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Fundamentally the problem is that Uranium is so damn energy dense and abundant enough that there's little need to set up these complicated recycling systems. I
by jandrese 11mo ago
Fundamentally the problem is that Uranium is so damn energy dense and abundant enough that there's little need to set up these complicated recycling systems. If we start to run out of Uranium then this technology starts to look appealing, but in the modern day it just doesn't make economic sense.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> Uranium is so damn energy dense and abundant enough that there's little need to set up these complicated recycling systems Uranium is abundant, but not homogenously so [1]. (China has some. But not a lot. And it's bound up expensively. And it's by their population centres.) For the Americas, Europe, Australia, southern Africa and Eastern Mediterranean, burning uranium makes sense. For China, it trades the Strait of Malacca for dependence on Russia and Central Asia. [1] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1800.pdf https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1800.pdf
- cyberax 11mo agoUranium can be stockpiled for years in advance, relatively easily. Enough to tide over a small war while you're setting up domestic production. And China should have enough low-grade ores for that.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> Uranium can be stockpiled for years in advance, relatively easily So can oil. Energy security is an important priority for a global power. Stockpiles are good. Own supply chains are better.
- Ericson2314 11mo agoUranium is far, far energy denser than any fossil fuel, and thus much easier to stockpile.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> Uranium is far, far energy denser than any fossil fuel, and thus much easier to stockpile Sure. That doesn't remove stockpiles' inherent disadvantages: finiteness and vulnerability. Relying on uranium stockpiles would immediately put China at a known limit in a war of attrition that wouldn't constrain their adversaries.
- Qwertious 11mo agoA sufficiently large stockpile of uranium gives China time to simply pivot away from depending on imported Uranium (either by building new mines locally or building out solar or such). An equivalent stockpile of oil simply isn't feasible, if only because oil is usually used directly and not via a source-agnostic electrical grid.
- Ericson2314 11mo agoIs 150 vs 250 years of energy reserves a disadvantage in practice?
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> Is 150 vs 250 years of energy reserves a disadvantage in practice? Reserves != stockpiles.
- Ericson2314 11mo agoI know. I am not saying I got the order of magnitude exactly right, just pointing out beyond a certain threshold the size of the stockpile doesn't matter. I suspect that if a nation state puts its mind to it, stockpiles great enough to last a war are totally possible.
- ViewTrick1002 11mo agoWhich is why renewables are even better. Zero fuel input.
- realusername 11mo agoWell no, no country on earth has 5 years worth of oil stockpile, logistically it's impossible. Nothing can compete with the energy density of uranium.
- dotancohen 11mo agoArguably Qatar does, as do most other nations who produce it locally. That is exactly GP's point. Oil is relatively easily, inexpensively, and quickly mined and refined. Compared to, say, uranium.
- realusername 11mo agoThat's not a stockpile, they have to extract and refine it to use it. Russia understood it the hard way with the refineries attacks. And no, oil is more expensive (especially nowadays) to extract than uranium. There's a reason nobody ever became rich with a uranium mine, all the value is in the plant and the market price barely covers extracting it, some mines even closed because of the price being too low.
- dotancohen 11mo agoWe're not talking about ore, rather fuel. Uranium ore might be inexpensive, I don't know, but converting that ore into fuel is not an easy task. I'm guessing that the reason it's not profitable is that so little of it is actually needed, relative to oil.
- mc32 11mo agoAlso, they can bring it in by rail from Russia. So they can avoid the seaward path.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> they can bring it in by rail from Russia Uranium is better for Chinese energy security than oil. But this still leaves China at Moscow's mercy. That's not too differet, energywise, than the situation is now.
- branko_d 11mo agoChina imports substantially all of its uranium from Kazakhstan and Namibia, and a tiny bit from US. Russia is insignificant. https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/CHN/year/2023/tradeflow/Imports/partner/ALL/product/284410 https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/CHN/yea...
- wiz21c 11mo agoand we still don't know where to store the trash. Thorium seems better (but my knowledge is close to zero here, I must admit:-) )
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> we still don't know where to store the trash We really do. Nuclear waste is less toxic than plenty of trash we just bury. And calling it "waste" is a bit reductive, given it almost certainly becomes valuable to reprocess within another century or two.
- hvb2 11mo agoNo, you really do not. Long term storage is still up in the air in the US. Yucca mountain was the plan but didn't happen Correct me if I'm with m wrong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain
- unethical_ban 11mo agoThat's a political problem, not a technical one. We also know that we could re-cycle nuclear waste with other nuclear plant designs, but the US chooses not to.
- jandrese 11mo agoRadioactive waste is decidedly nasty stuff, but the total volume of it is tiny. There are plenty of chemicals that are just as nasty that were simply buried in the ground in much larger quantities over the years with nary a peep from the population. Nuclear waste is a political problem not a technological one. The crazy part is that people want to insist that the sites need to be absolutely safe even if they aren't maintained for 1,000 years, but by that point the radioactivity would be no more than the base ore anyway so demanding these extended timelines doesn't make anybody safer. They're just red tape.
- hvb2 11mo ago
- jgehring 11mo agoThere's not that much Uranium actually that's economically sensible to extract. The NEA says in their 2024 report on Uranium [1]: > Considering both the low and high nuclear capacity scenarios to 2050 presented in this edition, and assuming their 2050 capacity is maintained for the rest of the century, the quantities of uranium required by the global fleet – based on the current once-through fuel cycle – would likely surpass the currently identified uranium resource base in the highest cost category before the 2110s. Their "high" scenario assumes having a bit more than double of today's capacity by 2050; today we have about 4-5% supply from nuclear energy worldwide. [1] https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_103179/uranium-2024-resources-production-and-demand?details=true https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_103179/uranium-2024-resourc...
- JumpCrisscross 11mo agoOut of curioosity, do they forecast at what point it becomes cheaper to breed than mine?
- lazide 11mo agoThere are tons of mines which were shut down a long time ago, but could be reopened if there was much of a uranium market again. The actual efficiency of breeding thorium is so low, it would take a HUGE scarcity to actual make any sense.
- dotancohen 11mo agoLocal scarcity, not necessarily global scarcity. Especially during times of conflict. China has no uranium, so this may make sense for them. Also, currently all transport channels for uranium are oil dependent, which is becoming a scarce resource in the relevant timeline - decades.
- lazide 11mo agoChina has massive Uranium reserves [https://www.nucnet.org/news/chinese-state-media-announces-discovery-of-substantial-uranium-deposit-1-5-2025 https://www.nucnet.org/news/chinese-state-media-announces-di...].
- hunterpayne 11mo agoSorry, but there are quite a few things you are missing. Nuclear engineering is well, nuclear engineering. The first big difference is that you can use the Thorium in a liquid fueled reactor instead of a solid fueled one. This allows you to burn far more of the fuel. For example, 2-4% of a solid fuel rod would fission, while in a liquid fueled reactor you can get to 90+%. This is good economically for 2 reasons: 1) more energy per unit of fuel and 2) the waste lasts far less time. There are also other advantages of a liquid fueled reactor. The big one is that it is far easier to run because it self regulates. When a liquid heats up it expands (slowing the reaction) and when it cools it contracts (speeding up the reaction). So its safer to run, makes less waste and gets 20+X more power per unit of fuel. There is one final thing to know about this stuff. A nuclear reactor is several billion in infrastructure supporting reactors that cost 10s of millions using a fuel load that costs less than your car. The way we scale and handle nuclear reactors just makes no sense economically. Each NPP is custom and they are built so rarely that everything has to be custom made. When you start building stock reactor designs with consistent supply chains, the cost goes way down. And most of the cost is lawsuits, lobbyists and PR. For developed countries, using or not using nuclear power is a political choice. One that we have been making badly. When you realize that the only real choices for baseload are FF and nuclear, the real political situation makes sense. Once again, the cause is just the excuse, not the real issue.
- wizzwizz4 11mo agoThere's also the choice to match our energy consumption dynamically to intermittent power sources (e.g. solar), reducing the baseload demand. This is entirely orthogonal to decisions about where the baseload generation should come from.
- hunterpayne 11mo agoThat's called load following. That's also a thing a liquid fueled reactor can do that a solid fueled reactor can't.
- dalyons 11mo ago
- cryptonector 11mo agoThe reason TMSR is appealing is that U-233 is hard to use for weapons purposes because it produces a lot of gamma radiation, which makes it hard to work with. There is also the claim that TMSRs are much safer designs than is possible with Uranium. It's possible that if TMSRs were mass produced that we could see them installed in many countries where we don't want to see Uranium or Plutonium reactors for proliferation reasons.
- Moldoteck 11mo agoAt this point few care about this topic. It's not like it's easy to make a bomb with classic pwr
- cryptonector 11mo agoWith a Uranium-based reactor you need a) a source of enriched Uranium (see proliferation risks), b) inspectors to check that you're not post-processing fuel rods to extract Plutonium. With Thorium if the operator country wants to extract the U-233 you think "maybe let them, they won't like it".
- Moldoteck 11mo agoWith classic pwr rods can't be used for weapons because of parasitic isotopes. At best you need to run the reactor in a specific way that would trigger global attention looking at power fluctuations. And still it'll not be easy afterwards. You can buy enriched uranium from others. With th- I'm not sure but don't you need enriched material anyway to kickstart it?
- fooker 11mo ago> abundant enough It's not uniformly distributed. Countries like India, for ezample, has an abundance of Thorium but they have to buy Uranium for use in any large scale application.
- keepamovin 11mo agoHm, is that really the case? Nextgen reactors are not just about lowering the cost of U. Or "saving the environment" from waste. Bonuses, sure. Real strength is increasing efficiency, which means: 1) lower buildout costs, 2) faster time to first iphone charged, 3) smaller, safer designs. They're a way around the giganto-plants of the past, on the way to making nuclear power the ubiquitous reliable utility it should be. I also like to think of U/nuclear as "Civilizational thinking" - it's the only solid power we can trust to stay by us through 10,000s of years, through cataclysims, and planet migrations, and it's ideal (before we find something more abundant, dense, and reliable) to take us from Earth, to a multi-planet, local-cluster exploring species, I think.