Uranium is abundant, but not homogenously so [1]. (China has some. But not a lot. And it's bound up expensively. And it's by their population centres.)
For the Americas, Europe, Australia, southern Africa and Eastern Mediterranean, burning uranium makes sense. For China, it trades the Strait of Malacca for dependence on Russia and Central Asia.
[1] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1800.pdf
So can oil. Energy security is an important priority for a global power.
Stockpiles are good. Own supply chains are better.
Sure. That doesn't remove stockpiles' inherent disadvantages: finiteness and vulnerability. Relying on uranium stockpiles would immediately put China at a known limit in a war of attrition that wouldn't constrain their adversaries.
Reserves != stockpiles.
Nothing can compete with the energy density of uranium.
Oil is relatively easily, inexpensively, and quickly mined and refined. Compared to, say, uranium.
And no, oil is more expensive (especially nowadays) to extract than uranium.
There's a reason nobody ever became rich with a uranium mine, all the value is in the plant and the market price barely covers extracting it, some mines even closed because of the price being too low.
Uranium is better for Chinese energy security than oil. But this still leaves China at Moscow's mercy. That's not too differet, energywise, than the situation is now.
https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/CHN/yea...
> Considering both the low and high nuclear capacity scenarios to 2050 presented in this edition, and assuming their 2050 capacity is maintained for the rest of the century, the quantities of uranium required by the global fleet – based on the current once-through fuel cycle – would likely surpass the currently identified uranium resource base in the highest cost category before the 2110s.
Their "high" scenario assumes having a bit more than double of today's capacity by 2050; today we have about 4-5% supply from nuclear energy worldwide.
[1] https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_103179/uranium-2024-resourc...
The actual efficiency of breeding thorium is so low, it would take a HUGE scarcity to actual make any sense.
Also, currently all transport channels for uranium are oil dependent, which is becoming a scarce resource in the relevant timeline - decades.
I also like to think of U/nuclear as "Civilizational thinking" - it's the only solid power we can trust to stay by us through 10,000s of years, through cataclysims, and planet migrations, and it's ideal (before we find something more abundant, dense, and reliable) to take us from Earth, to a multi-planet, local-cluster exploring species, I think.
With Thorium if the operator country wants to extract the U-233 you think "maybe let them, they won't like it".
There are also other advantages of a liquid fueled reactor. The big one is that it is far easier to run because it self regulates. When a liquid heats up it expands (slowing the reaction) and when it cools it contracts (speeding up the reaction). So its safer to run, makes less waste and gets 20+X more power per unit of fuel.
There is one final thing to know about this stuff. A nuclear reactor is several billion in infrastructure supporting reactors that cost 10s of millions using a fuel load that costs less than your car. The way we scale and handle nuclear reactors just makes no sense economically. Each NPP is custom and they are built so rarely that everything has to be custom made. When you start building stock reactor designs with consistent supply chains, the cost goes way down. And most of the cost is lawsuits, lobbyists and PR. For developed countries, using or not using nuclear power is a political choice. One that we have been making badly. When you realize that the only real choices for baseload are FF and nuclear, the real political situation makes sense. Once again, the cause is just the excuse, not the real issue.
Not sure I get what you are trying to say. Are you saying that you are a nuclear engineer and I am not? Because, frankly, the rest of your comment does not read as one written by a nuclear engineer.
That’s not really accurate. Many countries already meet a substantial portion of their baseload power requirements with renewables and are building out more and more renewable generation because it is cheap and fast to build.
This requires dispatchable backup generation to cover low wind periods, but that may only need to run a few weeks a year. This is by far the cheapest and fastest way to get to 90% carbon free power since most of the cost in gas generation is the fuel itself rather than the capital for the plant.
Nuclear is the opposite so cannot economically fill that role so it seems little is likely to be built.
It's not uniformly distributed. Countries like India, for ezample, has an abundance of Thorium but they have to buy Uranium for use in any large scale application.
We really do. Nuclear waste is less toxic than plenty of trash we just bury. And calling it "waste" is a bit reductive, given it almost certainly becomes valuable to reprocess within another century or two.
Long term storage is still up in the air in the US. Yucca mountain was the plan but didn't happen
Correct me if I'm with m wrong
We also know that we could re-cycle nuclear waste with other nuclear plant designs, but the US chooses not to.
The crazy part is that people want to insist that the sites need to be absolutely safe even if they aren't maintained for 1,000 years, but by that point the radioactivity would be no more than the base ore anyway so demanding these extended timelines doesn't make anybody safer. They're just red tape.
It's peculiar that it's a political problem in pretty much every country though? I know Finland is well on its way for long term storage but that's the only example I know of.
There's also quite a few cases where it is a technical problem. Gorleben in Germany for example.
It's a political problem in every country that shares its nuclear heritage from the ashes of WWII.
Point to the nuclear waste.
If there’s so much of it somebody must be able to point it out to me.
Waste from modern nuclear power plants seems to be a giant nothingburger. And yes, I came from the other side but flipped as I learned more about the technicalities, how Finland has solved it and how near you need to get hurt.
Dr Barry Brook. Reading his stuff 15 years ago flipped me.