4 ms·

If you look up the average quality of uranium ores globally, there's a bit of a problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_ore https://en.wikipedia.org/wik

If you look up the average quality of uranium ores globally, there's a bit of a problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_ore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_ore Each installed gigawatt of nuclear reactor power, regardless of whether this is twenty 50MW reactors or a single 1000MW reactor, requires on the order of 200 tons of uranium fuel rods per year to operate. By comparison, a 1GW bituminous coal plant burns on the order of 2,750,000 tons of coal per year to achieve the same kind of baseload power output. However, coal requires no further processing once mined. To get those 200 tons of fuel rods, it can take a varying amount of uranium ore, and the majority of that ore is not high-grade, it's down around 0.1% U3O8 more often than not (there are a few high-grade deposits). So you might have to mine 200,000 tons of ore, extract the uranium in the form of yellowcake, convert that to uranium hexaflouride gas for enrichment from ~0.7% to (apparently) 4.95% for the NuScale design, and then convert the gas to solid uranium oxide and package it in a fuel rod. This is a pretty intensive industrial process just to make the required fuel and is neither cheap nor all that clean. Enrichment level & NuScale plant design parameters: https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1034/ML103470495.pdf https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML1034/ML103470495.pdf If you are in a location with plenty of sunlight and wind, I don't see how this could possibly by less expensive than some kind of integrated wind turbine/solar PV/solar thermal linked-to-storage grid of the same capacity.

paul_funyun 4y ago
"is neither cheap nor all that clean." In terms of greenhouse gas emmissions, it's very clean. That's the whole point of bothering with green energy. "If you are in a location with plenty of sunlight and wind, I don't see how this could possibly by less expensive than some kind of integrated wind turbine/solar PV/solar thermal linked-to-storage grid of the same capacity." Unsurprising - things that exist are generally more expensive than things that don't. I'm not sure how you can even assess the cost of storing the power from those sources to compare them. Until a realistic method of storing that energy is created (if it ever is), nuclear as well as waste-incineration and hydroelectric are superior by virtue of being viable.
aesh2Xa1 4y ago
You bring up two advantages of nuclear’s competitors: 1. coal requires no processing after mining 2. solar and wind are less expensive For #1, it doesn’t seem like that statement is true: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/coal-processing https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci... For #2, I’m interested in an energy cost comparison, including the cost of ongoing maintenance, too. Solar and wind seem like an obvious investment in our future. I don’t know about the quality of “nuclearasia.com,” but I found an interesting anecdote that more directly answered the question “how much raw ore converts to a how much fuel rod?” The answer is that * 2.5 tons of uranium ore = 1kg fuel * 1kg uranium fuel = same energy output as 100 tons of coal * 2.5 tons of uranium ore = same energy output as 100 tons of coal > Even if you take a relatively poor ore (with a uranium content of 0.2%), it turns out that to produce 1 kg of enriched uranium fuel you need approximately 2.5 tonnes of uranium ore. If we recall that one kilogram of enriched uranium contains the energy “equivalent" of 100 tonnes of coal, it turns out that to produce the same amount of energy you would need 40 times less ore compared to the same amount of coal. Another advantage is that coal has to be delivered to the station in “bulk” but there is no need to ship uranium ore far from the place of extraction. Uranium and uranium fuel take much less space than coal, and this means a dramatic reduction in transportation costs. https://www.nuclearasia.com/knowledge-centre/much-uranium-ore-required-produce-one-kilogram-nuclear-fuel/?format=pdf https://www.nuclearasia.com/knowledge-centre/much-uranium-or... What I’d like to know is the overall cost (mining, processing, transportation, handling/disposal, and maintenance) in terms of $/energy. I would think that individual energy plants could provide this information.
- _n_b_ 4y ago
  > What I’d like to know is the overall cost We can estimate this for nuclear pretty easily. From the UxC cost calculator[1], we can see the various components that go into getting mined ore, converting it, and enriching it. At today's prices, let's call it $2000/kgU. We need to add fabrication, transportation, and carrying costs to that. Let's call fabrication $250/kgU[2] and throw on another $50 for transport and misc costs, giving us $2500/kgU for finished fuel. Assuming we burn our fuel to a an average discharge burn of 50 GWd/MTU and the plant is operating at about 34% electrical efficiency, that works out to 0.6 cents/kWh for nuclear fuel. On to disposal, in the US utilities were previously charged 0.1 cents/kWh for disposal; utilities haven't been charged this fee since 2014 due to a disposal route not being available[3], although DOE retains responsibility for disposing of civilian nuclear waste. On top of that you have the plant's O&M costs, which are probably another 0.8-1.0 cents or so/kWh. [1] https://www.uxc.com/p/tools/FuelCalculator.aspx https://www.uxc.com/p/tools/FuelCalculator.aspx [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1738573315000224 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S173857331... [3] https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-603.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-603.pdf

paul_funyun 4y ago

"is neither cheap nor all that clean." In terms of greenhouse gas emmissions, it's very clean. That's the whole point of bothering with green energy. "If you are in a location with plenty of sunlight and wind, I don't see how this could possibly by less expensive than some kind of integrated wind turbine/solar PV/solar thermal linked-to-storage grid of the same capacity." Unsurprising - things that exist are generally more expensive than things that don't. I'm not sure how you can even assess the cost of storing the power from those sources to compare them. Until a realistic method of storing that energy is created (if it ever is), nuclear as well as waste-incineration and hydroelectric are superior by virtue of being viable.

aesh2Xa1 4y ago

You bring up two advantages of nuclear’s competitors: 1. coal requires no processing after mining 2. solar and wind are less expensive For #1, it doesn’t seem like that statement is true: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/coal-processing https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci... For #2, I’m interested in an energy cost comparison, including the cost of ongoing maintenance, too. Solar and wind seem like an obvious investment in our future. I don’t know about the quality of “nuclearasia.com,” but I found an interesting anecdote that more directly answered the question “how much raw ore converts to a how much fuel rod?” The answer is that * 2.5 tons of uranium ore = 1kg fuel * 1kg uranium fuel = same energy output as 100 tons of coal * 2.5 tons of uranium ore = same energy output as 100 tons of coal > Even if you take a relatively poor ore (with a uranium content of 0.2%), it turns out that to produce 1 kg of enriched uranium fuel you need approximately 2.5 tonnes of uranium ore. If we recall that one kilogram of enriched uranium contains the energy “equivalent" of 100 tonnes of coal, it turns out that to produce the same amount of energy you would need 40 times less ore compared to the same amount of coal. Another advantage is that coal has to be delivered to the station in “bulk” but there is no need to ship uranium ore far from the place of extraction. Uranium and uranium fuel take much less space than coal, and this means a dramatic reduction in transportation costs. https://www.nuclearasia.com/knowledge-centre/much-uranium-ore-required-produce-one-kilogram-nuclear-fuel/?format=pdf https://www.nuclearasia.com/knowledge-centre/much-uranium-or... What I’d like to know is the overall cost (mining, processing, transportation, handling/disposal, and maintenance) in terms of $/energy. I would think that individual energy plants could provide this information.

_n_b_ 4y ago
> What I’d like to know is the overall cost We can estimate this for nuclear pretty easily. From the UxC cost calculator[1], we can see the various components that go into getting mined ore, converting it, and enriching it. At today's prices, let's call it $2000/kgU. We need to add fabrication, transportation, and carrying costs to that. Let's call fabrication $250/kgU[2] and throw on another $50 for transport and misc costs, giving us $2500/kgU for finished fuel. Assuming we burn our fuel to a an average discharge burn of 50 GWd/MTU and the plant is operating at about 34% electrical efficiency, that works out to 0.6 cents/kWh for nuclear fuel. On to disposal, in the US utilities were previously charged 0.1 cents/kWh for disposal; utilities haven't been charged this fee since 2014 due to a disposal route not being available[3], although DOE retains responsibility for disposing of civilian nuclear waste. On top of that you have the plant's O&M costs, which are probably another 0.8-1.0 cents or so/kWh. [1] https://www.uxc.com/p/tools/FuelCalculator.aspx https://www.uxc.com/p/tools/FuelCalculator.aspx [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1738573315000224 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S173857331... [3] https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-603.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-603.pdf