Uranium
An argument often heard against nuclear power is : “there is only enough uranium for 40 years”.
- The recoverable amount of uranium on earth depends, as with all minerals, on the price one is willing to pay. A well-known law in mining engineering states: “if you multiply the price that you are willing to pay for a raw material by a factor x, then the resources will multiply by x squared”. The amount of uranium on earth is more than that of silver, gold, wolfram and molybdenum. For example, the recoverable amounts of uranium at a price (present) of 80 USD per kg U is about 3 million tons. At a price between 80 and 260 USD per kg U, it is about 9 million tons and speculative resources are about 20 million tons.
- The nuclear reactors at present use less than 1% of the energy content of the uranium ore. This is a wasteful use in the history of fuel consumption. In half a century of nuclear energy we have been wasting uranium and we have stockpiled an amount of depleted uranium (1.4 million tons), that has an energy content equivalent to more than 10 times the present recoverable amounts of oil reserves in the world. The newer type of so-called fast nuclear reactors is able to burn uranium almost completely and so increases the effective use of uranium a hundred times. This will even make uranium extracted from sea water (total amount 4 billion tons), with present technology for a price of 450 USD per kg U, economically attractive.
- Fast nuclear reactors can also burn thorium. There is about four times more recoverable thorium than the uranium reserves on land.
All kinds of waste are a form of emission during the energy conversion process. However, due to the large amounts of waste of fossil energy production, the only way it could be handled up to today was by “uncontrollable dilution and dispersion”. In fact not at all conform the mostly used definition of sustainability:
“sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.
Our Common Future - 1987.
Nuclear is a step further in the history of energy conversion. Thanks to its extremely limited amount, the waste can be properly confined and stored in a controllable way and reduced when more advanced technologies have become available.