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Comment by Archelaos | Hacker News Reader

In the current context, it should be noted that the EU's dependence on Russia and its sphere of influence (Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan) for uranium is more or less compatible with that of coal, gas, and oil; for the US, it is even worse.

In 2020 only 0.5% of the uranium supply in the EU was domestic (+ 1.6% re-enriched), but the percentage from the Russian sphere of influence was as follows:[1]

    20.2 % Russia
    19.2 % Kazakhstan
     2.6 % Uzbekistan

    Total: 42.0 %

The figures for the US in 2020 were as follows:[2]

    16 % Russia
    22 % Kazakhstan  
     8 % Uzbekistan
 
    Total: 46 %

[1] Source: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[2] Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/nuclear/where-our-uraniu...

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Fuel is a much smaller fraction of the total cost of energy generation for nuclear power, though. If natural gas prices doubles, the price of electricity from gas turbine plants doubles. If uranium prices double because no one will buy it from Russia any more, the price of nuclear electricity goes up what, 5 or 10 percent?

Can anyone else increase production? Do we have stockpiles? If not the price of that electricity goes up to whatever Russia wants it to until we just stop using the reactors for lack of fuel. (Note: I don't know the answer to those questions, they aren't rhetorical)

Australia has large amounts of uranium (in the ground), for example. Russia and former Soviet states are not the only suppliers.

Yeah, one of the most productive uranium mine in the world is an Australian copper mine that happens to intersect a uranium deposit

> Can anyone else increase production?

Almost every producer can, there are some processing steps before shipping (uranium is generally shipped as yellowcake), but for the most part it's pretty straightforward mining.

> Do we have stockpiles?

I'd expect most nuclear countries to have both a stockpile and a strategic reserve (especially if they use uranium in other contexts than civil energy).

For reference France has a 2 years stockpile and a 5 years strategic reserve. A country like germany which is trying to get out of nuclear might have reduced their stockpile to waste less money (as they'd have to resell it).

That's mostly because it's cheap, and the US doesn't want to suffer the environmental cost (and political cost) of uranium mining.

Note that the US has Uranium reserves remaining, and countries like Canada, Australia, and the Ukraine have significant reserves. It will take time and effort to replace the supply chain for fuel, but it can be done.

Also, it's possible to produce nuclear fuel in breeder reactors, although this is plutonium rather than uranium and is a proliferation risk.

For a near term source of nuclear fuel if there's a shortage due to Russia et. al. not supplying, nuclear weapons contain highly enriched uranium or plutonium, and could be cannibalized in some amount to provide it.

As a bonus, nuclear reactors are carbon neutral, which itself should be reason enough to use them instead of Russian gas and oil.

Something I learned recently is that calling it "the Ukraine" rather than "Ukraine" is apparently using the Russian term for the country, rather than the country's own term for themselves. Similarly the spelling Kyiv rather than Kiev is seemingly what the Ukrainians themselves prefer. This seems like a good time to switch to using non-colonial terms and spellings.

Good point. It can be a tough habit to break, because it seems to occupy the same part of my brain as "the UK".

I thought about it previously and found it kinda odd that it seems so natural to say 'the Ukraine' when usually that is only the case for 'acronym countries'. It sounds pretty ridiculous for example to say 'the Italy', and yet with Ukraine it's hard not to.

It's because Ukraine means borderlands. So it's literally "the borderlands" which makes sense.

This appears in lots of languages. In Germany Iran is "the Iran".

Oh interesting. Like the Netherlands.

> Something I learned recently is that calling it "the Ukraine" rather than "Ukraine" is apparently using the Russian term for the country

Russian doesn't have articles: there is no the in Russian. The phrasing the Ukraine like the Netherlands has been used in English for well over a century. It's usually seen in cases where the name has a literal meaning in the original source language. Some like the Punjab have become archaic but some like the Deccan remain in use.

However, it's just good form to respect the official Ukranian preference and avoid the the.

Thanks for the correction, I didn't realize the term went back that far (but good point about the lack of articles). But at any rate, you're right, no matter where the term originated, it's still good form to respect the Ukrainian preference instead.

Can you give more details on this? I speak Russian and not sure I follow the idea here. There are no articles in Russian. Ukraine name in Russian is Украина. Is it because Russia use “the Ukraine” in English documents?

It’s not related to the language. It’s related to culture. Ukraine in Russian means frontier or borderlands. Calling it Ukraine simply means calling it a name. Calling it the Ukraine implies they’re calling it the frontier (of Russia).

It makes zero sense in the English language. But it’s just a micro resistance by a small country against a bigger dominant superpower and culture next to it.

The huge difference is uranium sources are pretty varied geopolitically: about 45% of resources are in western countries (mainly Australia and Canada), 20% in the BRICS, and about 35% elsewhere (which would include some countries within the russian sphere of influence). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r... lists the top 10 as Australia, Kazakhstan, Canada, Namibia, South Africa, Niger, Russia, China, Brazil, Greenland in that order (with Ukraine coming in at 11th), at current market prices.

And since it doesn't use pipelines it's much easier to get your shipments of yellowcake from a different country. It'll probably be a bit more expensive, but not "widespread fuel shortage" expensive.

Uranium is also easy to store (especially once refined), so you can have pretty massive reserves (IIRC France keeps at least 2 years worth of uranium stocked within its territory plus a strategic reserve worth 3~5 years of consumption).

Talking about uranium, Czechoslovakia used to have big deposits. But due to being occupied by Soviet union, we were forced to give them all for free. The amount it was worth would have made huge difference in our economy for decades. Soviet union never recognized this, Russia later recognized something but not really, and paid less than 0.5% of the value of it.

Yeah, there are countries where Russia might be viewed in positive light (like Serbia from what I've heard), but for sure it ain't former communist countries invaded and occupied by soviets. We were just fucked by them continuously, for 41 years, left and right and much more. And for these last 20 years Russia waged quite intense (not only) psy-ops war on whole Europe including us.

This whole hatred Russia is getting now, well they laid all the groundwork long time ago for that and put some good continuous efforts in it. It just took something so horrible as now for it to crystalize and spill over.

If the current supply is a result of production costs and market forces, rather than geological supply, then this shouldn't be an issue. My understanding is that there is plenty of uranium in the ground in Canada, but it's perhaps not economically viable due to competition from within the countries you mentioned.

This is not a fundamental issue. Let the market work.

I toured a US national lab that developed a method to extract uranium from seawater. Their results are frankly outstanding. Plastic fibers are cheaply impregnated with a binder than removes the uranium from the seawater. All you need to do is anchor long sections of the fibers in a high current area like a synthetic kelp bed, pull them onto a boat every few months, and rinse off the uranium with a mild acid (citric or weaker works). The cost analysis for this preliminary configuration estimated yellow cake production at 2x market rate. Last I heard they were working on ways to reduce costs and increase yields. For example, they were working with desalination plants to test extracting uranium from the concentrated effluent before discharge. The method does extract other valuable metals which can either be processed and sold, or returned to the ocean without issue.

True. But if required uranium is slightly easier to ship than natural gas, and a power plant doesn't consume much of it. A small plane from the US can transport all the uranium a reactor needs to function for one year easily!

Hopefully thorium SMR reactors will be a thing soon, as Norway has huge deposits of it. Won't help in the near future, though.

Yes but uranium can be sourced from anywhere since it’s so compact. One is not tied to a pipeline like natural gas.

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