France looks into increasing uranium enrichment capacity | Hacker News Reader

France looks into increasing uranium enrichment capacity

world-nuclear-news.org

63 pointsPaulHoule25 comments

If they're thinking about increasing enrichment capacity that likely means they have locked-in future mining output in Niger by some means or other. Here's some background on that:

https://resourceworld.com/france-aims-to-retain-leadership-i...

Incidentally, France's record in Niger is about as blatant a case of colonial exploitation as anyone can imagine. Uranium resources have been extracted for many years with zero if any benefit to the local population, which remains among the poorest on the planet, and arguably the toxic waste makes the net equation pretty negative:

https://www.downtoearth.org.in/blog/health-in-africa/extract...

Another fun fact: All the electricty used to power the uranium mines comes from burning coal (about 260,000 tons per year, and sources seem to indicate about 80% of that goes to power uranium mining activities). Uranium mining is among the most toxic-waste-generating forms of mining, releasing radioactive dust and radon gas. So, anyone claiming France's nuclear power is entirely clean carbon-friendly energy might want to tack those coal emissions (and the power needed for enrichment) onto their estimate.

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

Classical numbers for gCO2/kWh do take into account uranium extraction, and yet despite relying heavily on coal as you point out, nuclear (6-12 gCO2/kWh [1]) still remains one of the most competitive power sources [0].

I agree with the rest though.

[0] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5..., page 539 [1] https://www.polytechnique-insights.com/en/columns/energy/car...

It is not exactly increasing enrichment capacity, it seems it's more complicated than than. From https://twitter.com/TristanKamin/status/1579828412474351616, "UTS" is basically a tradeoff between enriching at the same level more uranium VS enriching to a higher level the same amount of uranium.

About your "fun fact": I don't claim that everything is perfect, but except from going back to the stone age, nuclear is by any measure the least worst option.

Plus they're probably doing it out of necessity rather than a commitment, Macron's governments have been rather eager to hand out customers to Total by negotiating rebates with the company, a major oil producer at the detriment of other producers rather as creating a tax of giga profits (profits that are purely out of market fluctuations) as has been done in other countries. They've chosen not to come back on closing some nuclear plants while putting a smoke screen about small scale reactors. Nuclear industry needs stability to develop, those are big long term investments. The last French governments have not provided that stability at all, it's a real shame.

The exploitation, radon, and toxic sludge in the drinking water is one of many sufficient reasons to not go with nuclear (providing copper, niobium and silver mining for PV and wind is less bad which I understand it to be about an order of magnitude better with current tech), but it's important to keep perspective when talking about GHG and criticise based on things that are true.

Using your numbers and 3000t of uranium per year at 3.5% burnup you get about 2g of CO2 per exported kWh of Uranium. This is well into 'completely fine' territory and depending on enrichment is cosistent with nuclear lobby claims about being lower emissions than wind.

Lower yield uranium mines are worse, and this is a concern if nuclear energy is increased.

France (Europe as a whole) probably needs this. But it's going to kill any energy intensive industry :(.

I am not a scientist, but I dream of being one: Does the decrease in nuclear energy production by Germany get completely offset by the increase in nuclear production and enrichment by France? Thereby making Germany’s decision to shut down their nuclear plants moot?

France gets up to 75% of their energy from nuclear. So the answer to your question is No.

Germany’s decision to close down their nuclear and rely on gas from terrorist state is one of the most profound mistakes of the last 3 decades with serious negative consequences for the Germany and the world.

Was it just a honest mistake?

You expect people to do baseless speculation about politics here on HN or do you expect somebody with inside information of some crime to decide to speak, in public, just because you prompted?

Either way, you won't get what you expect.

Over the past 30 years Germany has transitioned from 30% to 0% nuclear power, meanwhile solar + wind has gone from 0% to 30%.

Gas(from all sources) has grown from 5% to 15% of power in that time. It is in no way relied on and your hyperbolic description is absurd.

Ackshually, Germany relies on coal instead of nuclear. Nuclear and gas serve two completely different purposes. Germany uses a little less gas for electricity today than ten years ago when a couple of nuclear power plants were still running.

Thanks Gerhardt & Angela!

Probably not. Even if French capacity was going to increase enough to supply all of Germany, it would take several years.

Even before they shut down their nuclear plants, Germany's top source of energy was still lignite coal.

Russia is the largest exporter of Uranium in the world by far. The supplies of Uranium in the ground are more evenly distributed than oil but the actual refining and enrichment are more concentrated.

In the short term there is a glut of enriched U which has suppressed the addition of capacity but in the long term there will be a shortage unless the world adds capacity. If sanctions on Russia persist that situation is going to develop more rapidly.

The U.S. used to enrich uranium by gas diffusion at the Y12 plant at Oak Ridge. That has been decommissioned because it takes two orders of magnitude more energy to run than the gas centrifuge process. The U.S. has tried to build a gas centrifuge plant but so far (unlike Pakistan and Iran) it has failed to do so. The U.S. is now seriously talking about building a SILEX plant which uses lasers and should be cheaper overall.

The market for enriched U could also be impacted by fuel reprocessing which could produce a significant amount of U and also Pu fuel though globally only the French and the Russians have been successful at producing commercial mixed oxide fuel.

I was under the impression that the lack of US enrichment is more of a political thing. Demand for nuclear stalled, no one wanted an enrichment facility in their district, and plants had enough fuel from foreign markets - the only purpose for the US government to build new enrichment capacity was to support the Department of Defence. The actual efficiency of the plants was never an issue.

No it isn't. It's 6th in the list, half of even Canada.

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

Kazakhstan is the top at 22k tonnes, while Russia sits at 2.6k tonnes.

I think OP was speaking to refined Uranium.

Kazakhstan has no refinement facilities - it's all done in Russia.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

The U.S. until fairly recently had two gaseous diffusion plants, Portsmouth and Paducah. These were built by the government and privatized as USEC in 1992. After the cold war, the U.S. had a program to import high enriched Uranium from bombs from Russia, and downblend it to reactor purity. This, combined with the inefficiency of gaseous diffusion, caused the shutdown of those two plants.

USEC (Now Centrus) was supposed to replace Portsmouth and Paducah with a new centrifuge plant using centrifuges they designed, but progress has been slow.

Meanwhile, Urenco (the Dutch company that pioneered centrifuge enrichment) set up a centrifuge plant in New Mexico in 2010 that can meet a significant portion of U.S. demand.

There is also a proposed laser (SILEX) plant. I'm not sure what the current status of it, but SILEX and laser enrichment have been generally very controversial, because once the technology is developed and working at scale, it will be hard to protect the secret. When Urenco developed centrifuges, the technology leaked through AQ Khan to Pakistan, and from there it wound up powering the bomb programs of North Korea and Iran. Laser separation is even more energy efficient than centrifuges, so a laser enrichment plant would potentially be even easier to hide, and controlling proliferation would be even harder. There is a desire among many people in the government to basically try not let that genie out of the bottle.

Security by obscurity is futility.

The U.S. has tried to build a gas centrifuge plant but so far (unlike Pakistan and Iran) it has failed to do so.

This is incorrect. The United States successfully built a centrifuge enrichment plant in the 1980s, but it closed due to a global glut of enrichment capacity and corresponding low prices [1]. The UUSA centrifuge enrichment plant currently operates in Eunice, New Mexico. It has been operating since 2010:

https://www.urenco.com/global-operations/uusa

[1] https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/912770

At the moment, about half of France’s nuclear power plants are offline - partially due to lack of cooling water (which should resolve itself as the summer ends), partially due to maintenance issues. Germany had been exporting energy to france. You’ll have to wait a long time until France makes up for the closed German power plants.

https://www.rnd.de/politik/akws-in-frankreich-drohen-im-wint... (In German)

> partially due to lack of cooling water (which should resolve itself as the summer ends)

I don't know where you live, but summer is already ended here. Water is not lacking.

Please look at yearly averages to avoid cherry picking.

Maintenance is planned every autumn to make sure that all the nuclear plants work when they are needed, ie. during winter.

We really, really need to start using this stuff more efficiently. Reprocess the fuel to something useful, build fast breeders or thermal thorium breeders.

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