Hacker News Reader

Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

Doesn’t Australia have enough Uranium to power the world several times over?

Most likely the US, Canada and Australia each have enough uranium to power the world (we know for certain that Canada and Australia do, their known deposits are massive). The US doesn't even bother to look for uranium deposits, it has no intention of aggressively mining for it domestically.

France has enough known deposits to power all of the world for the next 20 years if we switched to 100% nuclear, worldwide today.

Are you talking about several years? Decades?

Lets first consider all Uranium in Earth's crust, about 65 trillion tons. So given,

  - 65e15 kg = Uranium in Earth's crust
  - 709000 = 709,000 MJ/kg energy density of natural U²
  - 500e12 MJ = 500 million TJ annual global energy usage
  - 92e6 = 65e15 × 709e3 / 500e12

So 92 million years.

Australia has about 1.7e9 kg of reserves at current prices¹. That comes to 2.4 years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_uranium [2] https://www.plux.co.uk/energy-density-of-uranium/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com