15 ms·

Nuclear energy is long-term sustainable

112 points by gone35 5y ago

andy_ppp 5y ago
I'm not sure I want every country in the world to have the potential to build nuclear bombs...
- krupan 5y ago
  Two different disciplines. The amount of refinement of the material needed for weapons is much much higher than for energy.
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  "More than 20 countries have developed nuclear power industries without building nuclear weapons. On the other hand, countries that have built and tested nuclear weapons have followed other paths than purchasing commercial nuclear reactors, reprocessing the spent fuel, and obtaining plutonium. Some have built facilities for the express purpose of enriching uranium; some have built plutonium production reactors; and some have surreptitiously diverted research reactors to the production of plutonium. All these pathways to nuclear proliferation have been more effective, less expensive, and easier to hide from prying eyes than the commercial nuclear power route." https://www.britannica.com/technology/nuclear-power/Proliferation https://www.britannica.com/technology/nuclear-power/Prolifer...
- delecti 5y ago
  Every country already does, they mostly just don't want to.
OscarCunningham 5y ago
The calculations don't take into account growing energy usage. But anyone who understands exponential growth already knew that from looking at the title. EDIT: Title on the article is currently 'Nuclear fuel will last us for 4 billion years'. I recall that that was also the HN title when I wrote this comment, but I could have got mixed up.
- nine_k 5y ago
  No form of exponential growth is sustainable; another name for it is "explosion". In practice, most things that look exponential end up as S-shaped / sigmoid curves
  - the8472 5y ago
    Well, maybe not exponentially. But at least theoretically things could keep expanding quadratically for a very long time, if we figure out a way to get to other star systems. And much of the sun's output is yet untapped.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  Energy consumption seems to be increasing linearly since the 40s not exponentially and the increase has been slowing down - to 1-2% increase per year. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
  - OscarCunningham 5y ago
    Yes, but prices have also been rising over that time. I expect that if prices had remained constant our usages would have gone up exponentially (equivalently, supply would have had to increase exponentially to keep prices constant). If we have low energy usage over the next 4 billion years, but only because the price keeps going up, then it has not 'last us 4 billion years'. The price going up is precisely what 'not lasting us' looks like!
  - caeril 5y ago
    We'll probably see that trend tick up again soon. Maybe you haven't been paying attention to the political climate, but there is a huge push to increase the living standards of 6 billion people up to the level of the 1 billion currently living in developed countries, whether through immigration or aid. The relationship between living standards and energy use/carbon emissions is not exactly 1:1, but it's pretty close (net of offshoring one's personal emissions to China, India, etc). Get ready for about a 4x increase in carbon emissions if our suicidal empathy trend continues. What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship's axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides. ― Pentti Linkola
rootsudo 5y ago
It's amazing how gasoline itself was only used from 1892 to current time. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/gasoline/history-of-gasoline.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/gasoline/history-of-gaso... So imagine 150 years of gasoline usage help lead the world to be green and change to an energy source for "4 billion years." That's so cool, and puts alot of conversation about environmentalism into prospective.
- dr_orpheus 5y ago
  I'm not sure I totally understand your point here. How did 150 years of gasoline usage help lead the world to be green? And we as of yet have not changed to 100% nuclear and/or recyclable and don't have the technology yet to achieve that goal of nuclear energy for "4 billion years"
  - nine_k 5y ago
    It'd be pretty hard to advance the civilization from coal-based energy straight into nuclear / solar, without all the carbohydrates-powered cars, trucks, and airplanes in the meantime.
    - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
      Has anyone actually looked into this in depth? It feels like a cheap throwaway line that you can use against new tech that's not really caught on yet, but as we're here in 2021 with EVs and nuclear power and wind turbines etc., what was actually stopping us getting there faster if we weren't distracted by oil? (either it magically didn't exist or somehow even more magically people succesfully priced in the carbon from the start).
      - oceanplexian 5y ago
        As crazy as it sounds, I think without oil civilization would have been set back 1000 years or more. We went from horse and buggy to space travel in a few decades, due in no small part to having a cheap, storable, high-density energy source that literally comes out of the ground.
throwaway5752 5y ago
1) there are no working thorium reactors 2) breeder reactors are hazardous 3) uranium seawater extraction doesn't exist 4) if uranium seawater extraction were made to work it would use enormous amounts of energy not reflected in this. The depressing truth is this shows that current uranium oxide reserves and nuclear tech could supply global energy needs for only 6 years.
- Robotbeat 5y ago
  1) Untrue https://sg.news.yahoo.com/china-hopes-play-leading-role-220307940.html https://sg.news.yahoo.com/china-hopes-play-leading-role-2203... 2) Not in any way that is irreducible. 3) wrong. https://www.machinedesign.com/materials/article/21836993/uranium-extracted-from-seawater https://www.machinedesign.com/materials/article/21836993/ura... “Oh, that’s just proof of concept.” Yes, and even 5 grams is enough to disprove your claim it doesn’t exist. Reality is we won’t need it for an extremely long time, so why would anyone do more than proof of concept? 4) still on-net easily pays for itself energy-wise. Thinking otherwise usually shows you do not appreciate just how energy dense uranium is. Belly aching that existing reserves are small, well duh. Demand is small. No one pays massive amounts of money to “prove” reserves when demand is small just to win an Internet argument. But uranium and thorium themselves are super common and in fact there’s more energy in fissionables in a random chunk of the Earth’s crust than there is thermal energy in a chunk of coal. The only thing depressing about what you said is that so many people buy into such poor logic. Look, I’m not a nuclear bro. We will primarily decarbonize with renewables. But so many of these anti-nuclear arguments are terrible.
  - dahart 5y ago
    Your news article link appears to state that China hopes to build a thorium reactor. It doesn’t seem say one is up and running, does it, or did I miss something?
    - dodobirdlord 5y ago
      Wikipedia indicates that some test reactors are currently operational, and there are construction projects underway for commercial reactors. The article notes that in 1999 there were 0 operating thorium reactors anywhere on earth, but that no longer seems to be true. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
zeryx 5y ago
It's incredibly frusturating that this isn't part of the public discourse, where are the pro-nuclear candidates? Which parties are pro-nuclear?
- purerandomness 5y ago
  It was for decades, there simply isn't anything new to discuss. We still have no solution a) where to put nuclear waste, and b) how to communicate to civilizations for the next 25000-50000 years what kind of waste that is. In Germany, the ongoing search for a permanent waste repository is going on for decades now. Funnily enough, this taxpayer's money is never calculated into the total cost of operating nuclear plants. It only makes sense if you subsidize cost by taxes of current and future generations.
  - fsflover 5y ago
    > a) where to put nuclear waste https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html > b) how to communicate to civilizations for the next 25000-50000 years what kind of waste that is. I would solve the climate change problem first, otherwise all problems appearing in 25000 years are moot.
  - adrianN 5y ago
    You'd put your waste in a breeder reactor until it has turned into short-lived isotopes that you only have to worry about for a few hundred years. Without breeder reactors we probably wouldn't have enough fuel anyway.
    - purerandomness 5y ago
      1. there are no working production-grade breeder reactors 2. you can't convert ALL of the waste into short-lived isotopes, just a fraction of it. Sure, we can invest time and money into researching these topics, why not. But why not put the same energy into researching renewables?
      - 5y ago
mikepurvis 5y ago
Aren't breeder reactors mostly still on the drawing board? I get that they're very promising, but my understanding is that there remain some non-trivial issues to work out around corrosion and so on. Anyway, I'm totally a believer in nuclear power for a greener future (yay Michael Schellenberger), but we need to keep these discussions honest: the path forward is to right now be building hundreds of copy-paste instances of existing, proven designs, not making the discussion about what might be possible with technology that's in development or not really in use at scale.
- Ottolay 5y ago
  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor Japan and India also have them. The problem seems to be that at least the Sodium type are more expensive to operate than traditional nuclear plants, so even though the technology has been around for a while, no countries are building very many of them.
  - p_l 5y ago
    Another is the small modular SVBR-100, which is essentially civilian version of submarine reactor that could be packed onto single rail car, and has no sodium nor fluoride involved. The problem is that since 1995 or so there was never enough funding to go to production.
dr_orpheus 5y ago
"However, billion-year sustainability does require advances in seawater uranium extraction..." This seems like a HUGE understatement. The calculations for the billion-year sustainability basically assume we have extracted every single bit of uranium from seawater. We have demonstrated extracting uranium from seawater [0] using plastic fibers with a compound that attracts the uranium+oxygen ions. But this would basically require pumping all of the worlds oceans through these fibers and continually extracting. [0] https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extract-uranium-seawater-nuclear-power#:~:text=Scientists%20have%20long%20known%20that%20uranium%20dissolved%20in,The%20uranyl%20ions%20essentially%20stick%20to%20the%20amidoxime https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extrac....
- Vox_Leone 5y ago
  Anyway, mankind doesn't have 5Gy. In a mere 500My the sun`s output should make the planet uninhabitable. Even so, it's enough time for us to have two more pangeas.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Surprisingly, we can move the plant. At least we could if we last that long and didn’t mess up the process, neither of which I would count on. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2001/jun/10/globalwarming.climatechange https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2001/jun/10/globalwa...
  - tim333 5y ago
    Though in a century we should have people living on Mars, so a while before the 500My is up. Or a sunshade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade. Or just raise Earth's orbit a bit by slingshotting an asteroid between Earth and Jupiter. >'All you have to do is strap a chemical rocket to an asteroid or comet and fire it at just the right time,' added Laughlin. 'It is basic rocket science.' https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2001/jun/10/globalwarming.climatechange https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2001/jun/10/globalwa...
- xyzzyz 5y ago
daneel_w 5y ago
In Europe everyone knows that. Even the craziest of our "greens" who insist on complete domestic decommissioning know it. The reason a few European countries are shutting their nuclear power plants down isn't because they think they are unsustainable, but because they fear they may be targeted and attacked. They currently view them as the combination of a sitting duck and a powder keg.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  And not as cost efficient as renewables, which they all plan to continue expanding rapidly.
  - p_l 5y ago
    Cost efficiency of renewables is a problematic topic, because it tends to avoid discussing their intermittency, only how much power costs when they happen to work (which isn't under control). So you have other side of the coin where renewable buildup ends up with fossil fuel burning to cover the inevitable shortages, while peak renewable low costs are used to badger dispatchable tech into non-existence
- jagermo 5y ago
  Plus, you know, storing the waste for thousands of years without a good place to do so. Payed for by the public.
  - jcfrei 5y ago
    A lot of the fuel can be recycled and doesn't need to be stored for thousands of years. Storing the remainder underground is mostly a one-off cost except for some monitoring. It's a solved problem and only public misconceptions about tectonics and radioactivity are holding it back.
    - perlgeek 5y ago
      > A lot of the fuel can be recycled and doesn't need to be stored for thousands of years. But is it, actually? The amount of nuclear waste in interim storage speaks against it. > It's a solved problem It is certainly not. For example in Germany there's only one terminal storage facility, and it's already showing problems, less than half a century in. And we thought/hoped it could last for tens of thousands of years. Maybe a case could be made that in ideal conditions, technical solutions exist, but I'm not aware of any actually viable solutions. (Note that a solution isn't viable from a public relations POV, it's NOT an actually viable solution).
cedilla 5y ago
Nuclear energy is sustainable only with technology we don't have yet. All the affordable reactor designs with no risk of accidents or proliferation are just 10 years away like they have been for four decades. And the sea water plan relies on technology that has been shown to be theoretically possible but not yet shown to be remotely feasible. At the proposed scale of kilotons per year, this would require filtering hundreds of billions of tons of sea water every year, even if we disregard the fact that most seawater isn't easily accesible. But the problem nuclear is that either way, it's far too late. Even if we managed to build nuclear reactors faster than at any other time in history, we would be far too late to stop climate change.
- bshoemaker 5y ago
  I do not understand why this comment is getting votes. The doomer perspective alone should be disqualifying... While we can't completely prevent any climate change, we have already significantly bent the curve and our efforts now are important - 2 degrees warming vs. 4 degrees is incredibly material. More on this: https://nyti.ms/3Egq7tV https://nyti.ms/3Egq7tV
  - cedilla 5y ago
    I think climate change is solvable, but we need solutions we can implement now. Proven solutions exist. Scaling up nuclear is not a solution. It is too slow and requires too much manpower. Nuclear had its chance, and it failed to deliver. It's a failed technology. It didn't work out, and it was never as cheap or as reliable as people wish it was.
    - p_l 5y ago
      The big economical killer for nuclear isn't renewables, but fossil fuels (specifically, gas turbines). Take away gas turbines and other fossil sources, and without magic pie-in-the-sky, renewables leave you with rolling blackouts and broken grid.
- BitwiseFool 5y ago
  >"But the problem nuclear is that either way, it's far too late." Sadly I see no other viable alternative. Wind and Solar are seemingly clean but require a ton of resources, have a massive footprint, and just don't scale with on-demand needs during bad weather. >"All the affordable reactor designs with no risk of accidents or proliferation are just 10 years away like they have been for four decades." No risk of accidents is an impossible standard. I know this will sound snarky, but, if you agree with the idea that the danger of climate change is existential, affordability is a relatively minor concern in comparison. Especially when you consider that a big factor as to why Nuclear is so expensive today is because we don't build them anymore, outside of places like China and India, which already have nuclear weapons.
dvh 5y ago
Right now, today, small village can take $30k from their budget and build small solar plant in their backyard in month or two, and then scale it up next year, and the next year. No multi-decade committees and multinational efforts needed. Nuclear will never be cheaper, solar is practically infinitely scalable. Time for nuclear was in the 80s, now that we have better options, we should pool all our resources into solar. We no longer have the time! We already have the silver bullet and it's solar. Anything nuclear-related is ridiculously expensive, if all those wasted resources went to solar we would be carbon neutral by now.
- p_l 5y ago
  And that power will be uncontrollable, annoying on the grid (demand and supply must be in sync otherwise !FUN! happens), and costs of storage that make for fully renewable grid quickly eclipse costs of the more expensive nuclear options.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    How would you build a fully nuclear grid without storage? Seems a really weird thing for nuclear enthusiasts to mention. It's like you're just passing on fossil fuel talking points without even reflecting on whether they make sense for nuclear.
    - p_l 5y ago
      You don't need large amounts of storage for nuclear-based power grid, only enough to provide frequency maintenance buffer while you change power output on the plant. You need huge storage amounts for renewables just to make sure you don't have rolling blackouts (undersupply vs. nuclear's oversupply) or, what happens in reality, fossil fuel backup. There is an equivalent of small village with fully renewable power grid (ok, maybe 99%, I think they had an oil generator or two). You have to deal with low limits of power you can draw, react in time to alerts to curtail your usage (or face disconnection), etc. etc. Forget about things like electric heating or charging BEVs, you have to worry if you can run the washing machine. The typical "village invests $30k in renewables" hides a ton of externalities taken up elsewhere due to how random the introduced supply power is.
Zigurd 5y ago
This is a rehash of breeder reactor talking points that are decades old. Some, like seawater extraction have always been pie in the sky. Breeder technologies have a track record. That track record is why new breeder reactors are not being built under any political or regulatory system. It is no coincidence that nuclear reactor PR has ramped up during the COP conference. It's last call.
Ottolay 5y ago
If only the world would have followed Sweden and France [1] and largely de-carbonized their electrical grid by the 90s using primarily nuclear, we would be in a much better situation when it comes to global warming. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#/media/File:FR_ELEC_PROD.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#/... It's 30 years later and countries which push renewables heavily like Germany still have over 40% of their electricity produced from carbon producing sources. [2] [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:Germany's_electricity_generation_by_major_fuel,_energy_sources_and_share_of_electricity_generation_by_fuel,_energy_source,_from_2000_through_2017_(47958295396).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...
- fsh 5y ago
  According to TFA, conventional nuclear power plants would exhaust the available uranium resources in 5.7 years if used to provide 100% of the world primary energy. The world could not possibly have followed Sweden and France even if it wanted to.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    Breeder reactors are a thing. I think the reason we lost interest was down to not needing them rather than anything else, but am prepared to be wrong if that turns out to be an urban legend.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Ottolay 5y ago
    Citation?
    - p_l 5y ago
      First graphic. That said, that assumes we only use USA-style LWR/PWRs that depend on natural U-235 to operate, I think, given that the numbers I've seen for reactors operating on unenriched uranium point to more like 50 years as super low-end estimate.
peter_retief 5y ago
What concerns me is just how few people know this and how many have completely wrong ideas about what nuclear is and the threats it poses.
golemotron 5y ago
People try to debate nuclear rationally, but I think there is a sharp divide in temperament in our culture. Some people want the solution to our energy woes to be perpetual austerity, lowering consumption and being eternally vigilant against anything that might produce more energy. The other temperament sees creating more energy as a good thing. It doesn't have the "closed world" assumption. It's remarkable that the former temperament is very conservation oriented, and therefore conservative, but more a feature of the Left than the Right.
- an9n 5y ago
  To caricature, the left wants to apply the precautionary principle to the environment but has no qualms about the destruction of national history, culture, etc. whereas the right is supposedly the opposite. Personally I'm a small c conservative, in that I oppose the destruction of the environment just as much as I oppose the ongoing push to erase individual nations.
mro_name 5y ago
I find it amusing how easy we leave waste and decide for generations to come to deal with. Plutonium has a half-life of 24110 years – it will take about ten of them until it's gone. Just imagine the provision for 1 security guard's toilet paper for a quarter of a million of years. It's always pipe-dreams like 'somebody will eventually have a genius idea about it'.
- acidburnNSA 5y ago
  Nuclear waste has appropriate and functional solutions on those time scales in deep geologic repositories. Finland is the leader here [1]. Compared with combustion waste from fossil and biofuel which kills ~8 million people every year and causes climate change, I have to say that the nuclear waste is dramatically better for the present and for the future. [1] https://posiva.fi/ https://posiva.fi/
  - mro_name 5y ago
    the claim was 'long term sustainable' – burning fossils isn't a contender here.
- Turing_Machine 5y ago
  Longer half-life = less radioactive. By definition.
  - mro_name 5y ago
    radioactivity isn't the only problematic property of plutonium.
    - Turing_Machine 5y ago
      But it's the one you mentioned. You're just trying to move the goal posts now.
      - mro_name 5y ago
jillesvangurp 5y ago
To be sustainable, nuclear also needs to be sustainable economically. There's a cost problem with nuclear that often gets swept under the carpet by its proponents. But it's actually a big reason for its current lack of popularity. Nuclear proponents instead love to emphasize how safe nuclear can be and how great of a safety track record it has. And with some caveats (e.g. the Fukushima mess was pretty bad) they are not wrong for modern nuclear reactor designs. However, nuclear is expensive and that combined with safety (which costs money to mitigate) is the real reason for the impopularity. It always was expensive but historically, a lot of that was paid for out of tax payer money. Most new plants are still very expensive compared to almost everything else in the market. And they still involve a lot of taxpayer money. Nuclear is not economically sustainable currently and those cost are either not payed (many countries don't have permanent waste storage solutions) or basically payed for out of tax money instead of revenue. If you add it all up it makes an already bad cost picture worse. Even without that accounted for it is easily the most expensive form of power. With all that accounted for, it only gets worse. To be economically sustainable, it needs to become vastly cheaper and account for the full cost. Will it always be that expensive? There are definitely ways to lower cost and there is of course a learning effect. But it seems we have a lot to learn. About an order of magnitude's worth of cost. And that would just be catching up to the status quo.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  French nuclear had a negative learning effect. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223761273_The_costs_of_the_French_nuclear_scale-up_A_case_of_negative_learning_by_doing https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223761273_The_costs...
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Nuclear is cost competitive with fossil fuels, if you include carbon externalities. Still more expensive than renewables though, so only the best option if they didn't exist.
  - jillesvangurp 5y ago
    Yeah, fossil fuel is also economically sustainable at this point. Even without carbon capture it is generally too expensive. However. but the best power is the power you have. While renewables are cheaper, we don't yet have enough renewable capacity. And while fixing that is happening at an enormous pace, it's going to take a bit of time. A few decades should help. E.g. China has more than a TW of coal plants and more under construction. The global rollout of renewables is in the order of a bit over 100 GW. At that pace, it would take a decade to roll out enough (globally) just to get rid of China's coal plants. That's why they are investing in expensive Nuclear plants. 150 plants adds up to about a TW pretty much. Assuming these are pretty big ones doing 6GW each. That's not because they are so cheap but because it is the only way to get China on a path where they can shut down most of their coal this half of the century. Doing that is becoming more urgent. Long term, they might shut down those nuclear plants as soon as they can get away with it to save money. That will require a massive increase in production for renewable generation and storage. These plants have a lifetime of around 60 years. They might not actually be online that long.
yholio 5y ago
The problem with nuclear energy is not, and never was, availability of fuel. The fueling costs are by and large negligible in the balance sheet of a nuclear plant. Nuclear has a massive capital cost issue, you need to invest a very large sum of money up-front and recoup it over decades; and you can start to recoup it only after at least 5 years of construction that can be bogged in regulatory and construction delays, political and civil opposition can stretch construction to more than a decade, all the while the investor is billions in the red. This makes nuclear very very risky from a financial perspective, slow to adopt innovation, hard to attract private investors that can't accommodate projects that take such a long time to become profitable. Basically, they are too expensive and slow compared to the business risk they entail, especially compared to renewables, which are quick to market and have very clear risk profiles. If and when this changes, for example by SMRs or advanced, low cost designs, then nuclear will have a place in the clean energy market. Up to now, attempts to bring the cost down have failed, for example NuScale's battery of small reactors is estimated to cost the same as a clasic reactor.
- danny_codes 5y ago
  Alternative solution: Lean into private/public ventures to change the economics. We just make the private risk profile look reasonable. via direct investment.
someonewhocar3s 5y ago
I think there is a huge gap in the market for production of nuclear energy plants, both (very)large scale and small. I haven't seen any superplants which break from the usual evaporation tower scale. I also haven't seen something I'd dip behind a dam which would evaporate it's lake, and yield the depth-energy somehow (perhaps more efficiently than a regular old dam's drop-pipe construction). There should be some special space-age-scale plants too. It's not like I'd know who'd buy one, but submarine/boat powerplants are legal if they stay in open waters, and scale pretty large. There's a certain terratory for nuclear train, certainly. All presently best in class designs for those have contamination and bulk issues (and not even either!). But it'd also not know who sells those! So it's still a hole in the market, either way. And with space, there's an interest in building spaceborne nuclear power plants, which now is likely to become commercial enterprise, but was not recently a purely governmental affair. So that can be very lucrative, yet safe. The 'aftermarket' for these products, which includes armed assurance of retrieving 'misplaced' fuel, and a suitable construction for assuring the safekeeping of said materials over their dangerous lifespan, with/without the fiscal instruments for these materials to be kept retrievable ('depleted' is relative). Is, well, basically just more market really. But it's important to capture this market very aggressively, or the materials will not be treated appropriately and the cost may be left uncarried. It may end up being incredibly unsustainable, with mineables lasting 60-80 years with reasonable (curved up) adoption, which is definitely on the short side. Space mining may yield tremendous amounts, and will more likely laser it moon/earthbound rather than shipping the uranium (but we'll see! It's 'down' in the gravitational spirals, so it may even yield energy on the way down hah). Water sourced uranium mining is something to be proven before we'll know what kind of 'solution' we're facing, but the idea of finding lots of uranium anywhere is nice. I'm positive we're not actually done prospecting the earth, just that the mines we do have are thusly rich we're not looking further!

112 points by gone35 5y ago

andy_ppp 5y ago

I'm not sure I want every country in the world to have the potential to build nuclear bombs...

krupan 5y ago
Two different disciplines. The amount of refinement of the material needed for weapons is much much higher than for energy.
mikepurvis 5y ago
"More than 20 countries have developed nuclear power industries without building nuclear weapons. On the other hand, countries that have built and tested nuclear weapons have followed other paths than purchasing commercial nuclear reactors, reprocessing the spent fuel, and obtaining plutonium. Some have built facilities for the express purpose of enriching uranium; some have built plutonium production reactors; and some have surreptitiously diverted research reactors to the production of plutonium. All these pathways to nuclear proliferation have been more effective, less expensive, and easier to hide from prying eyes than the commercial nuclear power route." https://www.britannica.com/technology/nuclear-power/Proliferation https://www.britannica.com/technology/nuclear-power/Prolifer...
delecti 5y ago
Every country already does, they mostly just don't want to.

OscarCunningham 5y ago

The calculations don't take into account growing energy usage. But anyone who understands exponential growth already knew that from looking at the title. EDIT: Title on the article is currently 'Nuclear fuel will last us for 4 billion years'. I recall that that was also the HN title when I wrote this comment, but I could have got mixed up.

nine_k 5y ago
No form of exponential growth is sustainable; another name for it is "explosion". In practice, most things that look exponential end up as S-shaped / sigmoid curves
- the8472 5y ago
  Well, maybe not exponentially. But at least theoretically things could keep expanding quadratically for a very long time, if we figure out a way to get to other star systems. And much of the sun's output is yet untapped.
Tenoke 5y ago
Energy consumption seems to be increasing linearly since the 40s not exponentially and the increase has been slowing down - to 1-2% increase per year. https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption
- OscarCunningham 5y ago
  Yes, but prices have also been rising over that time. I expect that if prices had remained constant our usages would have gone up exponentially (equivalently, supply would have had to increase exponentially to keep prices constant). If we have low energy usage over the next 4 billion years, but only because the price keeps going up, then it has not 'last us 4 billion years'. The price going up is precisely what 'not lasting us' looks like!
- caeril 5y ago
  We'll probably see that trend tick up again soon. Maybe you haven't been paying attention to the political climate, but there is a huge push to increase the living standards of 6 billion people up to the level of the 1 billion currently living in developed countries, whether through immigration or aid. The relationship between living standards and energy use/carbon emissions is not exactly 1:1, but it's pretty close (net of offshoring one's personal emissions to China, India, etc). Get ready for about a 4x increase in carbon emissions if our suicidal empathy trend continues. What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship's axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides. ― Pentti Linkola

rootsudo 5y ago

It's amazing how gasoline itself was only used from 1892 to current time. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/gasoline/history-of-gasoline.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/gasoline/history-of-gaso... So imagine 150 years of gasoline usage help lead the world to be green and change to an energy source for "4 billion years." That's so cool, and puts alot of conversation about environmentalism into prospective.

dr_orpheus 5y ago
I'm not sure I totally understand your point here. How did 150 years of gasoline usage help lead the world to be green? And we as of yet have not changed to 100% nuclear and/or recyclable and don't have the technology yet to achieve that goal of nuclear energy for "4 billion years"
- nine_k 5y ago
  It'd be pretty hard to advance the civilization from coal-based energy straight into nuclear / solar, without all the carbohydrates-powered cars, trucks, and airplanes in the meantime.
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    Has anyone actually looked into this in depth? It feels like a cheap throwaway line that you can use against new tech that's not really caught on yet, but as we're here in 2021 with EVs and nuclear power and wind turbines etc., what was actually stopping us getting there faster if we weren't distracted by oil? (either it magically didn't exist or somehow even more magically people succesfully priced in the carbon from the start).
    - oceanplexian 5y ago
      As crazy as it sounds, I think without oil civilization would have been set back 1000 years or more. We went from horse and buggy to space travel in a few decades, due in no small part to having a cheap, storable, high-density energy source that literally comes out of the ground.

throwaway5752 5y ago

1) there are no working thorium reactors 2) breeder reactors are hazardous 3) uranium seawater extraction doesn't exist 4) if uranium seawater extraction were made to work it would use enormous amounts of energy not reflected in this. The depressing truth is this shows that current uranium oxide reserves and nuclear tech could supply global energy needs for only 6 years.

Robotbeat 5y ago
1) Untrue https://sg.news.yahoo.com/china-hopes-play-leading-role-220307940.html https://sg.news.yahoo.com/china-hopes-play-leading-role-2203... 2) Not in any way that is irreducible. 3) wrong. https://www.machinedesign.com/materials/article/21836993/uranium-extracted-from-seawater https://www.machinedesign.com/materials/article/21836993/ura... “Oh, that’s just proof of concept.” Yes, and even 5 grams is enough to disprove your claim it doesn’t exist. Reality is we won’t need it for an extremely long time, so why would anyone do more than proof of concept? 4) still on-net easily pays for itself energy-wise. Thinking otherwise usually shows you do not appreciate just how energy dense uranium is. Belly aching that existing reserves are small, well duh. Demand is small. No one pays massive amounts of money to “prove” reserves when demand is small just to win an Internet argument. But uranium and thorium themselves are super common and in fact there’s more energy in fissionables in a random chunk of the Earth’s crust than there is thermal energy in a chunk of coal. The only thing depressing about what you said is that so many people buy into such poor logic. Look, I’m not a nuclear bro. We will primarily decarbonize with renewables. But so many of these anti-nuclear arguments are terrible.
- dahart 5y ago
  Your news article link appears to state that China hopes to build a thorium reactor. It doesn’t seem say one is up and running, does it, or did I miss something?
  - dodobirdlord 5y ago
    Wikipedia indicates that some test reactors are currently operational, and there are construction projects underway for commercial reactors. The article notes that in 1999 there were 0 operating thorium reactors anywhere on earth, but that no longer seems to be true. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power

zeryx 5y ago

It's incredibly frusturating that this isn't part of the public discourse, where are the pro-nuclear candidates? Which parties are pro-nuclear?

purerandomness 5y ago
It was for decades, there simply isn't anything new to discuss. We still have no solution a) where to put nuclear waste, and b) how to communicate to civilizations for the next 25000-50000 years what kind of waste that is. In Germany, the ongoing search for a permanent waste repository is going on for decades now. Funnily enough, this taxpayer's money is never calculated into the total cost of operating nuclear plants. It only makes sense if you subsidize cost by taxes of current and future generations.
- fsflover 5y ago
  > a) where to put nuclear waste https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html https://whatisnuclear.com/waste.html > b) how to communicate to civilizations for the next 25000-50000 years what kind of waste that is. I would solve the climate change problem first, otherwise all problems appearing in 25000 years are moot.
- adrianN 5y ago
  You'd put your waste in a breeder reactor until it has turned into short-lived isotopes that you only have to worry about for a few hundred years. Without breeder reactors we probably wouldn't have enough fuel anyway.
  - purerandomness 5y ago
    1. there are no working production-grade breeder reactors 2. you can't convert ALL of the waste into short-lived isotopes, just a fraction of it. Sure, we can invest time and money into researching these topics, why not. But why not put the same energy into researching renewables?
    - 5y ago

mikepurvis 5y ago

Aren't breeder reactors mostly still on the drawing board? I get that they're very promising, but my understanding is that there remain some non-trivial issues to work out around corrosion and so on. Anyway, I'm totally a believer in nuclear power for a greener future (yay Michael Schellenberger), but we need to keep these discussions honest: the path forward is to right now be building hundreds of copy-paste instances of existing, proven designs, not making the discussion about what might be possible with technology that's in development or not really in use at scale.

Ottolay 5y ago
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BN-800_reactor Japan and India also have them. The problem seems to be that at least the Sodium type are more expensive to operate than traditional nuclear plants, so even though the technology has been around for a while, no countries are building very many of them.
- p_l 5y ago
  Another is the small modular SVBR-100, which is essentially civilian version of submarine reactor that could be packed onto single rail car, and has no sodium nor fluoride involved. The problem is that since 1995 or so there was never enough funding to go to production.

dr_orpheus 5y ago

"However, billion-year sustainability does require advances in seawater uranium extraction..." This seems like a HUGE understatement. The calculations for the billion-year sustainability basically assume we have extracted every single bit of uranium from seawater. We have demonstrated extracting uranium from seawater [0] using plastic fibers with a compound that attracts the uranium+oxygen ions. But this would basically require pumping all of the worlds oceans through these fibers and continually extracting. [0] https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extract-uranium-seawater-nuclear-power#:~:text=Scientists%20have%20long%20known%20that%20uranium%20dissolved%20in,The%20uranyl%20ions%20essentially%20stick%20to%20the%20amidoxime https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/how-extrac....

Vox_Leone 5y ago
Anyway, mankind doesn't have 5Gy. In a mere 500My the sun`s output should make the planet uninhabitable. Even so, it's enough time for us to have two more pangeas.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Surprisingly, we can move the plant. At least we could if we last that long and didn’t mess up the process, neither of which I would count on. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2001/jun/10/globalwarming.climatechange https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2001/jun/10/globalwa...
- tim333 5y ago
  Though in a century we should have people living on Mars, so a while before the 500My is up. Or a sunshade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade. Or just raise Earth's orbit a bit by slingshotting an asteroid between Earth and Jupiter. >'All you have to do is strap a chemical rocket to an asteroid or comet and fire it at just the right time,' added Laughlin. 'It is basic rocket science.' https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2001/jun/10/globalwarming.climatechange https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2001/jun/10/globalwa...
xyzzyz 5y ago

daneel_w 5y ago

In Europe everyone knows that. Even the craziest of our "greens" who insist on complete domestic decommissioning know it. The reason a few European countries are shutting their nuclear power plants down isn't because they think they are unsustainable, but because they fear they may be targeted and attacked. They currently view them as the combination of a sitting duck and a powder keg.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
And not as cost efficient as renewables, which they all plan to continue expanding rapidly.
- p_l 5y ago
  Cost efficiency of renewables is a problematic topic, because it tends to avoid discussing their intermittency, only how much power costs when they happen to work (which isn't under control). So you have other side of the coin where renewable buildup ends up with fossil fuel burning to cover the inevitable shortages, while peak renewable low costs are used to badger dispatchable tech into non-existence
jagermo 5y ago
Plus, you know, storing the waste for thousands of years without a good place to do so. Payed for by the public.
- jcfrei 5y ago
  A lot of the fuel can be recycled and doesn't need to be stored for thousands of years. Storing the remainder underground is mostly a one-off cost except for some monitoring. It's a solved problem and only public misconceptions about tectonics and radioactivity are holding it back.
  - perlgeek 5y ago
    > A lot of the fuel can be recycled and doesn't need to be stored for thousands of years. But is it, actually? The amount of nuclear waste in interim storage speaks against it. > It's a solved problem It is certainly not. For example in Germany there's only one terminal storage facility, and it's already showing problems, less than half a century in. And we thought/hoped it could last for tens of thousands of years. Maybe a case could be made that in ideal conditions, technical solutions exist, but I'm not aware of any actually viable solutions. (Note that a solution isn't viable from a public relations POV, it's NOT an actually viable solution).

cedilla 5y ago

Nuclear energy is sustainable only with technology we don't have yet. All the affordable reactor designs with no risk of accidents or proliferation are just 10 years away like they have been for four decades. And the sea water plan relies on technology that has been shown to be theoretically possible but not yet shown to be remotely feasible. At the proposed scale of kilotons per year, this would require filtering hundreds of billions of tons of sea water every year, even if we disregard the fact that most seawater isn't easily accesible. But the problem nuclear is that either way, it's far too late. Even if we managed to build nuclear reactors faster than at any other time in history, we would be far too late to stop climate change.

bshoemaker 5y ago
I do not understand why this comment is getting votes. The doomer perspective alone should be disqualifying... While we can't completely prevent any climate change, we have already significantly bent the curve and our efforts now are important - 2 degrees warming vs. 4 degrees is incredibly material. More on this: https://nyti.ms/3Egq7tV https://nyti.ms/3Egq7tV
- cedilla 5y ago
  I think climate change is solvable, but we need solutions we can implement now. Proven solutions exist. Scaling up nuclear is not a solution. It is too slow and requires too much manpower. Nuclear had its chance, and it failed to deliver. It's a failed technology. It didn't work out, and it was never as cheap or as reliable as people wish it was.
  - p_l 5y ago
    The big economical killer for nuclear isn't renewables, but fossil fuels (specifically, gas turbines). Take away gas turbines and other fossil sources, and without magic pie-in-the-sky, renewables leave you with rolling blackouts and broken grid.
BitwiseFool 5y ago
>"But the problem nuclear is that either way, it's far too late." Sadly I see no other viable alternative. Wind and Solar are seemingly clean but require a ton of resources, have a massive footprint, and just don't scale with on-demand needs during bad weather. >"All the affordable reactor designs with no risk of accidents or proliferation are just 10 years away like they have been for four decades." No risk of accidents is an impossible standard. I know this will sound snarky, but, if you agree with the idea that the danger of climate change is existential, affordability is a relatively minor concern in comparison. Especially when you consider that a big factor as to why Nuclear is so expensive today is because we don't build them anymore, outside of places like China and India, which already have nuclear weapons.

dvh 5y ago

Right now, today, small village can take $30k from their budget and build small solar plant in their backyard in month or two, and then scale it up next year, and the next year. No multi-decade committees and multinational efforts needed. Nuclear will never be cheaper, solar is practically infinitely scalable. Time for nuclear was in the 80s, now that we have better options, we should pool all our resources into solar. We no longer have the time! We already have the silver bullet and it's solar. Anything nuclear-related is ridiculously expensive, if all those wasted resources went to solar we would be carbon neutral by now.

p_l 5y ago
And that power will be uncontrollable, annoying on the grid (demand and supply must be in sync otherwise !FUN! happens), and costs of storage that make for fully renewable grid quickly eclipse costs of the more expensive nuclear options.
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  How would you build a fully nuclear grid without storage? Seems a really weird thing for nuclear enthusiasts to mention. It's like you're just passing on fossil fuel talking points without even reflecting on whether they make sense for nuclear.
  - p_l 5y ago
    You don't need large amounts of storage for nuclear-based power grid, only enough to provide frequency maintenance buffer while you change power output on the plant. You need huge storage amounts for renewables just to make sure you don't have rolling blackouts (undersupply vs. nuclear's oversupply) or, what happens in reality, fossil fuel backup. There is an equivalent of small village with fully renewable power grid (ok, maybe 99%, I think they had an oil generator or two). You have to deal with low limits of power you can draw, react in time to alerts to curtail your usage (or face disconnection), etc. etc. Forget about things like electric heating or charging BEVs, you have to worry if you can run the washing machine. The typical "village invests $30k in renewables" hides a ton of externalities taken up elsewhere due to how random the introduced supply power is.

Zigurd 5y ago

This is a rehash of breeder reactor talking points that are decades old. Some, like seawater extraction have always been pie in the sky. Breeder technologies have a track record. That track record is why new breeder reactors are not being built under any political or regulatory system. It is no coincidence that nuclear reactor PR has ramped up during the COP conference. It's last call.

Ottolay 5y ago

If only the world would have followed Sweden and France [1] and largely de-carbonized their electrical grid by the 90s using primarily nuclear, we would be in a much better situation when it comes to global warming. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#/media/File:FR_ELEC_PROD.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France#/... It's 30 years later and countries which push renewables heavily like Germany still have over 40% of their electricity produced from carbon producing sources. [2] [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:Germany's_electricity_generation_by_major_fuel,_energy_sources_and_share_of_electricity_generation_by_fuel,_energy_source,_from_2000_through_2017_(47958295396).png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Germany#/media/File:...

fsh 5y ago
According to TFA, conventional nuclear power plants would exhaust the available uranium resources in 5.7 years if used to provide 100% of the world primary energy. The world could not possibly have followed Sweden and France even if it wanted to.
- ben_w 5y ago
  Breeder reactors are a thing. I think the reason we lost interest was down to not needing them rather than anything else, but am prepared to be wrong if that turns out to be an urban legend.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Ottolay 5y ago
  Citation?
  - p_l 5y ago
    First graphic. That said, that assumes we only use USA-style LWR/PWRs that depend on natural U-235 to operate, I think, given that the numbers I've seen for reactors operating on unenriched uranium point to more like 50 years as super low-end estimate.

peter_retief 5y ago

What concerns me is just how few people know this and how many have completely wrong ideas about what nuclear is and the threats it poses.

golemotron 5y ago

People try to debate nuclear rationally, but I think there is a sharp divide in temperament in our culture. Some people want the solution to our energy woes to be perpetual austerity, lowering consumption and being eternally vigilant against anything that might produce more energy. The other temperament sees creating more energy as a good thing. It doesn't have the "closed world" assumption. It's remarkable that the former temperament is very conservation oriented, and therefore conservative, but more a feature of the Left than the Right.

an9n 5y ago
To caricature, the left wants to apply the precautionary principle to the environment but has no qualms about the destruction of national history, culture, etc. whereas the right is supposedly the opposite. Personally I'm a small c conservative, in that I oppose the destruction of the environment just as much as I oppose the ongoing push to erase individual nations.

mro_name 5y ago

I find it amusing how easy we leave waste and decide for generations to come to deal with. Plutonium has a half-life of 24110 years – it will take about ten of them until it's gone. Just imagine the provision for 1 security guard's toilet paper for a quarter of a million of years. It's always pipe-dreams like 'somebody will eventually have a genius idea about it'.

acidburnNSA 5y ago
Nuclear waste has appropriate and functional solutions on those time scales in deep geologic repositories. Finland is the leader here [1]. Compared with combustion waste from fossil and biofuel which kills ~8 million people every year and causes climate change, I have to say that the nuclear waste is dramatically better for the present and for the future. [1] https://posiva.fi/ https://posiva.fi/
- mro_name 5y ago
  the claim was 'long term sustainable' – burning fossils isn't a contender here.
Turing_Machine 5y ago
Longer half-life = less radioactive. By definition.
- mro_name 5y ago
  radioactivity isn't the only problematic property of plutonium.
  - Turing_Machine 5y ago
    But it's the one you mentioned. You're just trying to move the goal posts now.
    - mro_name 5y ago

jillesvangurp 5y ago

To be sustainable, nuclear also needs to be sustainable economically. There's a cost problem with nuclear that often gets swept under the carpet by its proponents. But it's actually a big reason for its current lack of popularity. Nuclear proponents instead love to emphasize how safe nuclear can be and how great of a safety track record it has. And with some caveats (e.g. the Fukushima mess was pretty bad) they are not wrong for modern nuclear reactor designs. However, nuclear is expensive and that combined with safety (which costs money to mitigate) is the real reason for the impopularity. It always was expensive but historically, a lot of that was paid for out of tax payer money. Most new plants are still very expensive compared to almost everything else in the market. And they still involve a lot of taxpayer money. Nuclear is not economically sustainable currently and those cost are either not payed (many countries don't have permanent waste storage solutions) or basically payed for out of tax money instead of revenue. If you add it all up it makes an already bad cost picture worse. Even without that accounted for it is easily the most expensive form of power. With all that accounted for, it only gets worse. To be economically sustainable, it needs to become vastly cheaper and account for the full cost. Will it always be that expensive? There are definitely ways to lower cost and there is of course a learning effect. But it seems we have a lot to learn. About an order of magnitude's worth of cost. And that would just be catching up to the status quo.

bryanlarsen 5y ago
French nuclear had a negative learning effect. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223761273_The_costs_of_the_French_nuclear_scale-up_A_case_of_negative_learning_by_doing https://www.researchgate.net/publication/223761273_The_costs...
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Nuclear is cost competitive with fossil fuels, if you include carbon externalities. Still more expensive than renewables though, so only the best option if they didn't exist.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  Yeah, fossil fuel is also economically sustainable at this point. Even without carbon capture it is generally too expensive. However. but the best power is the power you have. While renewables are cheaper, we don't yet have enough renewable capacity. And while fixing that is happening at an enormous pace, it's going to take a bit of time. A few decades should help. E.g. China has more than a TW of coal plants and more under construction. The global rollout of renewables is in the order of a bit over 100 GW. At that pace, it would take a decade to roll out enough (globally) just to get rid of China's coal plants. That's why they are investing in expensive Nuclear plants. 150 plants adds up to about a TW pretty much. Assuming these are pretty big ones doing 6GW each. That's not because they are so cheap but because it is the only way to get China on a path where they can shut down most of their coal this half of the century. Doing that is becoming more urgent. Long term, they might shut down those nuclear plants as soon as they can get away with it to save money. That will require a massive increase in production for renewable generation and storage. These plants have a lifetime of around 60 years. They might not actually be online that long.

yholio 5y ago

The problem with nuclear energy is not, and never was, availability of fuel. The fueling costs are by and large negligible in the balance sheet of a nuclear plant. Nuclear has a massive capital cost issue, you need to invest a very large sum of money up-front and recoup it over decades; and you can start to recoup it only after at least 5 years of construction that can be bogged in regulatory and construction delays, political and civil opposition can stretch construction to more than a decade, all the while the investor is billions in the red. This makes nuclear very very risky from a financial perspective, slow to adopt innovation, hard to attract private investors that can't accommodate projects that take such a long time to become profitable. Basically, they are too expensive and slow compared to the business risk they entail, especially compared to renewables, which are quick to market and have very clear risk profiles. If and when this changes, for example by SMRs or advanced, low cost designs, then nuclear will have a place in the clean energy market. Up to now, attempts to bring the cost down have failed, for example NuScale's battery of small reactors is estimated to cost the same as a clasic reactor.

danny_codes 5y ago
Alternative solution: Lean into private/public ventures to change the economics. We just make the private risk profile look reasonable. via direct investment.

someonewhocar3s 5y ago

I think there is a huge gap in the market for production of nuclear energy plants, both (very)large scale and small. I haven't seen any superplants which break from the usual evaporation tower scale. I also haven't seen something I'd dip behind a dam which would evaporate it's lake, and yield the depth-energy somehow (perhaps more efficiently than a regular old dam's drop-pipe construction). There should be some special space-age-scale plants too. It's not like I'd know who'd buy one, but submarine/boat powerplants are legal if they stay in open waters, and scale pretty large. There's a certain terratory for nuclear train, certainly. All presently best in class designs for those have contamination and bulk issues (and not even either!). But it'd also not know who sells those! So it's still a hole in the market, either way. And with space, there's an interest in building spaceborne nuclear power plants, which now is likely to become commercial enterprise, but was not recently a purely governmental affair. So that can be very lucrative, yet safe. The 'aftermarket' for these products, which includes armed assurance of retrieving 'misplaced' fuel, and a suitable construction for assuring the safekeeping of said materials over their dangerous lifespan, with/without the fiscal instruments for these materials to be kept retrievable ('depleted' is relative). Is, well, basically just more market really. But it's important to capture this market very aggressively, or the materials will not be treated appropriately and the cost may be left uncarried. It may end up being incredibly unsustainable, with mineables lasting 60-80 years with reasonable (curved up) adoption, which is definitely on the short side. Space mining may yield tremendous amounts, and will more likely laser it moon/earthbound rather than shipping the uranium (but we'll see! It's 'down' in the gravitational spirals, so it may even yield energy on the way down hah). Water sourced uranium mining is something to be proven before we'll know what kind of 'solution' we're facing, but the idea of finding lots of uranium anywhere is nice. I'm positive we're not actually done prospecting the earth, just that the mines we do have are thusly rich we're not looking further!