107 comments on Getting a Grasp on Oil Production Volumes
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I would also be useful to put it in terms of oil equivalent of fossil fuel + nuclear power use--which is on the order of one Gb of oil equivalent every five days.
We consume the energy equivalent of: the East Texas Field in less than one month; Prudhoe Bay's oil reserves in less than two months and all of ExxonMobil's proven oil and gas reserves in less than four months.
So, since the (so far) peak production rate of world crude oil in May, 2005, we have consumed--from fossil fuel + nuclear sources--the energy equivalent of all of Saudi Arabia's cumulative oil production to date.
I did some quick calculations, and it looks like 2000 nuclear reactors operating at 85% uptime would replace all the oil used on a heat energy basis. Multiply by about 3 for an electrical energy basis, although I would argue that a heat basis is probably closer to reality because combustion engines are significantly less efficient at producing useful mechanical or electrical energy than reactors.
While 2000 or so reactors is a whole bunch, it is not inconceivable. Of course there is that issue of batteries when considering how to power vehicles...
Now, I am trying to conceive of enough uranium mines to power 2000 reactors....and I am afraid I DO know the meaning of the word "inconceivable" ---while still knowing that one should never get involved in a land war in Asia.
Not a problem with breeder reactors, if you don't mind that there would be plutonium for hundreds of thousands of bombs around at any given time.
"Cough" Except that we have not been able to build a breeder reactor that actually breeds in the real world as far as I know, and the figues I am aware of say that it would, on paper, take 10 years of run time for a breeder to make enough of the right isotopes to fuel its "child" at startup. So, even if we could get it working, at a "doubling time of 10 years due to the "fuel breed rate constraint" we would be looking at over a century to get to 2000 reactors.
We've had a number of successful breeders, from superfenix in france to ORNLs MSBR prototype. We havent needed any commercial breeders because we have more uranium than we could ever exhaust with light water reactors, so if breeders succeed it will have to be more than because of fuel efficiency.
You only need breeders to breed fuel for themselves; We're not facing a critical shortage of fissile fuel for startup. All a breeding regime needs for success is a breeding ratio of 1.0.
To call superfenix a "successful breeder" seems to me to be a big stretch. It ran for 10 years prior to being closed down, cost 6.8 billion USD to produce a total of 8 Billion KWH of electricity and as far as I know did not actually do much breeding (was not operated much in that mode AFAIK.
What sort of a fuel cycle do you have in mind to justify: "All a breeding regime needs for success is a breeding ratio of 1.0"?
Oak ridge labs gives the fuel doubling time for the MSBR design as between 13 and 21 years here
www.ornl.gov/info/reports/1966/3445602516436.pdf
and seems to see it as a constraint (see my post above) but maybe I'm missing something...
Technically successful, economic failure. All breeders will be with so much cheap uranium unless the offer more than fuel efficiency. Any solid fuel breeding regime is going to be a failure.
You breed enough fissile material to keep the reactor running. We have access to 20000 tons of fissile material easily, and thats all you need in a 1.0 breeding regime for 20000 reactors.
Thats probably because the MSBR's ideal fuel is U233, and it would be nice to breed enough U233 to fuel other reactors in the fleet, but its hardly necissary. I find liquid chloride actinide incinerators as ideal breeders for U233 for MSR seed fuel myself; But you cold just as easily seed it with U235, just making sure to pay more attention to initial actinide inventory.
Superphénix in France was not a technical success. It never got near its design output and was plagued with corrosion problems and leaks from the liquid sodium coolant. For most of its last ten years it produced little electricity and was a net consumer of power as the sodium had to be heated to keep it molten even when no electricity was being generated.
The two fast breeder reactors at Dounreay in Scotland also suffered problems from liquid sodium and this was one of the factors in the abandonment of the British fast breeder programme although the economic arguments about fuel costs in the medium term were bigger factors. It is not an inherent feature of fast breeder reactors but the environmental safety management at Dounreay was a disgrace. An estimated 10,000 irradiated fuel particles are in the nearby sea. Intermediate waste was dumped in a 65 metre shaft without records being kept which has contaminated groundwater and is likely to be washed away by the sea in 300 years. Hydrogen generated in the shaft has lead to one explosion.
Although, as I have said they are not inherent in fast breeders, these and other safety failings mean that the political realities are that there is almost no chance of a new fast breeder programme in the foreseeable future.
Neither country has yet come up with an answer of what to do with the thousands of tonnes of radioactively contaminated sodium.
By no chance of a new fast breeder programme, I meant in the UK, perceptions elsewhere may be different.
the political realities are that there is almost no chance of a new fast breeder programme in the foreseeable future
That's so funny. Usually it starts with "we have only 50-60 years" of uranium left. When shown that the exact numbers are closer to hundreds of years and many thousands of years if we include breeders then it always goes to the breeders and their birth defects. And it ends with a statement like the one above, generously dismissing the whole nuclear industry because of several failures. What is for you a foreseeble future? 10 years? 50 years (when the proven, high-grade ores are expected to end? 1,000 years? Do you know how much natural gas we have in US? Just for 8 years. How much copper? For 30 years. Do we need to stop using those - you bet!!!
This is such a junk. I wish at least you came up with something new - it is a same old overused strawman over and over again.
LevinK:
Nick is simply stating a political truth for the British environment.
Insulting him doesn't change the truth of his message.
Fast breeder reactors are NOT coming back here in the UK anytime soon.
If "soon" means 20 to 30 years I agree. I just pointed out that arguing against the long term feasibility of a technology on political grounds, which change from the morning to the afternoon is a ridiculous thing to do. Anyway in this 20-30 years timeframe there is no pressing need to develop breeders - uranium supplies will be more then sufficient.
You arent going to get me to defend liquid metal breeder reactors. They are technically successful at being able to produce plutonium. That superfenix didnt meet all the public works promises is a different matter. We will never pursue liquid metal breeder reactors because they are inherently less safe than thermal reactors or liquid fuel reactors, and incur large costs with processing regimes that must deal with many transuranic actinides. They do illustrate a technology that does work, albeit with many engineering challenges and extra costs. We wont ever pursue them because uranium will allways be too cheap for them to be justified.
The MSBR however did meet all of its design goals, but it wasn't an excuse to produce more plutonium during the cold war either. It is potentially cheaper than LWRs because of issues entirely divorced from fuel costs; No fuel fabrication, much smaller waste streams, inherent safety, negative void and temperature coefficients, better thermodynaic efficiency, scalability in size, continuous uptime.
Well, a liquid chloride reactor might make sense for actinide incineration.
Stick it in concrete casks in a parking lot. Worry about it next century. This isn't a hard problem, despite peoples efforts to make it so.
My point was not that we should build breeders but that we shouldn't. Technically many reactors are (albeit poor) breeders and many countries getting into the reactor game right now are really only interested in the generation of weapons grade plutonium.
Some, like Japan are probably honest in their attempts to build true breeder reactors. I doubt the investments they make will pay off in the long run.
I don't really care about starting a nuclear fuel cycle with breeders because I know that we can satisfy our needs and more with renewables which have absolutely no proliferation risk. 40 million solar panels produce as much electricity as a 1GWe reactor, but no matter how many you compress with explosives, there is never a nuclear explosion. :-)
Every time that argument succeeds, the coal lobby cheers.
Sadly enough, you have a point. I was more hoping the renewables lobby would cheer, but nobody seems to be there. Maybe that is so because everyone is working around the clock to grow last year's $30 billion global industry into this year's $40 billion global industry?
We can avoid some of the proliferation and long-lived waste problems by using thorium breeders.
My original post was not intended to downplay the importance of renewables and conservation, because we not only need to implement alternatives to oil but we also need to offset natural gas depletion and stop discharging CO2 from coal power plants. So we need a lot more of both nuclear and renewables, and we need them much sooner than most people realize.
Fortunately, the information is out there.
With 1 trillion tons of uranium recoverable, and a 1GW reactor consuming 200 tons of unenriched uranium per year, 2000 reactors would burn through the recoverable uranium in only 2.5 million years
http://www.nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/UraniuamDistribution
Now if we switch to thorium and uranium breeders, we'll have 160 trillion tons recoverable and only consume 1 ton per GW/year, so we'll have some breathing room with 16 million years of fuel assuming we had 10 million 1GW reactors. We couldn't burn it faster than that because we'd be doubling the heat rejection of the earth, so you would still have global warming, but instead of from CO2 it would be from simple waste heat.
That link looked more like a CERA report than a real analysis of uranium capacity. Funny how with so much supply uranium has gone from $7/lb to $60/lb in the last three years. There's lots of uranium out there, just as there is a lot of natural gas in the methane hydrates. No silver bullet here, sadly.
Funny how uranium price is negligable for nuclear power still. One might muse how its funny with oil supply dropping the price drops as well. If you have a criticism of the report, feel free to illustrate.
But comparing uranium to natural gas is naive in the extreme. Uranium could be five times todays price with no measurable impact on price per kw/hr from the plant. You're talking about 20 million per year on a 2 billion dollar plant.
The figures may be accurate as far as they go, but the vast majority of Uranium cannot be recovered with a net positive EROEI if it is to be used as reactor fuel. I.e. the stuff that is in the oceans, floating around in the magma in the core, trapped in hard granite where the milling required takes more energy than the U contains etc. etc.
The useful U, i.e. concentrated enough and in soft enough rock to have + ERORI is enough for about 75 years at present global consumption rates according to U.K. Gov't study (sorry, can't find citation perhaps others can help)
Read the link! The measured the energy inputs and the recoverable uranium with an energy payback of 16-32 is 1 trillion tons, and this is with light water reactors using the major energy sink of enrichment.
Every study I've seen points to the same thing.
This is referred to as the Techno-fairy solution. And it has many obstacles.
Building these Nukes requires lots of fossil fuels.
Mining the fissible ore requires FF.
Breeding the material implies that energy is already expensive.
Each plant has huge hurdles in getting built from regulatory agencies and NIMBY.
Waste disposal & decomissioning of plants is yet to be factored into costs.
Cost escalation for materials such as concrete.
Upgrading the 'Grid' for the enormous increase of EVs.
Resistance to allow the technology to pervade.
I'm not dismissing it. France is a good example of oil-poor and mitigating it's effects. But it simply is not a substitute.
And? Noone has ever claimed that uranium can be burned in '90s era gasoline engines. Noone has ever said that the green movement does not exist. Noone has ever said that we should build our houses out of radioactive materials, that the grid builds itself, or that the populace is currently screaming to live in the shade of a cooling tower.
Of course it would be difficult.
But calling it a non-solution is to ignore the fact that it is possible. With current technology. With positive ROI. Without harming the climate, air quality, etc. Accidents that do happen (which are several orders of magnitude less likely with up-to-date designs and some government transparency) tend to have a net benefit under radical environmental ideologies - see Chernobyl as nature preserve.
If it was easier to work on nuclear plants than a cubic kilometer of oil, we would be doing it already.
The linked page says:
Maybe I'm spoiled by the quality and depth of the data flow on TOD, but this is a rather bold assertion for the NuclearInfo site to make without attribution.
Can you provide URLs of some of these studies you mention that support that statement?
Joe,
The first sentence of the block quote is just working the fractions on the numbers given on the linked webpage.
Rossing mine has ore at 300 PPM and for 1 unit of energy expended in mining provides enough Uranium for powerplants to provide 500 units of energy.
Going down to ore at 10 PPM (30 times less concentrated), the 1 unit of energy for mining would provide enough uranium for powerplants to generate about 500 / 30 = 16.6 units of energy.
The attribution is right at the top of the webpage; it is a study by our buddy Kenneth Deffeyes! If you look at Deffeyes' table of uranium ore abundance versus uranium ore concentration (the table that is displayed on the linked page) and compare the tonnages for line 4 (the estimated tons available with ore that we currently process) and the tonnage for line 7 (the estimated tons available with ore at 10 to 20 PPM), you will see that 8 X 10^11 tons divided by 1 X 10^8 tons = 8 X 10^3, or a ratio of 8,000, as stated.
I think we would be lucky if our numbers here on TOD were as good as those from Deffeyes or the Nuclear Info website.
What do you mean without attribution? Its all in the link...
specifically, we currently mine from ore concentrations as low as 300ppm. It cite it specifically:
And there is more info related to the rossing mine study:
http://www.nuclearinfo.net/Nuclearpower/WebHomeEnergyLifecycleOfNuclear_...
with the data measured from the vattenfall study, and similar data from the olympic dam mine.
Hello TOD
Does anybody have an opinion on the papers and conclusions below ?
If we disregard the CO2 discussion and concentrate on energy it will come down to a discuccion of the nuclear fuel ore quality and the EROEI of nuclear fuels in a nuclear plant lifecycle perspective?
You can extract Nuclear from the vast amounts in seawater it is EROEI negative?
Figure 10 and 11 in this study http://www.stormsmith.nl/report20050803/Chap_2.pdf
indicate that ore grades below ~0.02% W/W -are EROEI - negative.
Figure 1 in this paper http://www.stormsmith.nl/report20050803/Introduction.pdf
gives an overview of the general lifetime energy costs of nuclear.
As far as I can see it is a repetition of the oil/gas EROEI discussion. A large part of the Uranium will never be mined- for good EROEI reasons.
Dopes anybody ( except the authors of the papers) have an indication of what the EROEI positive extractable reserves are?
regards/And1
The storm/smith paper allways comes up eventually. Its an illustration of how to lie with statistics. They lie.
FOr instance, they cherry pick the most energy intensive methods of mining, use theoretical samples, and insist on using data and technology from over 40 years ago... such as gasseous diffusion enrichment which is 50 times more energy intensive than centrifuge enrichment, and entirely unnecissary in CANDU reactors is the most telling example. And when confronted with this, they offer the lamest of excuses.
If you check the above link from the very post you responded to, the address the storm/smith paper directly.
I hate having to repost large chunks of the link in full but this comes up over and over again:
Storm/Smith are partisans with an agenda that lie with misrepresentations, half-truths, and gross errors. According to their calculations nuclear plants cant even run now, which is clearly false since they clearly do produce net energy.
The tragedy is that these jokers have gotten so much press.
Many of the people you argue with are also partisans, which makes the point of arguing... well doubtful at best.
dear dezakin.
Point taken :-)
IMHO nuclear will be an unavoidable and vital part of our energy future together with renewables when nuclear is there and fossil not. So we have to find a balanced transition and a modus vivendi.
It would, therefore, be nice to see a sober summary of the available EROEI positive nuclear fuel reserves, split into the respective fuels, reactor types- and a discussion of which mix of reactors etc. will give the maximal output with the least problems. So we can compare with fossil, renewables, costs etc and start planning.
kind regards/And1
Forget batteries ,
the high point of electric cars tech was in 1900
when the electic car " jamais contente" piloted by a mr dejazy broke the 100km speed barrier !
ever since in spite of a good industrial body of technologies with plenty of electrical vehicles usage from forklift , giant mining trucks to golf buggy ' the electrical path has been discounted ,
The main reason is that electricity is NOT an energy source ,
it's an energy transfer , like steam .
By the way nuclear power plant are steam turbines thermal plant, the only difference is the primary source of heat
Batteries are actually getting much better. The nickel hydride ones in my Prius work quite well. The latest technology in lithium batteries is tantilizingly close to being suitable for powering vehicles all on their own. The electricity for charging batteries would come from the grid, which would be supplied by nuclear, solar, sequestered coal, etc.
My reason for differentiating electric energy output from heat energy output is that the article appeared to be counting nuclear reactors only at their electric output. This would not be a fair comparison to oil, unless you are only looking at direct end-user heating with oil.
I posted this on the Verticle and Horizontal well drilling article by Heading Out, but would like to repost in case anyone missed it, according to Saudi Aramco Ghawar is 48% depleted as of 2004 -- see slide 11 of this presentation: http://www.csis.org/media/csis/events/040224_baqiandsaleri.pdf
Complaints before was that we had no data on Ghawar for more than 2 decades, but here it is, straight from Aramco itself.