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Comment by pretendgeneer | Hacker News Reader

One thing I found out recently found out about nuclear that really shuts down home "great" it is as a fix for climate change is how limited fuel is for it.

Some numbers

Nuclear currently uses about 60,000 tonnes per year of uranium [1] Nuclear is about 10% of electricity, 4% of energy as a whole [2] There is about 8,000,000 tonnes of uranium reserves world wide [3]

For a 100% of current electricity demand by nuclear that's 13 years of fuel,

For 100% of energy (e.g. gas heaters replaced by electric powered by nuclear) that's 5 years of fuel.

Doesn't look so great when you do the math.

[1] https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/news/iaea-symposium-examines...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/nuclear-energy

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...

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As everyone mentioned there is no much prospection, and we are only scratching the surface.

And this is only counting with the old nuclear power plant designs. The current Gen3 and coming Gen4 do not need nearly as much as the previous generations. They squeeze more juice out. (source: https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/academy/pdfs/nucl...)

We might unfortunately (because of the chaos that it will create) ran out of oil before uranium.

Fossil fuel crunch will eventually happen, and it would not be pretty, unless we electrify most of our economies (source: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...) and replace all the fossil fuel based production... This is the national security issue that every country should put as a priority.

The need to electrify the economy is why nuclear is so bad, it simply can't compete on cost even.

This article is about a power plant that cost £46Billion and nameplate of 3260 MW

Assuming 100% load factor for the plant (looks like 70-80% is more common but I'll be generous) that's 28,557,600MWh per year. Or a cost of £1610 per MWh per year.

Taking just one of the latest wind farm in UK South Kyle Wind Farm, Cost £38Million with a nameplate of 240MW.

Assuming 10% load factor (30% is common but I'll be pessimistic for this case).

That's 210,240MWh per year,(2400.1 24 * 365) that's £180 per MWh per year, (Life span differences of wind(30 year expected) vs nuclear(40-60) could increase the cost of the wind by up to double if you took the worst case but I've already given a 3x disadvantage on load factor) Even with the deck stacked in nuclear's favour it's 10x more expensive than wind, you will simply never migrate a factory using thermal gas with the cost of electricity made by nuclear.

Edit: also Flamanville 3 in france costs are better but still so much worse than wind, 13billion Euro(~11Billion GBP) for 1600MW nameplate, comes out for 713gbp per MWh per year, still 3x worse than wind.

There is some premium to be paid to choose when you get the electricity and when you decide it is a convenient time to shut down for maintenance.

If the alternative is having no lights and no industry operating the extra cost of dispatchable power pales in comparison to the losses due to blackouts.

The need to electrify the economy has more to do with peak fossil fuel or level of CO2 in atmosphere, than nuclear.

Comparing nuclear and wind is a bit apples and oranges. One is intermetent and one is not. The lifespans are different too, as nuclear usually last 60 to 80 years, when wind farm is 30 years. As mentioned in the article the cost of nuclear is artificially inflated, like for redundant safety measures, and specifically in UK by the financing used (most of the cost come from interest).

We need to build cheaper and more nuclear power plants, and more wind farms too.

Those are proven reserves, not all the uranium in the crust. It’s just the confirmed high value locations that people have bothered to prospect.

At over 3 ppm there’s at least 4 billion tons of uranium in seawater alone.

Fun fact: the estimated cost of extracting uranium from seawater is $1000/kg [1] (the link shows a lower number, but I'm making it round and higher to account for inflation), which is about 7 times higher than the current market price. If we were to use this, it would increase the price of nuclear generated electricity by ¢0.83/kWh. For comparison the average price of electricity in the US in February 2024 (last month published) was ¢ 16.1 / kWh.

Here's the math, for those curious: modern nuclear power plants produce about 50 GWd per ton of uranium fuel. It takes about 10 tons of mined uranium to produce one reactor grade ton (because of the enrichment). So, that's about 5 GWd per ton, or 120000 MWh/T, or 120000 kWh/kg. If one kg of Uranium is $1000, you get 120000 kWh out of that, which comes at $1/120 = ¢0.83 per kWh.

[1] https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...

It’s BS. There are far greater uranium reserves, even with minimal exploration, and most fuel can actually continue being used if desired.

The equipment for recycling used-up fuel rods is the same for creating nuclear weapon payloads. Governments struggle stomaching proliferation risk in the name of fuel efficiency.

If there was an actual shortage, that problem would be resolved,

They have no need to do so, because actual uranium reserves are huge. We haven’t been attempting to find or open new ones for a long time.

That's mostly just fear mongering because mitigating that risk with organization and a little bit of planning is trivial. Just put the reactors and the fuel reprocessing in different sites under control of different organizations. To produce plutonium usable for nuclear weapons you need to pull the fuel out of the reactor way ahead of schedule for power generation. The longer you keep the fuel in the reactor, the more Pu-240 you produce alongside the Pu-239 and you can't make nuclear weapons with that.

Weapons grade plutonium requires very low concentrations of Pu-240 and that requires running the reactor specifically for this. If the reactor and fuel reprocessing are done by different organizations, then neither can make nuclear weapons without the cooperation of the other.

Managing risk with organization structure is a technique well known to virtually all governments, from western democracies to the worst dictatorships, so this isn't breaking any new ground.

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