![]() | Saturday open thread | The Oil Drum | We Were Warned: The Spelling of the Word Has an Extra "u" That Many People Forget.. | ![]() |
106 comments on A concern about Canadian gas and the oil sands
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
106 comments on A concern about Canadian gas and the oil sands
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Support The Oil Drum
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
TOD:Europe
- Peak Gold, Easier to Model than Peak Oil? - Part I
- Carbon Capture and Storage
- Oilwatch Monthly November 2009
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- International Energy Agency calls 'Peak' on OECD Oil Demand
- Australian Senate: Peak Oil motion defeated 31:6
- The Bullroarer - Friday 20th November 2009
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- Early Warning
- The Energy Blog
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
Peak Oil Primers
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
“This order [i.e. capitalism] is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with the economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.”
—Max Weber, 1905
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Prof. Goose
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Heading Out, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Sam Foucher, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Campfire: Glenn, Jason Bradford
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.










GAIA Host Collective
Everything is limited. The wind & sun energy is limited to - isn't the sun sending limited energy to the Earth? Even the whole Universe contains a limited amount of energy.
The question is can a given resource be sufficient for such an amount of time to justify the investments we make to develop it. With hundreds of years of conventional uranium reserves and many thousands of years if we start using breeders I can assure you that the answer for nuclear is YES.
Link please?
The European Nuclear Society states that with the current reserves "all 439 world-wide operated nuclear power plants can be supplied for several decades".
But if you are talking about ramping up the use of nuclear power (as half the world is saying), then that "several decades" will be shortened quite drastically.
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium
To say that "we have several decades of uranium left" is like saying "we have only 100 days of food left in the world" (which can make you want to shoot yourself if you don't give it a second thought).
We are nowhere near to reaching the geological limits because what is being included in the official reserves now is just the tip of the tip of the iceberg. This link for example gives more than 100 years of U under 130$:
http://www.inb.gov.br/english/reservasMundiais.asp
But this is again relative, because should U go to 100$ and above (from the current ~ $35), the breeders reactors will become competitive, meaning that you have to multiply these figures by a factor of 100. In addition many new discoveries will be found all around the world if we simply start looking for them. Even now enormous amounts of nuclear fuel are simply stored away as waste, because the processed nuclear fuel contains plutonium and unburnt uranium that can be used. But the prices are so low that it is not worthed the investment and overcoming the NIMBYSsm.
Regarding economics - even at $130, the price of fuel will be below 30% of the production costs, assuming (wrongfully of course) that the sales prices in 100 years will remain at current levels.
http://www.americanenergyindependence.com/uranium.html
Very informative, reminding you once again to question your assumptions before making projections for the future (especially far in the future).