transmission, wind, etc. but not CCGT. Since CCGT has been the dominant new generation for about two decades (just recently surpassed by wind), it hardly needs promoting.

As for the rest, you hardly know what you are talking about. Today, in Texas and Louisiana, CCGT often has lower fuel costs than coal (not true 18 months ago, I know).

Roughly 60% to 2/3rds of the generation from CCGT comes from the turbine part, which has superb slew rates. The second stage steam has some lag, but that energy will not go to waste.

Why should we "save" NG for transportation ? Just electrify rail, bicycles and walking for the bulk of transportation.

BTW, wind & pumped storage are the way to save NG. New nukes in the USA are too slow and too few to make much difference compared to NG & pumped storage (or even straight wind).

AFAIK (enlighten me if different) only EPRs claim to load follow. Since "French nukes load follow" and basically the same people now claim that EPRs "load follow", NaCl is in order till confirmed in practice.

And even then "load following" will be slow and unresponsive at best (just too much thermal and mass inertia to be other wise).

But MAYBE EPRs will increase output a few % each hour from 7:30 to 13:00 and again from 17:00 to 19:00. Not as great as the delta in demand, but at least pointing in the right direction each hour, to reduce the demands on French & Swiss pumped storage, hydro, CCGT and coal.

Alan

Sorry about the tone, but you started it. My rule of thumb is that all supporters of the "radiation is good for you" "theory" are beyond the scope of rational debate on nuclear power. They will swallow ANYTHING that is pro-nuke and ignore all other reality.

France turns off nukes in the spring and fall (refueling, but some just sit idle). This simple act of "load following" (turn off the old reactors four to seven months of the year) would create that above and below average generation & demand match.

Turning reactors off for months is not load following as the term is generally understood.

Ontario used to do the same thing BTW.

Alan

Bad writing, but may give you some insights:

In 2006, the 59 French reactors produced 78.1% of the electricity (up from 77.7% in 2003), although only about 55% of its installed electricity generating capacity is nuclear. A historical winter peak-load of 86,000 MW is to be compared with an installed capacity of over 120,000 MW. Even a comfortable 20% reserve, leaves a theoretical overcapacity of more than the equivalent all of the 34 units of 900 MW. No wonder that the equivalent of a dozen reactors operate only for export and France remains still the only country in the world that shuts down nuclear reactors on certain weekends because it cannot sell their power – not even for dumping prices.

On the other hand, the electricity seasonal peak-load exploded since the middle of the 1980s, mainly due to the widespread introduction of electric space and water heating. ...

The difference between the lowest load day in summer and the highest load day in winter is now about 55,000 MW. That is a very inefficient load curve, since significant capacities have to be made available for very short periods of time in winter.
This type of consumption is not covered by nuclear power but either by fossil fuel plants or by expensive peak-load power imports. In 2005, France imported 10 TWh net peak power from Germany for an unknown but probably high price. As a consequence, the national utility EDF (Electricité de France) decided to reactivate over the coming years 2,600 MW of very old oil fired power plants – the oldest one had originally been started up in 1968! – in order to cope with the peak load phenomenon. Today, per capita electricity consumption in France is over 25% higher than in Italy.

http://www.energiestiftung.ch/files/downloads/energiethemen-atomenergie/...

Thus the 4 GW of new pumped storage planned for Switzerland. The economics of displacing oil fired power with almost free late night nuke are "attractive".

Nukes need pumped storage too !

Alan

Nukes need pumped storage too

I should say. The largest pumped storage facility in the US (Ludington, MI) was designed precisely to time-shift nuclear generation. It's been running very successfuly for decades.

During 2009, nuclear power plants, with a capacity of 370 GWe, will produce roughly 14% of the world-wide electric energy. About 65,000 tons of natural uranium equivalent are required to operate these reactors…

For the last 15 years, only 2/3 of this fuel has on average been provided by uranium mines, whereas 1/3 has come from secondary resources.

That is only about a fifth of a pound per person of a sustenance that is reasonably common in the earths crust.

1… If weapons grade uranium provides 1/3 of the uranium how could mines provide more than 2/3?

2… What would have happened to the price of uranium if mines produced a mass equal to the total amount consumed?

3… At what price does uranium become too expensive? Why?

4… If the price went up to, say, $1,000 / kg, how would the mining industry respond?

Another problem with this recycling is related to the military use of the Pu239

High burn up fuel contains Pu 238, 240, 241, 242 making it far less desirable than weapons grade Pu from simple cheap easy to build unpressurized Pu production reactors.

The uranium mined up to the end of 2006 is given as … 2,325,000 tons in chapter 2c …
Next, we need to know how much of this uranium has been used up (fissioned) so far. According to the 2007 Red Book (chapter 2c), a total of 1,700,000 tons of uranium have been used up in reactors until the end of 2006. Thus, the total remaining stocks at the end of the year 2006 were 625,000 tons…

Our steroidal submarine reactors only split about 1% of mined uranium, so about 99% of all mined uranium remains unfissioned.

In the past, up to 95% of the extracted Pu239 was used for military purposes

Commercial power plants do not make weapons grade plutonium, however a few plutonium production reactors have made electricity as a side product.

In absence of more precise data, we may assume that each nuclear weapon contains on average just the critical mass or at least 50 kg of U235.

Bad assumption. Compressing the metal with explosives to increases its density reduces the critical mass dramatically, as does adding a neutron reflector.

It seems that you did not read my article carefully. (I commented already on the other PU isotopes
not too relevant in the context of my paper but relevant for the use of MOX and why it is not the best fuel!)

Many of the answers to your points are given.
Please clarify (thanks)

If my 50 kg of u235 on average is a bad assumption.
well what it yours?

michael

It seems that you did not read my article carefully.

Actually I did. While you chide others for going of topic I notice that does not stop you when it suits your agenda, like associating commercial nuclear power with nuclear weapons proliferation.

If my 50 kg of u235 on average is a bad assumption.
well what it yours?

Pakistan's nuclear weapons are believed to be based on a Chinese design that has a solid core of WGU. This design need not require more than 15 kg of WGU, but a number of factors might increase this amount. A greater amount of WGU could be used to increase the weapon's reliability or yield. It is also likely that some WGU would be lost during the weapon-production process. Therefore, ISIS has concluded that an average of 20 kg of WGU per Pakistani weapon is a reasonable estimate.

http://www.isis-online.org/publications/southasia/ta-pak060198.html

The actual amount varies from 5- 16 kg depending on the level of sophistication.

http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/fissionw/fissionweapons.pdf

Many of the answers to your points are given.

I have reviewed your material; you have not provided serious answers to any of the four questions I asked. Why is that?

1… If weapons grade uranium provides 1/3 of the uranium how could mines provide more than 2/3?

2… What would have happened to the price of uranium if mines produced a mass equal to the total amount consumed?

3… At what price does uranium become too expensive? Why?

4… If the price went up to, say, $1,000 / kg, how would the mining industry respond?

I was writing about the average amount in the existing 20000 warheads from Russia and the USA

the link you provide is interesting but as far as I can see does not address the above point.

can we agree that the Pakistan number is important for proliferation issues
but not for the average US/Russian warhead?

,blockquote>
I have reviewed your material; you have not provided serious answers to any of the four questions I asked. Why is that?

1… If weapons grade uranium provides 1/3 of the uranium how could mines provide more than 2/3?

2… What would have happened to the price of uranium if mines produced a mass equal to the total amount consumed?

3… At what price does uranium become too expensive? Why?

4… If the price went up to, say, $1,000 / kg, how would the mining industry respond?

I guess because I have overlooked the questions!

1) you misunderstood or misquote what I wrote
I said roughly 1/3 from secondary resources and about 2/3 from mining.
10000 tons/ year come from Russia weapon HEU for another 4 years
that leaves another roughly 10000-12000 tons/year from other stocks!

2) I do not like to talk about the price because it is defined by many ups and downs
but I guess it would go down if the mining cost were small compared to the existing market price
the dumping practice from Russia and other big players influence it as well.
but this is currently a highly artificial question!

the mining is far below the requirements and since 15 years!

3) too expensive? don't know we will see when the shortages happen under market conditions
but this is highly doubtful as uranium is not a totally free thing and for good reasons.

let me turn the question back
how much would the indian nuclear power plants pay to operate their reactors
at 100% capacity (India is always short in electric energy!)

4) for a 1000 dollar/kg well they would enjoy for some time!
and try to keep their monopoly as long as possible
ignoring shutdowns or not!
the dark side of capitalism ..

but we are not at this situation yet and the question is
will the nuclear renaissance be stopped
because of outages like in India following uranium supply problems

or because the current economic crisis will eliminate some of the older
nukes fast than their replacement and price effects from uranium shortages will not be seen?

so far at least we observe many delays already!

that's why I always try to argue in the real amount of produced nuclear kwhe
and not in terms of price.

michael

can we agree that the Pakistan number is important for proliferation issues
but not for the average US/Russian warhead?

Yes, it does not make a big difference what form the material is in.

2… What would have happened to the price of uranium if mines produced a mass equal to the total amount consumed?

I do not like to talk about the price because it is defined by many ups and downs
but I guess it would go down if the mining cost were small compared to the existing market price

The answer is that the excess production would have collapsed the price until more mines shutdown to bring the market into balance.

And mining costs are not small, except on a per kWh basis.

Actually market forces have kept the average price just high enough to meet demand without generating huge windfall profits to most suppliers.

Most people look at the spot price which goes up and down. But the average price actually paid is not nearly as volatile, and not as high as the spot price due to long term contracts.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/umar/summarytable1.html

4… If the price went up to, say, $1,000 / kg, how would the mining industry respond?

for a 1000 dollar/kg well they would enjoy for some time!

Well, they would enjoy it until supply exceeded demand and the price collapsed.

3… At what price does uranium become too expensive? Why?

too expensive? don't know we will see when the shortages happen under market conditions

Reactor fuel assemblies cost about one half cent per kWh in 2007,

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat8p2.html

of which natural uranium cost is about one third.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf02.html

The average U.S. U3O8 price actually paid in 2007 was $24.45.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/nuclear/umar/summarytable1.html

Fuel cost for coal was, 2.4 cents per kWh, and for natural gas, 5.67 cents.

To make reactor fuel as expensive per kWh as coal the uranium cost / kWh would have to increase to 2.07 cents / kWh, which is about $300 per pound U3O8.

To make reactor fuel as expensive per kWh as natural gas the uranium cost / kWh would have to increase to 5.3cents / kWh, which is about $700 per pound.
With breeders these numbers would be up by a factor of 100, but we will save that discussion for a later post.

Question. What uranium price would convince utilities to shutdown their reactors and burn more fossil fuel rather than pay for uranium?

the question is will the nuclear renaissance be stopped because of outages like in India following uranium supply problems

Obviously the India shortage is not due to the high cost of uranium. My recollection is that India refused to comply with the nonproliferation treaty and was subject to political sanctions.

Using this transparent ruse to support your worldwide uranium shortfall prediction does your credibility great damage.

that's why I always try to argue in the real amount of produced nuclear kwhe
and not in terms of price.

There are reasons why the nuclear contribution is modest. Irrational fear, overregulation, the failure to include external costs of wind solar and fossil fuel. The cost and supply of uranium is not one of those factors.

on the 5th august India's Atomic Energy Commission said that the plant load factor of Nuclear Power Corporation of India has fallen below 50% due to a shortage of uranium. The government owned Uranium Corporation of India is operating 5 underground mines and one open cast mine as well as two processing plants. It hopes that opening a further 5 mines will lift the load factor to 55% next year and 65% in 2012. It also said that any new contract to buy a LWR must also be accompanied by a lifetime guarantee of fuel supply from the country of import. Is that normal or is it an indication of stress?

India has just been let in from the cold, right? (Due to not signing the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.) I guess they haven't been able to get full access to the world uranium market yet?

A deal was inked for Areva to supply some 300 tons of uranium to India about 8 months ago.

Thanks for the article. Thanks also to Engineer Poet for his rebuttal, it is always useful to have two sides to the argument.

As far as I am concerned, the discussion of nuclear fission as a reliable source of electricity is (both on TOD and else where) focussed around the availability of the primary fuel source - uranium ore. I would just make the following points:

1. It appears to me that the debate is still immature (ie, young). The reason we are all talking about uranium and nuclear power is because we are trying to secure a 'business as usual' outlook after the peak and subsequent decline of oil, gas and coal. We therefore need to replace our current energy use with a similar quantity of energy from a new source in order to seamlessly move over from one source to the other, and the crucially continue to ramp up that new energy production to feed the GDP growth monster of BAU. This is the crux of the issue.

Engineer Poet highlights a quote above stating that, at current consumption, the world has enough uranium ore to last a century. Let's analyse that a bit. Here in the UK - according to a recent report in the Economist - just 13% of our electricity comes from nuclear. Leaving aside the capital costs of replacing the worn out reactors, if we want to replace the electricity coming from Putin's gas (46% UK electricity - in 5 years time majority of gas will come from Russia, only 25% now) then we will need to roll-out three times more reactors, burning three times more uranium. This might be an academic calculation, and in reality implausible, but it leads me to point 2:

2. To view energy security and longevity of supply solely through the prism of proven ore resources is to miss the very real geo-political and market risks. Here in Britain we are becoming more and more reliant on Putin to heat our homes, cook our food and produce our electricity. If we waive a magic wand and wake up tomorrow with three times more nuclear reactors this just moves the political risk to somewhere else in the world. And we will still be reliant on a strong pound to buy uranium cheaply, which leads me to the most important consideration of all:

3. The price of energy is everything, the quantity of resources is only academic. The price the consumer pays for his monthly electric bill, or the price the aluminium plant pays is everything in the context of Business As Usual. Someone mentioned above that a government could address the problem of scarcity of supply by wading into the market and bidding up the price. Unfortunately, as I have been saying now for many years to whoever will listen, the free-market pricing mechanism is next to useless in an energy market. Yes, a supplier may bite the government's hand off but the consumer gets stuck with the price. If Britain were to invest in the reactors the free market will not work: the consumer can NOT choose where to buy his electricity from. If a family's electricity bill doubles, that is money then not flowing into the economy; the growth machine is affected.

4. How many more nuclear power plants will be needed to electrify the entire UK ICE fleet? I have no idea but I am sure that there are calculations out there. I would be interested to know.

I have rambled a bit but my main premise is that we should be mature in our debate about nuclear - or other energy sources. Engineer Poet's thesis seems to be that all we need do to keep BAU is to switch to nuclear as there is currently a 100 years of resources left - at present consumption. I take issue with this position, not based on resource quantities but on the other issues noted above. It would be very easy to acknowledge the decline of fossil fuels and then cast around for a suitable replacement. This would, in my opinion, be a foolish thing to do without first acknowledging the power of GDP growth vis-a-vis the exponential function and the inability of our species to continue consuming such ludicrous quantities of energy at such a low cost. For these reasons, conventional nuclear fission does not extract us from the quandary we are in. I wait with bated breath to learn about fast breeder technology and whether it will be the saviour.

at current consumption, the world has enough uranium ore to last a century.

Note that this assumes the use of enriched uranium in light-water reactors.  LWRs can only use about 1% of uranium.  Fast-neutron reactors can use upwards of 99% of uranium, and light-water breeder reactors can use perhaps 99% of thorium.  Thorium is about 4x as abundant in earth's crust as uranium (10 ppm vs. 2.5 ppm).

Here in Britain we are becoming more and more reliant on Putin to heat our homes, cook our food and produce our electricity.

That is very true.  That's a policy failure; it doesn't change the physics or resource abundance issues.

Engineer Poet's thesis seems to be that all we need do to keep BAU is to switch to nuclear as there is currently a 100 years of resources left - at present consumption. I take issue with this position, not based on resource quantities but on the other issues noted above.

That's a mischaracterization.  Nothing is going to maintain BAU, which is reliant on an increasing supply of petroleum which no longer exists.  The kind of business we have in the future depends on policy choices extending from now back some 50 years into the past.  We cannot change policy decisions of 20 years ago, but we can look at the consequences of those decisions and revisit them as necessary; above all, we should choose wisely.

Engineer-Poet,
Because of the time zone difference in Australia I missed some of the discussion. I appreciate your critique of Michael's article, and hope you can review my next article before it is posted.

One question I am not clear on could all PWR( LWR) be run on a mixture of Thorium/Uranium as was done at Shippingport and what would be the loss of rated power if any?

I have looked at some of the public info about Shippingport's core design and shaken my head.  I don't know enough details about reactor core design to have an opinion worth much, but one issue I'm aware of WRT breeding Th to U is neutron flux:  the higher the flux, the greater the likelihood that Pa-233 will capture a neutron and become Pa-234 before it decays to U-233.  Modern PWRs have higher power densities than Shippingport, so this would be a bigger problem.  This will hurt both the breeding ratio and neutron economy.

Regardless of this, it appears that at least one nuclear company is looking to sell fuel rods which include thorium to extend their useful life.  They'd be the ones to ask, or maybe go over to Rod Adams' blog and search there.

HAcland,

Thanks for the above temperate response. I appreciate that you are trying to learn and keeping an open mind. A commendable attitude.

Some of us on the pro-nuclear side of the debate do get testy at times. A response (or over-response) to what we see as the blatent distortions and misrepresentations of the other side.

I suppose the same could be said for the other side.

I don't agree with some of your points, however. In particular, this:

The reason we are all talking about uranium and nuclear power is because we are trying to secure a 'business as usual' outlook after the peak and subsequent decline of oil, gas and coal. We therefore need to replace our current energy use with a similar quantity of energy from a new source in order to seamlessly move over from one source to the other, and the crucially continue to ramp up that new energy production to feed the GDP growth monster of BAU. This is the crux of the issue.

I can understand how you might think that, and to some, perhaps it is the crux of the issue. But it's not at all how I feel.

I'm as interested as anybody in vanquishing the GDP growth monster of "BAU". But I'm even more interested in avoiding a planetary melt-down and the extinction of most of the planet's wildlife species. And right now, the only realistic alternative that I see to a rapid ramp-up in nuclear power is more use of coal, more mountaintop leveling, and accelerated global warming, leading ultimately to a series of nasty resource wars that have a high probability of going nuclear.

Do you play go or chess? If you do and are more than a rank beginner, then perhaps you'll understand what I'm about to say. Beginners at those games use very shallow strategies that are all on the surface and very direct. Attack when you see an opportunity, defend when you are attacked. Take gains that opportunity presents, cede nothing without a fight. Beginners are often puzzled when the neat attack strategy that they've planned is foiled by a simple innocuous-seeming move by a more experienced opponent, and they somehow find themselves boxed in by their own pieces and unable to escape from a rapidly deteriorating position on the game board.

I see the policies pursued by many of the green parties and sustainable living advocates as very analogous to the game play of rank beginners. I've no problem with where they would like to end up; we have quite similar goals. But their strategies have zero chance of succeeding in the face of real-world forces, and are ultimately counter-productive. They don't understand the system they're trying to change, and worse, don't see the necessity of understanding it. The arrogance of youth. Makes them great tools for those who know the use of tools.

This is barely a scratch in the surface of a large topic, but I'll post it now rather than trying to amplify. Because I can see I'm on the theshold of getting bogged down. If I tackle too much, I'm unlikely to finish anything. A flaw that I need to learn to live with.

I'm as interested as anybody in vanquishing the GDP growth monster of "BAU". But I'm even more interested in avoiding a planetary melt-down and the extinction of most of the planet's wildlife species. And right now, the only realistic alternative that I see to a rapid ramp-up in nuclear power is more use of coal, more mountaintop leveling, and accelerated global warming, leading ultimately to a series of nasty resource wars that have a high probability of going nuclear.

I believe that you nailed pretty well the reason for why there are so many pro-nuclear contributors to the oil drum. They hope that a nuclear renaissance can prevent a power-down after the end of cheap oil without necessity to increase coal to take its place.

Unfortunately, this hope is just a pipe dream.

Remember from Michael's first part that nuclear power currently contributes only between 2.5% and 7.5% to the overall energy mix, depending on the accounting method that you use.

Thus, even if we were able to increase nuclear power by 50%, which would be huge and is unlikely to happen any time soon as Michael demonstrated, the contribution of nuclear power would still be tiny (between 3.75% and 11.25% of the overall energy mix) in comparison with the oil that currently makes up roughly 40% of the overall energy mix.

Thus, nuclear power won't be able to replace the oil; not by a long shot; not by any shot.

Francois,

I'm baffled by the coexistence of two memes: "BAU can't persist, due to Peak Oil", and "We can't do anything about Peak Oil, because under BAU alternatives aren't fast enough/feasible". Aren't these obviously contradictory?

Personally, I prefer wind and solar, in part because they are indeed much easier to ramp up quickly than nuclear, in part due to weapons proliferation concerns (I think that weapons concerns are the basic reason that nuclear power receives so much opposition, even if anti-nuclear activists can't articulate it). I think it's clear that wind and solar could provide all of the cost-effective power we needed, as quickly as we needed it.

But, I'm perplexed by the argument that nuclear can not be ramped up quickly. it seems perfectly obvious to me that the recent stagnation of nuclear power is a social choice. If we really needed to, we could build it much more quickly.

I'm baffled by the coexistence of two memes: "BAU can't persist, due to Peak Oil", and "We can't do anything about Peak Oil, because under BAU alternatives aren't fast enough/feasible". Aren't these obviously contradictory?

No contradictions at all. The only energy source that can replace oil fast enough is coal, and coal cannot be increased significantly as long as we stick to our CO2 emission protocols. The question that remains to be answered is how much our promises to reduce CO2 emissions will be worth once the brownouts begin.

Hence we have exactly two choices: either allow a reduction in energy density or allow a significant increase in pollution density.

Personally, I prefer wind and solar, in part because they are indeed much easier to ramp up quickly than nuclear, in part due to weapons proliferation concerns (I think that weapons concerns are the basic reason that nuclear power receives so much opposition, even if anti-nuclear activists can't articulate it). I think it's clear that wind and solar could provide all of the cost-effective power we needed, as quickly as we needed it.

It is certainly true that it is much easier to obtain a go-ahead for a wind or solar power plant than for a nuclear power plant, but unfortunately, neither wind nor solar will be able to replace the oil.

Their contribution to the overall energy mix is currently even much more tiny than that of nuclear power, and for good reasons.

Solar is still too expensive. It cannot compete with fossil fuels at current fossil fuel prices, and the most common solar technology, photovoltaics, is currently even too expensive to be ever profitable on a large scale. PV is only economical due to heavy subsidies, and we can only afford those subsidies, because there are sufficiently few people taking advantage of them. PV technology costs currently in the order of $300/barrel oil equivalent. At that price, we would suffocate our world economy, if we were to embark on that technology on a large scale, because we would invest a too high percentage of our overall GDP on the acquiration of energy. Concentrated solar power (CSP) plants are more economical, at least in locations sufficiently close to the equator, but they can still not compete with fossil fuels at the current fuel prices. Hopefully, technology improvements and large-scale production will bring the prices down, but we aren't there yet.

Wind power is more competitive at least in some locations, and I expect wind power to pick up quite a bit over the coming years, a trend that can easily be observed already in recent years, but there are still problems with that technology also. The most serious problem is the intermittency problem. We need storage capacity, such as reservoir lakes, that are available in some places, but not in others. Wind power can reduce the problems of the decline of oil, but it won't fully compensate for it.

But, I'm perplexed by the argument that nuclear cannot be ramped up quickly. It seems perfectly obvious to me that the recent stagnation of nuclear power is a social choice. If we really needed to, we could build it much more quickly.

It is certainly true that the construction of new nuclear power plants has been and still is slowed down by political concerns, but any nuclear power plant will always have to be built to very high standards of security, and this means that it will always take at least 5-10 years for a nuclear power plant to be completed.

The only energy source that can replace oil fast enough is coal

Have you seen an analysis of this? In the US, at least, wind power supplied a .7% increase of generated KWHs in 2008, and it's annual installation rate could easily be increased by a factor of 4x (there's a 300GW backlog of proposed nameplate capacity). That seems like enough.

The question that remains to be answered is how much our promises to reduce CO2 emissions will be worth once the brownouts begin.

Is there really a question here? Isn't it absolutely clear that, given a choice between Keeping The Lights On and mitigating climate change, that KTLO will be chosen every time? Is there any government in the world that has indicated otherwise? Isn't it clear that our only hope for mitigating climate change is preventing that kind of either-or choice?

PV technology costs currently in the order of $300/barrel oil equivalent.

How did you calculate that? Oil at $75/barrel suggests gasoline at $2.50/gallon without taxes. In the average new US car at 27 MPG that's $.09/mile. An EV would use .25KWH/mile, so competitive electricity would cost $.36/KWH. That's definitely achievable by PV,now.

Have you seen First Solar's $.87/Watt(p) cost of panel production? Take a look here: http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006453.html

Wind power...most serious problem is the intermittency problem. We need storage capacity, such as reservoir lakes, that are available in some places, but not in others. Wind power can reduce the problems of the decline of oil, but it won't fully compensate for it.

Well, as you note, coal is adequate for the medium term, so the difficult issue really isn't Keeping The Lights On, it's dealing with climate change. Right?

If that's the case, why not just build out wind as fast as possible, and use it when it's available to turn down coal output? When wind got big enough that coal wasn't needed, couldn't we solve the intermittency problem by using coal for the 10% of the time when wind isn't available?

it will always take at least 5-10 years for a nuclear power plant to be completed.

Well, currently I have the sense that the solution to this is small, modular manufactured nuclear plant components. One of the problems of the industry is that plants are so large that there's too much time between plants. In effect, they're usually new designs, being handmade for the first time. If we could design small, modular, manufactured reactors that might change. Also, apparently Chinese and Western companies are trying to build Westinghouse AP1000 reactors in 36 months ( http://www.nucpros.com/?q=node/4833 ). Any nuclear advocates out there want to tackle the question of whether either of these is possible/likely?

The construction timeline is at this link.
Nth AP1000 timeline
18 months site prep, 36 months build, 6 month startup work. 5 years end to end.
The recent S Korea construction has been showing steadily lowering construction times on similar to AP1000 reactors. last one in 2005 had 48 month actual build time.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/08/faster-and-cheaper-nuclear-plant.html

South Korea is getting improved build times.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/08/generation-35-nuclear-reactors.html

The modules are going in for the AP1000 being built in China. They built the module factory in 11 months.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/08/ap1000-modular-reactor-construction.html

China is planning to have Nth unit build times for the HTR-PM (pebble bed) down to 24 months. the first will have end to end project of 60 months.
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/06/worlds-first-commercial-high.html
http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/01/chinese-researcher-2007-presentation-on...

Hyperion Power Generation is working on hot tub sized uranium hydride reactors modelled on the Triga research reactor. The goal: You order it, you pre-pay for most of the cost, they manufacture it and then they deliver it within six to 12 months.

http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/11/update-on-hyperion-power-generation.html
http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/09/ceo-of-hyperion-power-generation.html

Hyperion Power generation is trying to make a factory mass produced uranium hydride molten core reactor which will generate 70 MWt and 27-30MWe. Hyperion Power Generation plans to sell and build the first 4000 reactors over the first ten year period or less. [2013-2022] They have orders from Romania and Czechs and are now talking to developers in the Cayman Islands, Panama and the Bahamas. 4,000 reactors over ten years is an average of 400 per year or 10-12 GW per year.

The reactor will weigh fifteen to 20 tons, depending on whether you're measuring just the reactor itself or the cask—the container that we ship it in—as well. It was specifically designed to fit on the back of a flatbed truck because most of our customers are not going to have rail. It's about a meter-and-a-half across and about 2 meters tall.

It uses uranium hydride. UH3 is the chemical formula. Low-enriched, about 10 percent [uranium isotope]-235, the rest is U-238.

We're leveraging the design of a very common reactor, called a TRIGA reactor. There are 60-something of those reactors around the world. They are the only reactor that the NRC has licensed for unattended operation, meaning it's so safe that you can literally walk away from it. It's walk-away safe.

In the US, at least, wind power supplied a .7% increase of generated KWHs in 2008, and it's annual installation rate could easily be increased by a factor of 4x (there's a 300GW backlog of proposed nameplate capacity). That seems like enough.

The question is how long this growth rate can be maintained. The U.S. has a lot of empty flat land in the Midwest that could be used for wind power. Europe is much more densely populated. If you drive through the land North of Vienna, for example, between Vienna and the Czech border, you will find that there is already one windmill next to another. There is hardly any space left to build yet more windmills in that area.

Is there really a question here? Isn't it absolutely clear that, given a choice between Keeping The Lights On and mitigating climate change, that KTLO will be chosen every time? Is there any government in the world that has indicated otherwise? Isn't it clear that our only hope for mitigating climate change is preventing that kind of either-or choice?

Of course. That was a rhetorical question. The world is likely to destroy itself ... because this is the most economical among the alternatives.

How did you calculate that? Oil at $75/barrel suggests gasoline at $2.50/gallon without taxes. In the average new US car at 27 MPG that's $.09/mile. An EV would use .25KWH/mile, so competitive electricity would cost $.36/KWH. That's definitely achievable by PV now.

Well, I was thinking about small-scale PV installations on private homes, ordered and paid for by private citizen with little to no bargaining power. I myself installed a PV system at our (former) weekend house in the White Mountains of New Mexico a few years ago, and that is the price that I calculated I had to pay to get it all up and running. The price included, of course, not only the PV panels, but also the inverter, the batteries, the propane backup generator, the solar tracker, etc.

Well, as you note, coal is adequate for the medium term, so the difficult issue really isn't Keeping The Lights On, it's dealing with climate change. Right?

If that's the case, why not just build out wind as fast as possible, and use it when it's available to turn down coal output? When wind got big enough that coal wasn't needed, couldn't we solve the intermittency problem by using coal for the 10% of the time when wind isn't available?

I agree with this scenario ... not because I like it, but because it seems to be the most reasonable among lots of bad alternatives. This is indeed most likely what is going to happen ... except that I don't believe that wind will be able to fully replace fossil fuels for a very long time if ever, and therefore, we'll continue to emit large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere from burning coal for several decades.

The U.S. has a lot of empty flat land in the Midwest that could be used for wind power. Europe is much more densely populated. There is hardly any space left to build yet more windmills in that area...

Ah. So your concern about wind is primarily Europe, not North America? My impression is that there is quite enough unutilized wind resource in Europe, especially if we include offshore, to provide whatever's needed. Anyone expert on this? Neil?

Of course. That was a rhetorical question.

Well, I can appreciate that, but don't you think we'll make better progress if we frame the problems correctly?

So, we're agreed that the problem with electricity is not Peak Oil, but climate change?

I was thinking about small-scale PV installations on private homes

Why did you install such an expensive system? Was grid-power unavailable?

Would you agree that if we want to use solar in the most cost-effective way possible, we'll do it in large grid-connected installations either on flat industrial/commercial roofs or on dedicated land?

What did you think of my analysis (Oil at $75/barrel suggests gasoline at $2.50/gallon without taxes. In the average new US car at 27 MPG that's $.09/mile. An EV would use .25KWH/mile, so competitive electricity would cost $.36/KWH. That's definitely achievable by PV, now)?

Did you have a chance to look at my solar references (First Solar's $.87/Watt(p) cost of panel production, and http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006453.html )?

I agree with this scenario

Ah, that's great. We're making progress in framing our problems, I think.

I don't believe that wind will be able to fully replace fossil fuels for a very long time if ever, and therefore, we'll continue to emit large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere from burning coal for several decades.

There's a difference between what's feasible (assuming reasonable costs, etc) and what's likely. I think we're not likely to fight climate change in the aggressive way we should (primarily due to people's fear of losing their jobs and investments in BAU). On the other hand, I think it's certainly possible to build wind quite quickly. Heck, in the US it would only cost about $2 trillion to replace coal entirely with wind - that's the cost of the Iraq war.

Ah. So your concern about wind is primarily Europe, not North America? My impression is that there is quite enough unutilized wind resource in Europe, especially if we include offshore, to provide whatever's needed.

Yes. My primary concern is with Europe ... and not only limited to wind.

The Swiss government predicts a shortfall of electricity in the relatively near future. Until now, Switzerland is a net exporter of electricity (we export roughly 10% of our electricity), but the situation can change fast. Initially, the government predicted a shortfall for 2020 and beyond, but later corrected that prediction to 2012.

Britain seems to be in a similar situation with similar predictions.

The demand for electricity is rising here in Switzerland, because ever more people switch their central heating systems from oil to electric (including myself - I threw our central oil heating system out in 2005 and replaced it by a liquid-to-liquid heat pump with geothermal support on the primary side and solar thermal support on the secondary side). When we did it, the waiting period for getting a company to our house for digging the geothermal wells was 4 months. The waiting period has now increased to almost one year. This demonstrates the growing demand.

We haven't seen yet any increase of electricity demand due to EVs, but it is expected that this demand will start growing around the 2011/12 time frame.

Our government talks about the problem, but very little is done about it. Here in Switzerland, the political system is very slow due to our form of government. The government has executive powers only. Any new nuclear power station will have to be approved by the people in a popular vote, and the will to do so is simply not there at the current time.

This may change when the brownouts start in earnest, but by that time, it will be too late to fix the problem quickly.

The Swiss government predicts a shortfall of electricity in the relatively near future. Until now, Switzerland is a net exporter of electricity (we export roughly 10% of our electricity), but the situation can change fast. Initially, the government predicted a shortfall for 2020 and beyond, but later corrected that prediction to 2012.

And yet the Swiss government is not concerned about it at all.
Last year the UBS was saved overnight by the Swiss taxpayer and despite this banks record loss, it paid 7 billion CHF in bonuses. This year 0.01 billion CHF will be invested in photovoltaics on Swiss roofs (to apparently 'boost' the economy). If only 1% of the bonuses are spent in brothels, the Swiss tax payer will fund brothels 7 times more than photovoltaics. But as opposed to photovoltaics, brothels can unfortunately not reduce the Swiss dependence on limited resources nor will they increase the competitiveness of the country especially since many of these bonuses were paid to investment bankers not even operating in Switzerland.

Anyway, Switzerland is currently increasing its pump storage capacity and electricity price fluctuations have been increasing (and therefore it will probably be a lucrative investment), so Switzerland does not necessarily need to be able to provide 100% of the electricity anyway. After all it already imports 100% of oil, 100% of natural gas, 100% of uranium and 43% of food, so why would it be all of a sudden a huge problem if tiny Switzerland net-imported 10% of its electricity, when it can get all that European excess electricity at night and on week-ends (and in the future maybe on windy days) and the hydro storage lakes have enough capacity to provide electricity for up to 3 months to the entire country?

The concern about the Swiss government ignorance regarding renewable energy is more related to the competitiveness of the country, than whether the lights will go out or not. Keep in mind the nuclear power plant in Leibstadt provides 15% of the Swiss electricity and 3 years ago it didn't provide power for 6 month due to an unexpected generator failure and no lights went out. Ironically the same nuclear operator was running an expensive TV-campaign against renewable energy (specifically PV) and claiming that if Switzerland were to invest in renewable energy, the lights would basically go out.

Last year the UBS was saved overnight by the Swiss taxpayer and despite this banks record loss, it paid 7 billion CHF in bonuses.

Actually, the Swiss government was a bit more savvy than some other governments. They bought eight months ago UBS stock at a value of 6 billion CHF from UBS, and this week (after the deal with the U.S. government, the value of UBS stock rallied), the Swiss government sold all that stock to private investors, making in the process a bit more than 1 billion CHF in profit. The demand for the stock was so high that they couldn't meet the demand although they put all of their UBS stock on the market the same morning. Hence the Swiss tax payer so far didn't pay a penny on its UBS salvation exercise. On the contrary, the bank salvation will lead to a reduction of the tax burden.

Of course, the story isn't over yet, because the Swiss National Bank assumed also toxic assets from UBS at a value of 54 billion CHF. It may still happen that the Swiss National Bank may lose quite a bit of money on these toxic assets, yet the National Bank is one step further removed from the tax payer than the government.

Anyway, Switzerland is currently increasing its pump storage capacity and electricity price fluctuations have been increasing (and therefore it will probably be a lucrative investment), so Switzerland does not necessarily need to be able to provide 100% of the electricity anyway. After all it already imports 100% of oil, 100% of natural gas, 100% of uranium and 43% of food, so why would it be all of a sudden a huge problem if tiny Switzerland net-imported 10% of its electricity, when it can get all that European excess electricity at night and on week-ends (and in the future maybe on windy days) and the hydro storage lakes have enough capacity to provide electricity for up to 3 months to the entire country?

This is an important comment. Yes! Switzerland has a big advantage due to its mountains. Some European countries, such as the Netherlands, are totally flat, and need to outsource their electricity storage requirements. Thus, Switzerland can store electricity for its neighbors (at a profit, of course), and in return will hopefully be able to buy some electricity from its neighbors also.

Already now, the European electricity grid is very tight, i.e., electricity flows across borders everywhere. Switzerland imports electricity from France, Germany, and Austria (about 50% of all the electricity that the country needs), while it exports to Italy about 60%. Thus overall, Switzerland exports 10% of its electricity.

I also agree with your comment that Switzerland has essentially slept through the recent revolution of renewable energy. We were in the forefront of solar (PV) technology around 1990, but by now have been overtaken by Austria and Germany, because both of these countries are offering much more substantial subsidies to private homeowners for investing in PV technology than Switzerland.

Actually, the Swiss government was a bit more savvy than some other governments. They bought eight months ago UBS stock at a value of 6 billion CHF from UBS, and this week (after the deal with the U.S. government, the value of UBS stock rallied), the Swiss government sold all that stock to private investors, making in the process a bit more than 1 billion CHF in profit.

That may be true but if the Swiss government went to the Casino and put 6 billion on one color it could have won even 6 billion CHF in a minute.

Of course, the story isn't over yet, because the Swiss National Bank assumed also toxic assets from UBS at a value of 54 billion CHF. It may still happen that the Swiss National Bank may lose quite a bit of money on these toxic assets, yet the National Bank is one step further removed from the tax payer than the government.

Imagine how many pumped storage and renewable power options and how many jobs could have been financed and created with this much cash.

Initially, the government predicted a shortfall for 2020 and beyond, but later corrected that prediction to 2012.

Are you reassured by the later comment about imports and pumped storage?

Britain seems to be in a similar situation with similar predictions.

Yes, but LNG imports appear to be adequate: suddenly, due to greater US supplies of shale gas, world LNG supplies appear adequate for the foreseeable future, while the UK is busily building LNG import terminals. It may be luck, but the UK's electricity situation looks decent.

Regarding wind, are you reassured by the later comment about European wind resource?

Did you have a chance to look at my solar info?

My impression is that there is quite enough unutilized wind resource in Europe, especially if we include offshore, to provide whatever's needed.

http://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/paginas/Contenidosecciones.asp?ID...

The estimated technical potential for wind energy on land is calculated to be around 45,000 TWh in all EEA countries together in 2030, while the offshore technical potential in 2030 is two-thirds that of onshore and is estimated at 30,000 TWh.

The current European electricity consumption is 2,900 TWh.

It is certainly true that the construction of new nuclear power plants has been and still is slowed down by political concerns, but any nuclear power plant will always have to be built to very high standards of security, and this means that it will always take at least 5-10 years for a nuclear power plant to be completed.

This sure as hell doesn't follow. If people face the risk of their power going out and having the median income go from 40k to 4k a year, they're not going to care about some obscure risk of some folks across the country being fried by shoddy work. Its not obvious that safty concerns keep plant build times up either. Much of it is regulatory issues and immature industrial environment. After the Nth plant goes up, these tend to go away.

The only energy source that can replace oil fast enough is coal, and coal cannot be increased significantly as long as we stick to our CO2 emission

The only energy source that can replace oil fast enough is conservation.

Not only will conservation replace oil, it will reduce the cost of alternatives. The current consumption hurdle is set very high, the overall price structure of all fuels reflects this.

Reduce demand by 50% and the 7% of energy production provided by nuclear becomes 14% without the need to build a single reactor or open new mines.

The real issue is trying to support the mindless and pointless consumption. Build a reactor that can fly me to Mars and you will have something useful. Build a reactor to drive some fat- ass to Seven- Eleven for more potato chips is unspeakable.

it seems perfectly obvious to me that the recent stagnation of nuclear power is a social choice.

It is probably mostly related to the huge capital costs and long construction time of a power plant option that is at present not capable to do load following efficiently/effectively and compared to wind power has higher operating costs and still requires fuel.

Florida Power and Light estimates its two new nuclear plants (2.2 GW to 3 GW) will cost as much as $24 billion:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=89169837
http://tinyurl.com/m6qeuh
Even at 3GW that's $8000/kW.

huge capital costs and long construction time

These are related to social choices:

regulatory choices & risk balancing;
interest costs (which can be reduced by government guarantees or ownership (think France);
standardization of designs; and
production volumes.

interest costs (which can be reduced by government guarantees or ownership (think France)

Wind and other renewable options could also grow faster, if they received cheap government loans.

Absolutely.

Francois Cellier was suggesting that it was not possible to build as much low-CO2 generation as we need in a timely way, and I was disagreeing. I suggested wind as the primary form of generation needed, but also pointed out that the current pace of nuclear construction depended heavily on social choices, rather than technical barriers.

I believe that you nailed pretty well the reason for why there are so many pro-nuclear contributors to the oil drum. They hope that a nuclear renaissance can prevent a power-down after the end of cheap oil without necessity to increase coal to take its place.

No, Francois, that's not quite it.

I can't speak for others, but that is not how I feel. Ending physical growth, and ending those aspects of the economic system that require perpetual growth, are things that must happen if we're to avoid destroying the planet. But I have no interest in avoiding power-down. I'm sure we could live sustainably and comfortably on a small fraction or our current energy budget. It would make a lot of things easier. But it's irrelevant. A rational power down is just not in the cards. We'll see the world in hell (more or less literally) before we consent to that.

You and many others view rational power down as the only alternative to chaotic collapse. You say that any hope of preventing power down through nuclear power after the end of cheap oil is a "pipe dream". I think a more accurate statement would be that you are committed to the notion of power down as a concept, as a moral imperative for how we should be living, and you see nuclear power as a threat to that vision. Whatever. In any case, it's the idea of rational power down that I see as the pipe dream.

The notion that concerns about global warming will be enough to stop us from burning coal, if there is no alternative, is hopelessly naive. The AGW deniers club is well organized, and have a strong lobby in Washington. Thermal inertia in the ocean and ice caps mean that the more serious effects of warming won't be showing up for 50 to 100 years. And even if the evidence soon becomes too overwhelming for even the diehard deniers, well, it's the dark-skinned folks living in the tropics who will bear the brunt of the problem. Big deal. We masters of the universe can probably pick up a good deal on arctic waterfront, if we buy before the proles catch on.

You see the problem? If oil becomes inconveniently costly, then we'll build CTL plants, and to hell with CO2 emissions. As long as there's a hill left somewhere in Virginia with coal under it, we'll keep leveling to get at it. What good are streams and valleys, anyway?

I'm being a little too cynical, I know. We won't destroy the world as casually as all that, and we'll be really sorry about it when we do. But we will find a way to rationalize it if we see no alternative.

Something I learned as a kid in Colorado, when I was into riding horses: if a horse takes the bit and runs away on you, it's futile to saw at the reins trying to stop it. But if you keep your head, you can still usually direct where it goes. The trick to controlling a horse is to understand its limits -- what you can and can't ask of it. And don't ask anything you know it won't accept. The world will accept clean nuclear power. It won't accept power down.

nuclear power won't be able to replace the oil; not by a long shot; not by any shot.

That's an interesting assertion, because in the USA nuclear power already replaced oil in one segment:  electric generation.

If you look at the EIA historic figures, US electric generation from oil peaked in 1978 at 365.1 billion kWh.  This was about the time of the second OPEC oil price spike, and oil-fired generation dropped 17% in 1979, about 20% in 1980, and a whopping 29% yoy in 1981.  Nuclear-electric generation passed oil-fired in 1980 and never looked back; it has more than tripled since then.  Oil-fired generation in the US is now at about 12% of its 1980 peak, and Hawaii (37.9%) and Alaska (7.1%) account for a great deal of that.

It's much more difficult for nuclear to push petroleum out of its existing markets, but increasing prices are certain to shrink them and expand others (electric trucks, electrified rail).  Nuclear has a pretty good shot at those.

E-P,

It seems to me that it isn't realistic to project electricity shortages due to Peak Oil. If renewables and nuclear can't be ramped up quickly, we'll use coal until they can.

In that case, the question isn't whether renewables and nuclear can mitigate PO, it's really whether they can mitigate climate change due to coal.

Right?

It would help if we could focus the debate properly...

You forgot shale gas; at $8/mmBTU it is still about half the price of gasoline.

Mitigating coal is the subject of something else kicking around in my head, though I suspect that someone else has already written the piece better than I could and I just haven't found it yet.  In a nutshell, coal is gasified to produce primarily CO and H2.  The CO is extracted and burned with pure oxygen in a supercritical CO2 turbine.  The thermal efficiency of this last step may be in excess of 70%, and it yields a pure stream of CO2 for sequestration.  Then you still have the H2 (with a bit of methane in it) as a nearly carbon-free fuel you can burn in air, use as a chemical feedstock to de-oxygenate biomass-derived fuels to hydrocarbons, etc.

Agreed, I've often though such a cycle is obvious given current state-of-art combustion turbines. The primary plants should be located in midwest coal fields connected to the grid by HVDC transmission which also picks up wind generation from the windy corridor west of the missippi, while the hydrogen is either liquified and shipped by tanker or pumped by new non-embrittlement-prone pipelines. One modification is you could dramaticall reduce the cost of developing the "70% efficient CO+O2 fired turbines" (an animal which to my knowledge doesn't exist yet due to the high combustion temperatures) by re-circulating enough of the exhaust CO2 back to the inlet to dilute the fuel-air mix down to the appox. 20% O2 of normal air, for which current turbines are designed. It will loose about 20% to CO2 compression, and need some additional cooling of the compressor input, but would be a very quick development project.

I don't see any point in creating a huge new infrastructure for hydrogen and compromising the layout of the electric grid to support a fuel that will disappear over time.  Just increasing the efficiency of powerplants at existing sites and eliminating most of the emissions would be a big plus; it would take huge amounts of pressure off climate change and other things.

I'm still going through the work of Vaclav Dostal on supercritical CO2 turbines for nuclear power reactors, when I'm not distracted by other things (which is most of the time).  It's 317 pages and very heavy going.  I did stumble across more things with his name, perhaps on supercritical CO2 combustion turbines, but until I'm done with this first piece I don't have attention to spare.

Essentially, a supercritical CO2 combustion turbine would recirculate most of its working fluid, only adding enough to provide the necessary combustion heat.  The pressure ratios are fairly low, because most of the ΔT between the turbine outlet and the heat sink is used to pre-heat the compressor outlet fluid in a regenerator and large temperature drops in the turbine are not required.  The back-work in the compressor is quite low because of the properties of fluid near the critical point; this raises the overall efficiency.  Also, the fluid densities are very high, which makes the power densities very high and the required size of the machinery quite small compared to steam turbines.  Small machinery has the virtue of usually being less expensive.

Dostal's work found that a supercritical CO2 turbine could exceed 50% thermal efficiency if heated by a nuclear reactor.  A turbine heated by combustion could run at much higher turbine inlet temperatures (GE is claiming 1360°C for their gas turbines, I'm sure at least 1200°C is feasible with CO2) with a consequent increase in thermal efficiency.  My problem analyzing his stuff includes difficulties getting thermodynamic data; the source I have for CO2 tops out at 1100K (about 826°C).

There's data on gasifier prices, oxygen-plant cost and power requirements for the Wabash River repowering project, if you feel like writing this piece instead of me. ;-)

One can also produce Methane from CO2 and H2 relatively easily.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction

Instead of having to transport H2, one could also imagine to transform H2 and CO2 into CH4 and feed natural gas pipelines or tankers already in existence and available today.

If CH4 is then burnt in CHP plants which for example fertilize greenhouse agricultural farms (already done today), its CO2 is again captured and even if it wasn't the overall energy gained per CO2 produced would be significantly increased.
Btw, Venice intends to power part of its city with algae, but instead of producing oil from algae they use a gasification process, which is also a process that is already commercially available and producing power today.
http://www.goodcleantech.com/2009/04/algae_from_canals_to_supply_ha.php
http://www.kompogas.ch/uploads/media/Vergaerungsanlage.pdf

You forgot shale gas

The US has a lot, but we seem to have come to a consensus that the US doesn't really have a realistic problem with electricity supplies, either from a PO or GW point of view (at least in theory, assuming we can overcome the concerns of those who would lose their jobs or investments due to massive conversions away from FF).

I'm not aware of the same kind of enormous reserves of shale gas in Europe, which is what Francois is concerned about. Any thoughts about low-CO2 substitutes in Europe?

I'd recommend solar thermal in the Sahara.

http://www.nrel.gov/csp/pdfs/34440.pdf Assessment of Parabolic Trough and Power Tower Solar Technology - Cost and Performance Forecasts - Sargent & Lundy LLC Engineering Group Chicago, Illinois

[QUOTE]For the more technically aggressive low-cost case, S&L found the National Laboratories’ “SunLab” methodology and analysis to be credible. The projections by SunLab, developed in conjunction with industry, are considered by S&L to represent a “best-case analysis” in which the technology is optimized and a high deployment rate is achieved. The two sets of estimates, by SunLab and S&L, provide a band within which the costs can be expected to fall. The figure and table below highlight these results, with initial electricity costs in the range of 10 to 12.6 ¢/kWh and eventually achieving costs in the range of 3.5 to 6.2 ¢/kWh. The specific values will depend on total capacity of various technologies deployed and the extent of R&D program success. In the technically aggressive cases for troughs / towers, the S&L analysis found that cost reductions were due to volume production (26%/28%), plant scale-up (20%/48%), and technological advance (54%/24%).[/QUOTE]

Given Sargent & Lundy Engineering's worst case scenario provides peak time solar electricity at $0.062/kwh by only building 2.8 GW and doing a few minor and definitely achievable R&D improvements, plus transmission, and a clear path is provided to offering 83% capacity factor using cheap sand and gravel tanks for thermal storage with 3x collector area and no additional central plant, which should make the installation no more expensive PER KWH if only the industry can get to 2.8 GW installed, I don;t see what we are waiting for.

It also appears to me that the more agressive forecasts of NREL / SunLab of $0.035 / kwh if we can get to 8.2 GW insalled quite quickly is entirely within reach.

http://www.terrawatts.com/trec-white-paper.pdf Clean Power from Deserts - The DESERTEC Concept for Energy, Water and Climate Security - Club of Rome

the only realistic alternative that I see to a rapid ramp-up in nuclear power

I see (at least for the USA), nuclear as being a secondary and "late" (i.e. clean-up) part of the solution.

Conservation and renewables have the quickest and largest potential until about 2025 under a realistic (Murphy lives) best case. Then I could see the new nukes being the largest part of the annual solution 2025-2030.

Conservation includes trading 20 BTUs of oil for 1 BTU of electricity on a massive scale via massive electrification of transportation (NOT EVs, but urban rail, railroads + bicycling and walking).

Renewables includes HV DC transmission and pumped storage (also required for new nukes).

Best Hopes for Realistic Planning,

Alan

Alan,
Do you have any figures on potential pumped storage sites in the US possibly with comments?

Pumped storage is a great thing (Wikipedia has a good article), but it's not really the best way to handle wind & solar intermittency. Demand Side Management, especially with PHEV/ErEV/EVs is really the best, cheapest and most effective thing.

I respectively disagree.

One VERY important point is that mass market EVs do not exist, so characterizing them is just guess work. My GUESS is that DSM, etc. will NOT work as planned and EVs will add to the 6 PM peak. Come home, plug in and recharge.

Alan

I respectively disagree.

I know. We've had this discussion many times. There are many things on which we agree, but this isn't one of them. I haven't been able to identify a good reason for that...

mass market EVs do not exist

Actually, they do. Think Prius - 1,000,00 on the road.

Mass market highway-legal EVs existed 100 years ago, and they were only discontinued because of dirt-cheap gasoline. Mass market non-highway-legal EVs exist in the tens of millions. With the death of dirt-cheap gasoline, many large companies are ramping up other highway-legal EVs now.

The Chevy Volt, for instance, exists in it's final form, and will be in mass production November 2010. There's no question that the Volt is central to GM's plans. The Volt is an Extended range EV, which will use 10% as much fuel as the average US vehicle.

My GUESS is that DSM, etc. will NOT work as planned and EVs will add to the 6 PM peak.

Do you have any evidence for this? There's lot of evidence from utilities that DSM is old, well established and effective. Further, PHEVs and ErEVs eliminate range anxiety, so it's easy for people to charge when it's best, rather than when they get home.

Alan,considering the qoantity of electronics already embedded in cars and/or the low costs of timers,it should be no sweat to plug up at sispm and begin charging at any desired time-with a smart grid at ANYTIME as wind or sun come on strongas during the day if the car is plugged into a charger while at work.That would help absorb some sun and wind that might otherwise be poorly utilized due to lack of storage,especially during the spring and fall lulls in heat and ac demand in many places.

If it really is possible,as it seems is the case now,to build a good electric even if he range is only forty miles,i think they will sell like hot cakes-if they become cost competitive with new ice cars.

at any desired time

My guess for consumer behavior (remember the "12:00" flashing on 100+ million VCRs) is that, once 10 million EVs are sold, that the desired time will be as soon as they get home for a large minority of owners.

No one truly knows.

Alan

A few thoughts:

1) Plug-in hybrids like the plug-in Prius, and extended range EVs, like the Volt, will dominate for a long time. For them, there will be neither an economic or ecological reason to charge immediately.

2) Management of charging by price will be an social and economic choice. If, as a society, we make EV charging at night a priority, we will make it happen via price signals - there's really no question that people pay attention to price signals.

3) GM is working very hard on DSM - GM says "the Volt will be the smartest thing on the grid", and judging from this - http://bioage.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341c4fbe53ef0120a5045aa8970b-popup , it will be.

(remember the "12:00" flashing on 100+ million VCRs. Yes, ease of use matters, as any itunes/iphone user will tell you. So, we sell EVs with default built-in programming to charge at night, and make the programming really easy. Obviously, it can be done, as apple has demonstrated. If we care, both as consumers, green-PR loving sellers (and Toyota and GM really, really care about the green-PR) and as a society, it will happen.

So, we really do know.

My guess for consumer behavior (remember the "12:00" flashing on 100+ million VCRs)

It's trivial to take consumer behavior out of it.  You can buy clocks which read broadcast time signals over the air (I own two of them); the only reason VCRs don't have them is that anyone who really cares about recording things knows how to set the time.  Building the DSM systems into new PHEVs will be done by making DSM part of the standard.  The consumer won't do anything because they won't have to do anything.

Don't forget heat pumps.

If fossil heaters are substituted by heat pumps, which are connected to a water tank, a big portion of the demand leveling can be accomplished with heat pumps as heat energy can be stored cheaply (at these temperatures).

The same can be accomplished with air conditioners connected to ice tanks.

Only anecdotal. While touring Raccoon Mountain, I was told that they reviewed dozens of potential sites in the TVA region and evaluated 4 ones nearby (Chattanooga is the best place for pumped storage from a grid POV).

TBM tunnel drives are getting cheaper and basically anyplace with high hills or mountains can be turned into pumped storage. Economics are the issue and existing facilities are "dirt cheap" IMO.

Lots more to discuss on MW vs. MWh issues, non-traditional designs and more.

Basically for daily and weekly load shifting, I am confident that there is a lot of potential pumped storage at different places in the USA. But for shifting periods of a month or longer, pumped storage is not the answer.

Best Hopes,

Alan

The largest site in the US is Ludington, MI. It uses Lake Michigan as it's lower reservoir.

I suspect that the Northern Peninsula of Michigan, a very, very poor region, would welcome a great deal of pumped storage.

We need more discussion on pumped hydro, it's extremely interesting. Like, what's the main costs (beyond financing costs)? What decides if a site is suitable or not?

I'm wondering because I have this little idea... If you move the French nuclear capacity factors up from 77 % to 87 % you get a huge nightly surplus of power. You send this across the channel (need something like a 12 GW cable) into 12 GW of pumped storage in Scotland and Snowdonia, which you discharge in the UK grid by day. And there, you've eliminated like 2/3 of the UK power generation gap in one fell swoop. Should make EdF shitloads of €€€ as well.

That is, if powerlines and pumped hydroplants can be built at affordable costs. So, once again, what decides if they can be?

France has a bit over 4 GW of pumped storage (1 GW recent years and 1.1 GW in Luxembourg that is effectively French, plus XX GW in Switzerland).

I see transmission as a bigger issue.

More about the latest, and biggest, pumped storage plant in the UK

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station

Alan

Building a 12 GW transmission is indeed a mammoth venture, but so is building 6.7 new Dinorwig stations!

I'm not at all sure the former is the easier task. But I'm not sure. Any arguments? :)

Per the linked article, the UK planned a second large pumped storage unit nearby, but canceled it.

That one should be easy to build.

LOTS of possible sites in Scotland.

Alan

As far as N America goes, pumping from Lake Ontario to Lake Erie across Niagra Falls could provide all the convenient pumped storage anyone needs. Agreed, tunnel boring would be necessary to rise over the escarpment, but open canals like the Welland canal would serve for most of the distance.

I'm an Australian, and we have the world's largest uranium reserves, this is the Saudi Arabia of uranium. Here's a list of countries uranium reserves.
1 Australia 1,243,000 23%
2 Kazakhstan 817,000 15%
3 Russia 546,000 10%
4 South Africa 435,000 8%
5 Canada 423,000 8%
6 USA 342,000 6%

But what's the ranking in actual production?
1 Canada 9,862 25.2%
2 Australia 7,606 19.5%
3 Kazakhstan 5,279 13.5%
4 Niger 3,434 8.8%
5 Russia 3,262 8.3%
6 Namibia 2,782 7.1%

The thing this article misses is that Australia's uranium reserves are barely exploited at all. Australian public has a strong anti-nuclear attitude, this same attitude has stopped the government from constructing any nuclear power plants (so we are 90% coal and one of the worst countries in the world on greenhouse gases per person, worse than the USA, never the less in a funny way at least this shows the publics strong environmental awareness). State governments are hesitant to allow mining companies to exploit uranium reserves, only the northern territory, which is not a state and under federal government administration, and South Australia allows uranium mining.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_Australia#Map
You can see from this map just how few potential uranium mining sites are exploited in this country. If we had the political will we could dramatically add to world exports and take on most of the world demand. And as one of the world's richest and most stable democracies and strongest ally of the US, there is a guarantee of willing supply to the US and western europe.
The reality is that the market is getting as much uranium as it requires right now, and there is no rush for Australian governments to rush out mining permits and investments.

Morn,

So it seems that the world can rely on Australia to increase the supply of available uranium in the future (current political climate notwithstanding). I'm just wondering what is the fastest realistic time frame to open a uranium mine & begin production? This to me is an important question since if the article is to be believed then we have only until 2013 before we hit a supply crunch.

You make a good point. Just because there is a proven (or probable) resource on paper does not mean it is easily - or cheaply, or quickly - converted to a producing mining operation. Just as in the oil debate, just because Brazil has discovered new resources in deep water it does not follow that they will be on stream tomorrow morning!

Again, I re-iterate: the debate over the potential of nuclear fission to power our Business As Usual, GDP growth monster is not limited to the amount of rock in the ground. There are a lot of other factors, one of which is hardly ever discussed is the quantity and quality of nuclear engineering graduates coming 'on stream'. Having never set foot in a nuclear power plant I have no idea how many highly qualified people are required but I would guess it is some large number. Does the industry have concerns over this issue in the same way the oil industry is fretting about the lack of qualified petro engineers?

The proven resources in Australia's case, are proven economical at current prices. The obstacle is political not technical. There's a strong view in the Australian public that uranium mining ruins a vast area of nature, that our exporting of uranium encourages nuclear proliferation. (ie, lets sell uranium to China and watch it come back on their missiles!) And paranoia about the safety of civil power and whether it's good to encourage it's use in foreign countries with exports. These issues all make state and federal governments reluctant to permit mining operations, And the states of Western Australia and Queensland have totally banned uranium mining.

There are a lot of other factors, one of which is hardly ever discussed is the quantity and quality of nuclear engineering graduates coming 'on stream'. Having never set foot in a nuclear power plant I have no idea how many highly qualified people are required but I would guess it is some large number.

I believe you do have a point here, but this also appears to be a matter of policy, not physics.

Background:  The US PWR program is an outgrowth of the naval nuclear power program.  Naval nuclear plants require a fair amount of expertise to operate, and this expertise is transferable.  One of the major career routes for retired submariners is the commercial nuclear power industry; it can be viewed as an employment program for ex-military (much as the airlines are major employers of ex-USAF and ex-Navy pilots).

From this point of view, one of the drawbacks of the molten-salt reactor (MSR) is its lack of any concerns about control rods, reactivity management, void coefficients and all the other details which pertain to solid-fuel PWRs.  Reactivity is managed by the concentration of fuel in the salt, and self-regulated by the salt density falling as temperature increases.  There are no control rods.  There are very few issues of void coefficient, as the fuel density decreases along with the moderator (assuming the moderator is the salt itself and not graphite).  Almost none of the military expertise is required, and management of an MSR would require many fewer people than a PWR.  Given that most of the analytical work on matters like fuel chemistry have to be done by remote manipulation in a hot cell, there isn't much to prevent one scientist from managing many reactors all over the world by teleoperation.  This scientist could work from any place in the world which has broadband.

The point I'm trying to make is that the need for lots of expert people can be reduced by changing our choice of technology, from PWRs to MSRs.  And imagine the great working conditions for some of those experts:  live on the beach or with a view of your favorite mountains and go to work without stepping out of your bedroom.  If you need qualified personnel, you'll be able to bid plenty for them.

Given that most of the analytical work on matters like fuel chemistry have to be done by remote manipulation in a hot cell, there isn't much to prevent one scientist from managing many reactors all over the world by teleoperation. This scientist could work from any place in the world which has broadband.

The point I'm trying to make is that the need for lots of expert people can be reduced by changing our choice of technology, from PWRs to MSRs. And imagine the great working conditions for some of those experts: live on the beach or with a view of your favorite mountains and go to work without stepping out of your bedroom.

I'm sorry Engineer Poet, but that is just absurd. No government in the world - however dumb - would even consider allowing nuclear power generation monitored by remote control. Sorry mate, but I have just split my guts laughing! There is not a snow ball's chance in hell of the voting public allowing a nuclear power plant to be built in their neighbourhood whilst out-sourcing the scientists to a call centre in Bangalore!! Doesn't matter how 'safe' the new technology is, if it has the word 'nuclear' in it it will be politically hot.

Sorry, but by posting this you have shot your credibility in the foot somewhat!

It is OBVIOUS that EP was discussing technical feasibility, not political feasibility.

Why wouldn't it be politically feasible?  Requiring all the reactors sold to nations of questionable reliability to be monitored by scientists living and working in the United States (and spot-checked by e.g. US military scientists using the same control channels) would be a huge plus for non-proliferation and combating AGW while meeting demand for better standards of living.  If the US scientists wanted to live in Hawaii, or with a view of Mt. Rainier, it would help in getting the best people.

The Good Ol US of A military is going to be the arbiter of truth... I feel safer already.

The Good Ol US of A military is going to be the arbiter of truth... I feel safer already.

The Good Ol US of A is going to be the sole arbiter of truth... I feel safer already.

(apologies for multiples - not sure what happened there... don't hit reload on a slow connection?)

Well, there may be infrastructure factors involved for many of these sites, being in quite remote outback areas.
But, here's a good case study.
Four Mile uranium mine was promised to the industry in 2008 by the government and granted just this year, 2009 July 14th by the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts (nice mouthful for what is basically just the aussie EPA). The mining company says that they will start producing in Q1 2010, that's pretty fast. This one mine will have the capacity of 1400 tons a year, which is a quite large figure as you can see from the export numbers in my earlier post. And is expected to last 15 years before depleting it's reserves.

This anti-nuclear-energy nonsense is simply a movement of non-scientific educated (example the author. is that the best they've got?) and uninquiring persons being misled by the fossil fuel industry.

Typical mined coal contains about 10% of the potential energy in its radioactive content of its mineral ash as in the carbon. Coal plants the world over (including Australia) are commonly allowed to simply spew this radioactive material into the atmosphere (eg. grandfathered coal generation which can avoid all EPA regulations), but nuclear plants must provide to contain every iota of their wastes fo 100,000 years.

So agreed, the radioactivity from coal plants fly ash is not usually any big health problem, it amounts to perhaps only 5% of a typical background dose for a nearby resident. But neither are nuclear plants. Start learning about nuclear from something other than the Simpsons show's writers.

Wow, what a pile of...non sequiturs, red herrings, baseless claims and irrelevancies!

I see no evidence that any of this info is from the fossil fuel industry. If you do, please enlighten us.

I certainly see no evidence that anyone here has been influenced by the Simpson's show. If you can point to some such specific evidence, if so please do.

I see no one advocating for coal. Again, if you do, please enlighten us.

These types of arguments always remind me of when I was a kid, and when was caught doing something naughty, I would yell, "But Jimmy [my little bro] did it too!"

This was of course totally irrelevant to the question of whether I was guilty, of course, and after the age of seven or so I stopped using this immature, puerile type of argument.

Others seem to have not given it up yet.

The US coal industry does have a history of financing anti-nuclear groups (nuclear and coal are both used mostly for electric generation in the USA), so it's worth pulling back the curtain on claims to get an idea of their origin.

I don't think Dittmar is directly influenced by any FF interests.  I think he's so deep into the doomer mindset he can't see any other possibility, and he picks his data to confirm his biases.

Where does one apply for the coal company anti-nuclear money? Will they still give it to you if you are also anti-coal? Who'll fund me if I think industrialism (which based on FF, nuclear, and other underground resources) is in decline? United Fruit?

You'll need at least an MS in psychology or advertising and a job at one of the ad agencies that handles an industry account. And your job won't be to produce anti-nuclear material yourself, but to cultivate and influence "opinion leadership communities" that will do the job for you without pay. "Cultivate and influence" involves such things as setting up networks to make sure that those in your target community receive reinforcement from others of like mind, arranging invitations to conferences, and arranging for publication of articles.

Think I'm kidding?

Maybe I am. Or maybe not. Wouldn't you like to know! Well, so would I. :-)

I'm not an ad agency insider. But that's how I'd go about it, if I had the contract.

Nicely put.

And I'm sure the pure and virtuous nuke industry never stoops to such measures. I'm certain that we can be completely sure all those discussing this issue here have no such ties to the industry.

I feel so reassured. :-|

The problem is defining what IS the "nuclear industry". Right now, the simon-pure "industry" is only the nuclear utility conglomerates in the U.S. It doesn't really include GE, Westinghouse, etc because both these companies actually are big into ... wind, solar, etc. Actual nuclear only industry is small. So are their lobbying efforts in the US. In other countries it's all state run.

In Australia last year, the coal mining industry hit the nail on the head with their full page ads stating that "nuclear represents a threat to the coal mining industry". Truer words couldn't of been stated.

In the US, the Oil and Gas Industry Association, along with some of their members (Shell, Exxon, BP) have been running more or less regular TV spots touting...renewables along with their own FF products. Strange bedfollows? I think not.

In the US the biggest opponent of nuclear energy are gas companies that have been caught giving aid and comfort to anti-nuclear efforts. Chesapeake Gas Corp is the most notorious in this.

Reciprocally, you now find not just Lovins, but Greenpeace, Joseph Romm and others *touting* natural gas as a "temporary bridge" until renewables can "take over". A huh.

Stones, glass houses 'nuff said.