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I would say that comparing the purchase of gas to the purchase of uranium is uninformed, if not dishonest, for two reasons: - Fuel costs for nuclear is only 15-

I would say that comparing the purchase of gas to the purchase of uranium is uninformed, if not dishonest, for two reasons: - Fuel costs for nuclear is only 15-20% of the total cost, half of which is the uranium itself [1]. For natural gas, the majority of the cost is the fuel, even during "normal" times. In other words, natural gas imports generate a lot more $ per GWh of energy produced, even if imported from the same country (Russia). - The reserves of Uranium across the globa are still huge, much of which can be found in (relatively) politically stable places such as Australia and Canada. For natural gas, one is locked into imports from countries such as Russia, Saudi-Arabia (and similar Arab monarchies), Venezuela and Russia for the forseeable future. I'm not suggesting that investment in renewables should be slowed down, only that coal and gass should be removed BEFORE nuclear. If Germany is able to produce the energy they need from renewables only, and to provide a stable supply, all the power to them. But to bring up renewables in a discussion about nuclear vs natural gas, is just a diversion tactic (or at best a dilusion). Oh, btw, I'm Norwegian. My country is making a $100 billion profit from the current energy situation in Europe, just this year, meaning that my household of 4 indirectly profits about $80000 from this in 2022 alone. So I'm not arguing from personal interest.... [1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspects/economics-of-nuclear-power.aspx https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/economic-aspec...

roenxi 4y ago
3 reasons, I suspect - if someone wants an enormous stockpile of uranium fuel they can probably do that. The volumes check out - uranium is very dense and so will not take up much space. I'm not sure if it has a shelf life, but being a rock I expect something can be sorted out. I can't pretend to know how feasible it is in practice, but long term strategic uranium stockpiles should be doable. Long enough to weather any reasonable war. Much, much more doable than trying to store a decade of nat gas.
- jhgb 4y ago
  I hope you noticed the news about Gazprom possibly intentionally keeping gas reserves in Germany low for months before the Russian invasion in preparation of said invasion. You can't make a strategic stockpile if your potential enemy is your supplier and preventively doesn't allow you make those stockpiles in the first place so that you didn't have this way out.
  - trashtester 4y ago
    You could turn that on its head. Had Germany created uranium stockpiles in 2014, enough to last, say, 5 years, they would not be vulnerable to this tactic in the first place.
    - Tretioh 4y ago
      And now we replay an earlier argument on if Germany would have continued with the renewable transition, we wouldn't need any stockpile oof gas or uran from Russia.
    - jhgb 4y ago
      Considering that you can't use raw uranium but need fuel assemblies, you'd need a replacement manufacturer of fuel assemblies, not just a uranium stockpile. But of course Germany was scheduled to shut down its nuclear power plants in 2022-ish anyway so a stockpile would have been largely meaningless.
      - trashtester 4y ago
        Pretty sure you can have your stockpiles pre-assebled, or close enough that the final step is trivial. Anyway, my argument i built on the premise that Germany should never have shut down their nuclear power plants (except when they truely are "spent") and instead built a large number of new ones. If their nuclear capacity was about the same as the French, it would make a lot of sense to have a strategic stockpile of ready-to-use fuel, both in case supply is restricted for political reasons and because it would serve as a hedge against price fluctuations.
        jhgb 4y ago
        Or, they could just shut down their nuclear plants and the problem with nuclear fuel stockpile goes away as well. And in fact, this is vastly easier to accomplish, and exactly the thing they're already doing.
        4y ago
jhgb 4y ago
> I would say that comparing the purchase of gas to the purchase of uranium is uninformed, if not dishonest, for two reasons: - Fuel costs for nuclear is only 15-20% of the total cost, half of which is the uranium itself [1]. For natural gas, the majority of the cost is the fuel, even during "normal" times What seems "uninformed, if not dishonest" to me is the argument that fuel price matters here. Imagine this: Your country needs seven doohickeys per year to run. What exactly those doohickeys are is unimportant; the only important thing is that you need then. Russia can provide you with four doohickeys per year. The rest of the world can provide you with only five doohickeys per year, and for many years they won't be able to provide any more than that. So you need at least two doohickeys per year from Russia, no matter what, otherwise your country stops running. So Russia can stop your country from running at any moment. Did you notice how price never entered this discussion? > The reserves of Uranium across the globa are still huge, much of which can be found in (relatively) politically stable places such as Australia and Canada. Reserves of uranium matter here much less than enrichment and fuel assembly production capacity. Russia has over 40% of enriched fuel production capacity (as per https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/conversion-enrichment-and-fabrication/uranium-enrichment.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...). Until you build new plants for this, it doesn't matter that you can get natural uranium from Australia or Canada. You won't be able to do anything useful with it (unless your reactor is CANDU).
- trashtester 4y ago
  For Germany's risk, the the price doesn't make a big differencem, should Russia decide to cut off the supply. As long as the supply is NOT cut off, it matters quite a lot what Germany is paying for it. If the choice (for a set period of energy supply) is to pay either 100 billion euros for natural gas, or 20 billion euroes for uranium, the difference is 80 billion euroes less that Russia could spend to keep their war machine running. That's as much as their peacetime yearly military budget. As for Russia's enrichment capacity, that is something any advanced country could set up, just as several countries have deposites they could start mining. Ones mining and enrichment has started, it could be kept running for as long as needed. For natural gas, on the other hand, there are fewer good sources. By far the cheapest source is from wherever it can be transported in pipes. Other countries can convert their gas to LNG for transport to Germany, but that also requires expansion of LNG facilities in both ends, and perhaps construction of more LNG ships. I don't know which take longer, between LNG from other sources or uranium from other sources. And even when the transfer has been made, natural gas is a more limited resource than uranium, so even if it is purchased from, say, Saudi Arabia, the global supply and demand situation isn't changed much, so Russia will still be able to find buyers for their gas. (For instance, Germany may start to buy up gas that would otherwise be exported to China. If so, China can just buy from Russia.) This doesn't even start to go into having dependencies on fundamentalist islamic monarchies in the middle east. I would think it would be preferrable for Germany to import their energy from Canada and Australia, countries they that share most of Germany's values. Finally, with nuclear there is always the option of setting up strategic fuel reserves. This would be analogous to strategic oil reserves, except with massively lower storage costs. Nuclear fuel is stable for 100s of years, and so dense that reserves able to last a few years could probably be fit in a single warehouse (or several small ones): [1] http://lnsp.mit.edu/strategic-fuel-reserves http://lnsp.mit.edu/strategic-fuel-reserves

roenxi 4y ago

3 reasons, I suspect - if someone wants an enormous stockpile of uranium fuel they can probably do that. The volumes check out - uranium is very dense and so will not take up much space. I'm not sure if it has a shelf life, but being a rock I expect something can be sorted out. I can't pretend to know how feasible it is in practice, but long term strategic uranium stockpiles should be doable. Long enough to weather any reasonable war. Much, much more doable than trying to store a decade of nat gas.

jhgb 4y ago
I hope you noticed the news about Gazprom possibly intentionally keeping gas reserves in Germany low for months before the Russian invasion in preparation of said invasion. You can't make a strategic stockpile if your potential enemy is your supplier and preventively doesn't allow you make those stockpiles in the first place so that you didn't have this way out.
- trashtester 4y ago
  You could turn that on its head. Had Germany created uranium stockpiles in 2014, enough to last, say, 5 years, they would not be vulnerable to this tactic in the first place.
  - Tretioh 4y ago
    And now we replay an earlier argument on if Germany would have continued with the renewable transition, we wouldn't need any stockpile oof gas or uran from Russia.
  - jhgb 4y ago
    Considering that you can't use raw uranium but need fuel assemblies, you'd need a replacement manufacturer of fuel assemblies, not just a uranium stockpile. But of course Germany was scheduled to shut down its nuclear power plants in 2022-ish anyway so a stockpile would have been largely meaningless.
    - trashtester 4y ago
      Pretty sure you can have your stockpiles pre-assebled, or close enough that the final step is trivial. Anyway, my argument i built on the premise that Germany should never have shut down their nuclear power plants (except when they truely are "spent") and instead built a large number of new ones. If their nuclear capacity was about the same as the French, it would make a lot of sense to have a strategic stockpile of ready-to-use fuel, both in case supply is restricted for political reasons and because it would serve as a hedge against price fluctuations.
      - jhgb 4y ago
        Or, they could just shut down their nuclear plants and the problem with nuclear fuel stockpile goes away as well. And in fact, this is vastly easier to accomplish, and exactly the thing they're already doing.
        4y ago

jhgb 4y ago

> I would say that comparing the purchase of gas to the purchase of uranium is uninformed, if not dishonest, for two reasons: - Fuel costs for nuclear is only 15-20% of the total cost, half of which is the uranium itself [1]. For natural gas, the majority of the cost is the fuel, even during "normal" times What seems "uninformed, if not dishonest" to me is the argument that fuel price matters here. Imagine this: Your country needs seven doohickeys per year to run. What exactly those doohickeys are is unimportant; the only important thing is that you need then. Russia can provide you with four doohickeys per year. The rest of the world can provide you with only five doohickeys per year, and for many years they won't be able to provide any more than that. So you need at least two doohickeys per year from Russia, no matter what, otherwise your country stops running. So Russia can stop your country from running at any moment. Did you notice how price never entered this discussion? > The reserves of Uranium across the globa are still huge, much of which can be found in (relatively) politically stable places such as Australia and Canada. Reserves of uranium matter here much less than enrichment and fuel assembly production capacity. Russia has over 40% of enriched fuel production capacity (as per https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/conversion-enrichment-and-fabrication/uranium-enrichment.aspx https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fu...). Until you build new plants for this, it doesn't matter that you can get natural uranium from Australia or Canada. You won't be able to do anything useful with it (unless your reactor is CANDU).

trashtester 4y ago
For Germany's risk, the the price doesn't make a big differencem, should Russia decide to cut off the supply. As long as the supply is NOT cut off, it matters quite a lot what Germany is paying for it. If the choice (for a set period of energy supply) is to pay either 100 billion euros for natural gas, or 20 billion euroes for uranium, the difference is 80 billion euroes less that Russia could spend to keep their war machine running. That's as much as their peacetime yearly military budget. As for Russia's enrichment capacity, that is something any advanced country could set up, just as several countries have deposites they could start mining. Ones mining and enrichment has started, it could be kept running for as long as needed. For natural gas, on the other hand, there are fewer good sources. By far the cheapest source is from wherever it can be transported in pipes. Other countries can convert their gas to LNG for transport to Germany, but that also requires expansion of LNG facilities in both ends, and perhaps construction of more LNG ships. I don't know which take longer, between LNG from other sources or uranium from other sources. And even when the transfer has been made, natural gas is a more limited resource than uranium, so even if it is purchased from, say, Saudi Arabia, the global supply and demand situation isn't changed much, so Russia will still be able to find buyers for their gas. (For instance, Germany may start to buy up gas that would otherwise be exported to China. If so, China can just buy from Russia.) This doesn't even start to go into having dependencies on fundamentalist islamic monarchies in the middle east. I would think it would be preferrable for Germany to import their energy from Canada and Australia, countries they that share most of Germany's values. Finally, with nuclear there is always the option of setting up strategic fuel reserves. This would be analogous to strategic oil reserves, except with massively lower storage costs. Nuclear fuel is stable for 100s of years, and so dense that reserves able to last a few years could probably be fit in a single warehouse (or several small ones): [1] http://lnsp.mit.edu/strategic-fuel-reserves http://lnsp.mit.edu/strategic-fuel-reserves