How long will supply of uranium last

We have developed breeder reactors in the past , but they remain a small minority of our current fleet. We are talking about all primary energy here rather than just electricity. The rest is for transportation, industrial heat, etc. This is available for free on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Because non-breeders are x less fuel efficient than breeders, it has long been considered impractical to use low-grade uranium resources like seawater or crustal nuclear fuel in non-breeders. The energy to get the material out is too high given the return.

Breeders with mined, seawater, and erosion resources, assuming about half the erosion resource will reach the sea:. Assuming big gigawatt-scale reactors, we find:. Another nearly unbelievable fact HT reddit user paulfdietz is that if you dig up an average crustal rock, it will have 20x more nuclear energy in it than a piece of pure coal of the same mass.

Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Discover World-Changing Science. Read more from this special report: The Future of Nuclear Power. May 11, report. As Abbott notes in his study, global power consumption today is about 15 terawatts TW.

Currently, the global nuclear power supply capacity is only gigawatts GW. In order to examine the large-scale limits of nuclear power, Abbott estimates that to supply 15 TW with nuclear only, we would need about 15, nuclear reactors. In his analysis, Abbott explores the consequences of building, operating, and decommissioning 15, reactors on the Earth, looking at factors such as the amount of land required, radioactive waste, accident rate, risk of proliferation into weapons, uranium abundance and extraction, and the exotic metals used to build the reactors themselves.

Even a supply of as little as 1 TW stretches resources considerably. Land and location: One nuclear reactor plant requires about Secondly, nuclear reactors need to be located near a massive body of coolant water, but away from dense population zones and natural disaster zones. Simply finding 15, locations on Earth that fulfill these requirements is extremely challenging.

Lifetime: Every nuclear power station needs to be decommissioned after years of operation due to neutron embrittlement - cracks that develop on the metal surfaces due to radiation. If nuclear stations need to be replaced every 50 years on average, then with 15, nuclear power stations, one station would need to be built and another decommissioned somewhere in the world every day.

Currently, it takes years to build a nuclear station, and up to 20 years to decommission one, making this rate of replacement unrealistic. Nuclear waste: Although nuclear technology has been around for 60 years, there is still no universally agreed mode of disposal.

Accident rate: To date, there have been 11 nuclear accidents at the level of a full or partial core-melt. These accidents are not the minor accidents that can be avoided with improved safety technology; they are rare events that are not even possible to model in a system as complex as a nuclear station, and arise from unforeseen pathways and unpredictable circumstances such as the Fukushima accident.

Considering that these 11 accidents occurred during a cumulated total of 14, reactor-years of nuclear operations, scaling up to 15, reactors would mean we would have a major accident somewhere in the world every month.

Proliferation: The more nuclear power stations, the greater the likelihood that materials and expertise for making nuclear weapons may proliferate.

Although reactors have proliferation resistance measures, maintaining accountability for 15, reactor sites worldwide would be nearly impossible. Uranium abundance: At the current rate of uranium consumption with conventional reactors, the world supply of viable uranium, which is the most common nuclear fuel, will last for 80 years.

Scaling consumption up to 15 TW, the viable uranium supply will last for less than 5 years. Viable uranium is the uranium that exists in a high enough ore concentration so that extracting the ore is economically justified. Theoretically, that amount would last for 5, years using conventional reactors to supply 15 TW of power.

In fast breeder reactors, which extend the use of uranium by a factor of 60, the uranium could last for , years. Moreover, as uranium is extracted, the uranium concentration of seawater decreases, so that greater and greater quantities of water are needed to be processed in order to extract the same amount of uranium. Abbott calculates that the volume of seawater that would need to be processed would become economically impractical in much less than 30 years.

For uranium, the figures will be not much different. And 1 GWe-yr equals 8. This means that even in our extreme scenario, the combined uranium and thorium of the United States would be enough to power the world for about Uranium forms soluble salts and the seas contain 0.

The production speed is still very low and not nearly enough for the yearly refill of a single molten salt reactor, but we have all the time in the world to improve our technique… Still not satisfied on the sustainability? The concentration of the uranium in the sea is an equilibrium. Meaning: if we take some out, nature will refill the store through rivers and rock-weathering — it already does: rivers carry uranium to the sea all the time. Charles Barton — a respected blogger on the subject of molten salt reactors he grew up as the son of Oak Ridge researcher Charles J.

Barton, Sr. Finally, uranium in seawater is in equilibrium solution.