Nuclear Energy - I need to vent/rant

[Hamradioguy]

I would venture to say that a query on whether or not a nuke plant can blow up like a nuclear weapon would result in at least half the US population saying yes. Hmmm...gotta see if any stats are available on that.
glenn

My guess is the percentage would be higher. I actually asked that question on a "nuclear poll" back when I was teaching Radiological Monitoring courses for the VT Emergency Management Office. (Other questions asked about the chances of nuclear war or nuclear terrorism in future years). Students were primarily firefighters, law enforcement people, Civil Air Patrol folks and local government officials. The question was, "What is the likelihood of a nuclear power plant blowing up like the atom bombs dropped on Japan in WWII?" Choices ranged from, "Very likely", to "Impossible". Not that many picked "Impossible." I have the results of several years of polling around here somewhere if anyone is interested.

To be fair, the poll originated with Jack Greene, an HP who co-wrote "Would the Insects Inherit the Earth? and Other Subjects of Concern to Those Who Worry About Nuclear War" His original poll may have been published in the Health Physics Newsletter back in the late 1980s or early 1990s.

BTW, the nuclear industry isn't helping matters by resorting to "nuke speak": Years ago a friend was appointed Social Welfare Department Liaison to the State's nuclear plant. As a non-scientist he was concerned about nuclear explosions and kept asking about the odds of the plant "blowing up". After correctly repeating several times that this was "impossible" to his persistent question, a plant engineer did allow that there could be a, "High pressure steam dissasembley". My friend said that sure as Hell sounded like an explosion to him.

 

[Ziggurat]

“Even if we take into account that uranium prices will rise dramatically and that this will raise interest in exploiting previously uneconomical uranium mines, our uranium reserves will be fully depleted in 70 years at the latest“

Here's the catch: the term "reserves" means known uranium deposits which are economical to extract at current prices and with current technology. The later is a very important consideration for oil, but the former is especially important for uranium. With current reserves that will last for decades to come, why would anyone bother to explore for more? They wouldn't, and they don't, because it doesn't make economic sense. So there's quite possibly a lot more uranium out there. And exploration won't really start until demand gets a lot larger than it is today.

 

[Ziggurat]

the chemistry of D or D₂O being indistinguishable from H₂O,

Turns out it isn't totally indistinguishable, though it's very close. If you feed purely deuterated food and water to an animal, it will die. BUT if you feed it only partially deuterated food/water, and up the fraction slowly, you can train them onto deuterium. And the animal will become deuterated itself. So it's not chemically toxic per se, but there is a slight difference, and the body can adjust to that difference over time.

 

[luddite]

The fuel rods for a fission reactor make up a tiny portion of the overall cost of the plant. The price would probably have to increase nearly a hundred fold (well, 25 fold now...) to actually have in impact on wholesale price of the electricity produced.

I wasn't worried about the price of electricity. I'd like to see higher energy prices. It would encourage wiser use. Proceeds could go to promote conservation to drive down the cost of your energy bill down below where it would have been if energy was cheap.

I only point this out as an indication that there is a shortage now.

 

[Pidge]

Turns out it isn't totally indistinguishable, though it's very close. If you feed purely deuterated food and water to an animal, it will die. BUT if you feed it only partially deuterated food/water, and up the fraction slowly, you can train them onto deuterium. And the animal will become deuterated itself. So it's not chemically toxic per se, but there is a slight difference, and the body can adjust to that difference over time.

Useful bit of knowledge, that, I'll keep it in mind.

If you spill a lot of heavy water, I'll go with the correct responses to be either to contain and recover the heavy water, or dilute it with ordinary water as soon as possible.

Then again, when you spill a modest swimming pool full of the stuff (18,000L), dilution could be problematic...

 

[Pidge]

I wasn't worried about the price of electricity. I'd like to see higher energy prices. It would encourage wiser use. Proceeds could go to promote conservation to drive down the cost of your energy bill down below where it would have been if energy was cheap.

I only point this out as an indication that there is a shortage now.

Oh dear. I'm spotting a disturbing trend here.

It has been repeatedly pointed out in this thread that the shortage of Uranium is a "shortage (70-years of supply at current demand) of uranium that is economic to extract at the current price".

Do you understand this?

And, as above, the cost of the fuel is a tiny fraction of the cost of the electricity generated.

Put those two factors together, when the cost of uranium increases, due to more costly extraction and refinement processes, the cost of the electricity generated will not increased significantly.

Do you understand this?

 

[luddite]

Oh dear. I'm spotting a disturbing trend here.

It has been repeatedly pointed out in this thread that the shortage of Uranium is a "shortage (70-years of supply at current demand) of uranium that is economic to extract at the current price".

Do you understand this?

And, as above, the cost of the fuel is a tiny fraction of the cost of the electricity generated.

Put those two factors together, when the cost of uranium increases, due to more costly extraction and refinement processes, the cost of the electricity generated will not increased significantly.

Do you understand this?

I understand this. People I trust disagree. And the article I pointed to disagrees. And they are not talking about a 70 year supply at current rates and current prices. They are talking about an outer limit of 70 years even if prices skyrocket and we turn the planet into swiss cheese looking for more.

I'll repeat the quote:

“Even if we take into account that uranium prices will rise dramatically and that this will raise interest in exploiting previously uneconomical uranium mines, our uranium reserves will be fully depleted in 70 years at the latest“, says Dr. Werner Zittel, energy expert at Ludwig Bölkow Systemtechnik GmbH in Ottobrunn. He is one of the key figures of the Energy Watch Group that has taken up the cause of conducting critical and politically unbiased analyses of our future energy supplies. “All suggestions to expand nuclear energy production overlook the fact that the raw material reserves needed for this technology are severely declining and don’t permit further expansion.”

The link goes on:

The Energy Watch Group has calculated that, even with steep uranium prices, uranium production will have reached its peak by 2035 and that it will only be possible to satisfy the fuel demand of nuclear plants until then. If we continue to expand nuclear energy production – as the IEA recommends that we do – then we will already start to run out of uranium fuel reserves before 2030. “The IEA’s atomic energy goals have been built on uranium sand that doesn't exist", commented Zittel. This means that the operators of new nuclear power plants – construction of which was encouraged by the IEA in its World Energy Outlook this autumn – will in any case be faced with a dramatic rise in prices.

The uranium content in the bedrock is an essential factor in development cost considerations and in determining the profitability of a mine. The current shortage of uranium has already caused the price of uranium to increase manifold to 130 dollars per kilogramme. “The fuel rods of nuclear reactors consume as much as 67 kilotons of uranium per year. Yet uranium mines can only supply 42 kilotons per year.” To fill the gap of 25 kilotons, uranium is largely obtained from the conversion of nuclear weapons and old deposits at present. These deposits stem from before 1980; they will be depleted within the next ten years. We would need to increase the annual production of uranium by 50 per cent until 2015 to cover our future needs. Yet the development of new mines is turning out to be extremely difficult.

This agrees almost word for word with the assessment that I received in a personal communication with David Hughes, who has positions with both Natural Resources Canada and the National Energy Board. With Canada being the number one producer and exporter of uranium as well as a serious centre of nuclear research, his positions with both energy and resource agencies here make him very well placed to make such determinations. The only thing he adds is that the uranium from weapons will end a lot sooner than 10 years, because most of it is of Russian origin and is sold under a contract set to expire in 2012, and which the Russians have already stated they will not renew.

I'm not sure where the very disparate numbers for availability of uranium come from. Perhaps people misunderstand the term "proven reserves". Canada, for example, has "proven undiscovered reserves of natural gas" to last for several decades. They don't help us much. We've quadrupled the drilling rate and we're still finding less and less each year. All that gas almost certainly is in there somewhere, and eventually we'll probably find it (If the earth warms enough, some of it may find us). But when people go around saying "Oh, we have 84 years of natural gas left", they neglect to realize that we have only 7 years of proven, discovered, economically recoverable and deliverable reserves. That's it.

And as I've stated above, my concern is not with rising prices. My concern is with expanding the nuclear program based on nonexistent fuel.

 

[luddite]

Well, actually, that's not my only concern, or even my primary one. But the focus on nuclear, if it prevents us from doing immediately helpful things will be especially frustrating if it isn't even technically possible.

I've just been looking at the World Energy Council site. There is a category of undiscovered reserves, but the definition of proven reserves is summarized by the sentence:

Proved reserves have a high assurance of existence.

http://www.worldenergy.org/publications/survey_of_energy_resources_2007/uranium/677.asp

In their assessment of the future reserves, they are reassuring that there's plenty of uranium around. But if you read closely, they identify serious challenges to meeting demand once uranium from weapons is no longer available, and they're only projecting for the next 2 decades. I think this is a reasonable summary:

Based on current, committed and planned additional mining capacities, the Red Book (NEA/IAEA, 2006) assesses a maximum annual production capacity of some 86 000 tU by 2025 (2006: 52 000 tU). This capacity would just meet the reactor requirements of IAEA's Low nuclear electricity projection but would fall seriously below the High projection of 129 000 tU by 2030. However, the Red Book estimates are based on the US$ 80/kgU resource category. At prices above the US$ 130/kgU production cost category and bright demand prospects, additional investments in new mining capacity can reasonably be expected.

http://www.worldenergy.org/publications/survey_of_energy_resources_2007/uranium/674.asp

This is not inconsistent with the assessments I've heard. Basically, it will be challenging and expensive, but we can keep the current nuclear fleet hobbling along for a few decades.

 

[DRBUZZ0]

The idea that we could run out of uranium seems very very very far-fetched to me. The energy density is enormous. Consider that the current mined deposits constitute something like 10% of known minable deposits.

On top of that, not reprocessing fuel ends up meaning that more than half of the U-235 gets thrown away. And forget about the possibility of using heavier isotopes. If you consider that uranium is better than 99% U-238 and that U-238 is fertile then by using plutonium as fuel you effectively multiply the potential material by 100 times.

Okay, you don't like plutonium? Too nasty? Weapons proliferation hazard? Fine. Go with the thorium cycle reactor system then. It's been proven effecient and workable and India is banking on it. There's three times as much minable thorium in the world as uranium.

And since natural thorium is almost entirely Th-232 it's nearly 100% fertile to the fissionable U-233, which is an excellent fuel for a reactor.


The current price of uranium has a lot more to do with speculation and current mining than it does with the world resources of uranium.

 

[Ziggurat]

They are talking about an outer limit of 70 years even if prices skyrocket and we turn the planet into swiss cheese looking for more.

That is precisely what it does not mean. Reserves means supplies we have already found. It explicitly does not include supplies which have not been found, not even supplies we expect to be able to find. So 70 years is not how long we have until uranium runs out. It's been like this with oil for decades too. I don't think we've ever had oil reserves that would last 70 years, but we've been drilling for oil for longer than that. But nobody is going to bother looking for more uranium when current reserves will last 70 years. That doesn't mean there isn't more out there. There almost certainly is.

 

[luddite]

That is precisely what it does not mean. Reserves means supplies we have already found. It explicitly does not include supplies which have not been found, not even supplies we expect to be able to find. So 70 years is not how long we have until uranium runs out. It's been like this with oil for decades too. I don't think we've ever had oil reserves that would last 70 years, but we've been drilling for oil for longer than that. But nobody is going to bother looking for more uranium when current reserves will last 70 years. That doesn't mean there isn't more out there. There almost certainly is.

Zig, you're argument is not with me. As I say, there are very disparate interpretations I've seen about just how much uranium there is. But the paper I referred to clearly indicates that they mean "outer limit". And the World Energy Council defined "proved reserves" (not even just "reserves" as you've called them) as having a "high assurance of existence" - which means that there's a small possibility that even these aren't there. You can argue that they're wrong about how much is in the ground. But you can't make the site agree with you. It says what it says.

 

[Pidge]

Gah! I think my head is going to explode...

It seems there we have a problem of semantics occurring over what uranium reserves there are.

To me, a "proven reserve" implies that the existence and extent of the ore in a location is known to a degree of confidence - i.e. samples have been extracted in a number of locations to determine the extend of the deposit and its quality.

And a counter argument - Google for uranium ore reserves, and this is the highest ranked page:
http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.html

In summary, the actual recoverable uranium supply is likely to be enough to last several hundred (up to 1000) years, even using standard reactors. With breeders, it is essentially infinite. Hundreds of thousands of years is certainly enough time to develop fusion power, or renewable sources that can meet all our power needs.

 

[DRBUZZ0]

If you think we're going to run out of uranium, then you have no idea what the energy density of the stuff is. It's huge... massive. More than you could fathom in chemical terms.


A few kg of u-235... we're talking a chunk of pure U-235 the size of a golfball is enough to run a massive nuclear submarine... hundreds of crew taking hot showers... air conditioning for the computers.. active and passive sonar... engines that cruse faster than most surface vessls under water, massive stills to make fresh water, electrolysis to make oxygen. Megawatts and megawatts of power. And you need to refuel it about every 20-40 years. It depends on the efficiency of the reactor and such. But literally decades. DECADES.

Compare uranium to coal. A coal fired power plant that produces 1 gigawatt will have at least one coal train deliver coal per day. The trains are about a mile long. On peak days it could be three our four trains. Literally hundreds of thousands of tons of coal PER DAY. Hundreds of thousands of TONS.

There is a 500megawatt coal plant a few cities over from me. They store the coal in a massive pit and on barges. The mountain of coal is massive. Truely massive. And they can only burn for about four days on the stored coal, if there is a delivery interruption.


There is also a nuclear power plant near me. It's spent fuel pool is about 80% full and they're talking about moving some to dry casks. It's nearly 80% full. The plant has been producing over a gigawatt of power since the mid 1970's. All the fuel they have ever used in those decades fits in a spent fuel pool the size of a small gymnasium. That might sound like a lot and in the sense of nuclear fuel, that is a sizable amount.

Compare that to the coal plant. The same volume of fuel is used in maybe an hour as the nuke plant used in all it's years of operation. The energy density is millions of times greater.

 

[Lonewulf]

Oh, but the waste from nuclear is SO much worse than all those tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of waste from coal, surely! And, unlike coal, you can totally not reuse nuclear waste, I'm sure!

 

[Belz...]

Funny you should mention that. There are serious proposals to get our energy from giant microwave beams. The risk is that if we lose control of them, they can start microwaving huge swaths of inhabited areas in unpredictable ways.

I guess humanity should've stayed in the caves, then.

 

[Lonewulf]

From what I understand, the "energy from microwaves" is a poor source of energy. It costs about as much energy put into the microwave beam as you get from it...

If it's good for anything, I'd say that "beaming" power would be good for giving power to ships or space stations, and that's about all the use I can really see out of it. I'm willing to be proven wrong, of course.

 

[luddite]

To me, a "proven reserve" implies that the existence and extent of the ore in a location is known to a degree of confidence - i.e. samples have been extracted in a number of locations to determine the extend of the deposit and its quality.

Well, first of all what it means to you is not the issue. The issue is what it means to geologists.

But I believe your definition is correct for "proven, discovered reserves".

And as I said when I began, there are differing opinions about how much there is and how long it will last.

If you think we're going to run out of uranium, then you have no idea what the energy density of the stuff is. It's huge... massive. More than you could fathom in chemical terms.

Compare uranium to coal.

I'm not sure what to make of this. If you were arguing for reprocessing or using alternate fuels to say there's a lot of nuclear available, okay. But no resource lasts forever, no matter how dense. And whether they think it's 70 years at current rates or two centuries at expanded rates, everyone predicts that uranium will end.

When oil was discovered, the energy density led people to believe it was essentially forever too. Didn't turn out that way.

I know there are wildly different estimates out there. And I'm no expert. But pretty conventional and respected people are coming up with estimates that show uranium coming into decline within a couple of decades.

Oh, but the waste from nuclear is SO much worse than all those tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of waste from coal, surely! And, unlike coal, you can totally not reuse nuclear waste, I'm sure!

I never said that.

I apologize for any misunderstanding. My only comments on this narrow point were that

a) We have a huge climate crisis we have to start addressing now.
b) Using conventional reactors, there may be a severe limit to the fuel availability, and that's backed up by a number of assessments.

Go ahead and argue for thorium. Go ahead and say you're certain there's more uranium. You may be right.

But please understand what I said.

 

[Lonewulf]

I'm not sure what to make of this. If you were arguing for reprocessing or using alternate fuels to say there's a lot of nuclear available, okay. But no resource lasts forever, no matter how dense. And whether they think it's 70 years at current rates or two centuries at expanded rates, everyone predicts that uranium will end.

I'm pretty sure that 200 years' worth of energy is a Good Thing (tm), and gives us enough time to come up with better energy solutions.

From the most optimistic estimations, using breeder reactors and Thorium, it's not hundreds of years or decades. It's thousands, tens of thousands even. Now, I'm sorry, but if you think that a thousand years is insignificant, I suggest you get your brain examined.

 

[Cuddles]

Nuclear energy would have an impeccable safety record if not for the cornor-cutting in the Soviet Union.

It's hardly fair to blame everything on the USSR. America and Britain have had some fun problems of their own, although are generally better now. Japan's safety record is an absolute joke, and shows no sign of improving. There's no doubt that the USSR was by far the worst offender, but there are enough problems still around for safety to be a legitimate concern, if not as bad as most opponents make out.

 

[cloudshipsrule]

There's no doubt that the USSR was by far the worst offender, but there are enough problems still around for safety to be a legitimate concern, if not as bad as most opponents make out.

The opponents not in the industry have no concept of the safeguards (Pun intended) in place long before ground is even broken on a new plant. We're fortuante in the US to have an excellent system of checks and balances which is continually improved.

Mistakes happen, and there is always room for improvement, but there is a system in place in the US where operational experience is shared among plants so each learns from the other. As plants age new problems will arise, and the challenge will be discovering and dealing with these issues before and after they occure.