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Comment by king_phil | Hacker News Reader

One important thing to notice is that uranium is a finite non-renewable resource. The Red Book says there are about 3.3 million tons that are extractable for a price of 130 USD/ton. In 2017 the total uranium production was 60.000 tons. Thats about 55 years of uranium left at the current production rate. The Red Book assumes there are another 2.1 million tons likely to exist from geological data, but not found yet and another 4.8 million tons assumed to exist but yet to be discovered.

Now imagine that nuclear power production would be greatly increased. How many years of uranium supply would we have left?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium

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We have basically unlimited uranium. There’s no risk of shortage. The average cubic meter of crust has more breedable fuel energy in it than a cubic meter of coal.

Fission is effectively as unlimited as renewable energy is, about a billion years’ worth of crust. Even if we stick with typical U235 reactors, sufficient uranium ore exists for hundreds of years, although no one will bother to formally “prove” the reserves for a constraint 100 years in the future.

What’s limited is the atmosphere’s capacity for CO2. Not much else matters in the mid/near-term, except perhaps for ensuring we have enough energy for civilization to function.

There is, however, no reason that fission power need be restricted to uranium as a fuel source. Use of breeder reactors would allow power consumption at our current levels longer than the sun is likely to exist.

Even if fission power is not the long-term solution, it is the desperately needed current solution. Running out of power would definitely kill us slowly. Current rates of CO2 production will kill us quite quickly.

This is where fast reactors can help. Fast reactors can be fueled with reprocessed waste from thermal-neutron reactors. This produces many times the energy for the same amount of fuel. We can meet the US's energy needs for well over 100 years with the nuclear waste that we've already stockpiled, and the ultimate waste products have a half life measured in decades and not millennia.

> One important thing to notice is that uranium is a finite non-renewable resource.

One important thing to notice is that place on earth to put wind turbines and solar panels is limited. Now imagine that electricity needs greatly increased ...

At the end of the day, everything is finite

That place is much larger than you'll ever need at the very least in this century (maybe in a thousand years we'll be in trouble, but I imagine that in that era, we'll have completely different issues anyway).

We could provide for all the needs of our current power consumption by use of a single very large solar array in central africa or the middle east. The problem is no the availability of wind and solar- those can provide a monumental amount of energy. The problem is that energy and power are not the same thing. We need to be able to store energy widely throughout the grid and make massive transmission system improvements to facilitate the movement of energy from place to place.

Both of these are not fundamental problems, only financial / political ones. If we decided tomorrow that we really wanted these things we could have them.

Transmission and storage are not just political and financial problems, except in the sense that you can technically frame any problem as being them.

They are though - we know how to build high capacity transmission, we know how to build complex dispatch control systems, we know how to build energy storage. All we need is the money and factories and brains and hands to build a lot more of them. All that requires is powerful entities to decide it's important - i.e. politics.

Politics is not powerful entities. Do you mean politicians, or governments?

Either way this is a category error. Tesla needs those things and used venture capital. A correct thought would be: governments are one way to do this.

Space is not at all an issue currently.

From what I've read[1] it looks like we should be able to use nuclear fission for a significant amount of time (>1000 years). This would involve using uranium and thorium as well as breeder reactors.

[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/blog/2020-10-28-nuclear-energy-is-...

FWIW, according to your own links.

> Uranium-235 is a finite non-renewable resource.[1][3]

> As of 2017, identified uranium reserves recoverable at US$130/kg were 6.14 million tons (compared to 5.72 million tons in 2015). At the rate of consumption in 2017, these reserves are sufficient for slightly over 130 years of supply. The identified reserves as of 2017 recoverable at US$260/kg are 7.99 million tons (compared to 7.64 million tons in 2015).[9]

They mention multiple (more or less optimistic) scenarios in respect to finiteness of U235, plus, they talk about the experiences using fast breeders and their current state with respect to market needs.

They calculate 130 years of supply at current consumption rates. Nuclear power supplies something like 5% of the global primary energy, so scaling this to 100% would deplete the estimated reserves in a few years.

Breeders would help, but have so far not been very successful. For example, the German Thorium breeder THTR-300 is considered one of the greatest technological failures in postwar history.

Scaling nuclear power supplies to 100% of global primary energy would change the economics of extraction, do you claim you can predict these things? BTW, scaling it to 100 % is not necessary.

AFAIK, THTR-300 is only one of the different breeder models, CEFR from China <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Experimental_Fast_Reacto...> seems to be working, as a new model <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFR-600> is being built since 2020, sure, recycling uranium is not needed at the moment, so you could argue this is not demonstrating the interest of breeding though it seems to be working to a certain extent.

This supply is assuming we exclusively use terrestrially mines uranium, as well as no reprocessing. Seawater extraction can provide an effectively unlimited supply: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2016/07/01/uranium-s...

I think you are missing the important part. Lowballing it, a typical 50 year old reactor produces about 10^7 megawatthours or 10^6$ in power per kilo of uranium. And that actually leaves most of the fissile unused. So... How much uranium can be extracted at a reasonable fuel price like 10% of the end user price? i.e. about 10^5$ per kilo?

Its silly to consider availability at 0.03% of the end product price.

Breeder reactors make that concern go away:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

Those links suggest that peak uranium is driven by lack of demand, and not lack of supply, or renewability (including suggestions that we could create more uranium for as long as the sun lives)

The author above didn’t read the articles they themselves are quoting.

TL;DR: we have 120years of uranium ore that one can mine at $120/kg. You can mine more ore but more expensively.

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