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Comment by groby_b | Hacker News Reader

This is off by 6 orders of magnitude?

A crucial part here is that you're interested in recoverable Uranium at a reasonable price level. Assuming < USD260/kg, you'll end up at ~8 million tonnes (depending on what other factors you account for): https://www.oecd-nea.org/upload/docs/application/pdf/2020-12...

And so the time estimate is similarly off. Uranium resources can power humanity's need for ~130, years, extending to 250 years if the entire conventional resource base is exploited. (pg. 113 in the report I linked). With large error margins for Uranium deposits not found yet, but not "factor of millions" error margins.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't invest into nuclear (we definitely should), but it does mean that it's not the panacea it's touted as either.

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That is assuming slow nuclear reactors, which is the case for the majority of the current reactors. But with fast reactors, you gain a factor of about 100, so the 200 years turn into 20000 [1]

    The big picture effect is that U238 is usable as fuel instead of just U235. There is over 100x more U238 in nature than U235, so the time that 200 years of uranium can last humanity turns into 20,000.

[1] https://whatisnuclear.com/fast-reactor.html

There is also plenty of thorium easily recoverable. The primary problem is that we need to move on to next generation reactors. Fertile martial availability is really not the problem and will not be for a very long time.

With a thermal breeder design reactors we easily have 1000s of years of material.

And in fact volcanic activity will push new thorium up as well. The idea that we can run out of fertile material is mostly just not relevant.

Asteroid mining seems like it would become a necessary endeavor once uranium becomes too expensive to extract on earth. I'd bet big that humanity can figure out profitable asteroid mining within the next 100 years!

> Asteroid mining seems like it would become a necessary endeavor (...)

...or, I don't know, add a wind turbine somewhere?

Huh, you must me lucky enough to live somewhere that the wind always blows and the sun always shines.

> Huh, you must me lucky enough to live somewhere that the wind always blows and the sun always shines.

This blend of puerile argument had been thoroughly refuted for over 30 years. Please find another cliche to parrot.

As long as energy storage is expensive this is a valid argument.

And as we erode our base generation in favor of these intermittent sources it becomes a more serious problem.

No it doesn't. Its totally unnecessary and there are many much cheaper ways to get fertile material.

20 years ago we were told there was 20 years of petrol remaining. It's sadly false.

> 20 years ago we were told there was 20 years of petrol remaining. It's sadly false.

No, we weren't. At least not by anyone credible.

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