11 ms·

Interesting. How much Uranium do we have on Earth?

• archgoon 2y ago
  Depends on what you mean. If you mean "how much is commercially viable" versus "how many kilograms of the stuff are there" you get very, very different answers. For just "how much stuff is there", we can look at the concentration in the earths crust, and we get about 10^17 kilograms of the stuff (10^15 if you want U-235). If you just say "Sure, but we can't get most of that, how much can reasonably get extracted at current prices and technology" then you go down to about 10^9 kilograms.
  • the8472 2y ago
    Most of Earth's uranium is already engaged in commercially useful activity such as sustaining the geomagnetic field and the geological carbon cycle.
  • numpad0 2y ago
    The materials are also difficult to obtain without getting a rooftop guided Champagne delivery. Purchasing prepackaged materials is hard enough, making one is harder still.
• credit_guy 2y ago
  For all practical purposes the quantity is infinite. The so-called "proven" reserves currently stand at 6 million tons [1]. But the quantity of uranium in seawater is staggering, of the order of 5 billion tons. It is estimated that, if needed, one could extract uranium from seawater at about 10 times the current cost of getting it from mines. That would add less than 1 cent to the price of 1 kWh of electricity generated by nuclear power plants. For comparison the average retail price of 1 kWh in the US is about 17 cents. Of course, nobody is seriously thinking of getting uranium from seawater because there are much cheaper ways to get it from mines. But any talk of uranium lasting only a few decades, or centuries is non-sense. [1] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...