4 ms·
There's ~4 billion tons of uranium dissolved in seawater, too. Which is enough for a millenia or three - if we used it for all of our power needs.
by DuskStar 6y ago
There's ~4 billion tons of uranium dissolved in seawater, too. Which is enough for a millenia or three - if we used it for all of our power needs.
- jabl 6y agoAdd in breeder reactors and reprocessing providing a factor of 200 improvement in fuel usage, and we have enough uranium for millions of years.
- SamBam 6y agoHow much energy would it take to extract one ton of uranium from the ocean?
- Symmetry 6y agoWell, according to "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air" >Japanese researchers have found a technique for extracting uranium from seawater at a cost of $100–300 per kilogram of uranium, in comparison with a current cost of about $20/kg for uranium from ore. Because uranium contains so much more energy per ton than traditional fuels, this 5-fold or 15-fold increase in the cost of uranium would have little effect on the cost of nuclear power: nuclear power’s price is dominated by the cost of power-station construction and decommissioning, not by the cost of the fuel. Even a price of $300/kg would increase the cost of nuclear energy by only about 0.3 p per kWh. The expense of uranium extraction could be reduced by combining it with another use of seawater – for example, power-station cooling. https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_165.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_165.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_174.shtml https://www.withouthotair.com/c24/page_174.shtml
- s1artibartfast 6y agoDo you know if withouthotair is actively maintained? I used it in school more than a decade ago and I would love to reread a new version. I know the author died in 2016.
- Invictus0 6y agoThis article estimates that the cost of seawater extraction would be roughly 10x the current market price, although not much word on the energy consumption. [0] https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pnucene.2017.04.016 https://sci-hub.tw/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pnucene.2017.04...
- tehabe 6y agoThat is not really the point, it doesn't matter if there is 4 or 40 or 400 billion tons of uranium, the point is that it is finite. At some point, there is none, or better there is no more usable ressources available. This can be shifted with technology and better knowledge but it is still finite. And that is all the point I wanted to make.
- john-shaffer 6y agoThe sun also will burn out eventually, and every other star as well.