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81 comments on How Uranium Depletion Affects the Economics of Nuclear Power

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advancednano on April 18, 2007 - 11:51am

Mr Torres can you kindly address the extraction of uranium from seawater that was demonstrated in Japan.

http://jolisfukyu.tokai-sc.jaea.go.jp/fukyu/mirai-en/4_5.html

The total amount of uranium in seawater is 4.5 billion tons though the concentration is very low, 3.3 ppb (3.3mg-U in one ton of seawater). The annual amount of the uranium carried by the Black Current, flowing near Japan, is estimated at 5.2 million tons. When 0.2% of this uranium is collected, it would be enough for all the nuclear power generation in Japan.

The cost estimate for recovery is about $120 per pound.

http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2006/01/207-uranium-from-seawater-pa...

http://www.wise-uranium.org/upusa.html

Presidential Committee recommends research on uranium recovery from seawater
In a report released on August 2, 1999, the The President's Committee Of Advisors On Science And Technology (PCAST ) recommended that the U.S. consider participating in international research on extracting uranium from seawater:
"One possibility for maintaining fission as a major option without reprocessing is low-cost extraction of uranium from seawater. The uranium concentration of sea water is low (approximately 3 ppb) but the quantity of contained uranium is vast - some 4 billion tonnes (about 700 times more than known terrestrial resources recoverable at a price of up to $130 per kg). If half of this resource could ultimately be recovered, it could support for 6,500 years 3,000 GW of nuclear capacity (75 percent capacity factor) based on next-generation reactors (e.g., high-temperature gas-cooled reactors) operated on once-through fuel cycles. Research on a process being developed in Japan suggests that it might be feasible to recover uranium from seawater at a cost of $120 per lb of U3O8.40 Although this is more than 10 times the current uranium price, it would contribute just 0.5¢ per kWh to the cost of electricity for a next-generation reactor operated on a once-through fuel cycle-equivalent to the fuel cost for an oil-fired power plant burning $3-a-barrel oil." [emphasis added]
40 Nobukawa 1994: H. Nobukawa "Development of a Floating Type System for Uranium Extraction from Sea Water Using Sea Current and Wave Power," in Proceedings of the 4th International Offshore and Polar Engineering Conference (Osaka, Japan: 10-15 April 1994), pp. 294-300.
Source: Powerful Partnerships: The Federal Role In International Cooperation On Energy Innovation. A Report From The President's Committee Of Advisors On Science And Technology Panel On International Cooperation In Energy Research, Development, Demonstration, And Deployment. Washington, DC, June 1999, p. 5-26 - 5-27 (download full text , 1.3M PDF format)

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http://advancednano.blogspot.com

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Phitio on April 18, 2007 - 12:08pm

Using money to make balances is greatly misleading. Economics don't follow underlying phisics very well.

EROEI, that's really matter.

Extracting uranium from seawater is indeed feasible, if you have a large amount of cheap fossil energy to spend upon it. But you have to do with EROEI larger than 1 to say BINGO!

Same reasoning for nuclear fuel in the main post: using volatile dollar as measure is misleading: suppose a huge recession in USA, rampaging inflation and dollar devaluation, and all our calculation can be thrown away.

Again: use EROEI. The phisics rule the game. And more, even a EROEI larger than, say 1.5 could be insufficient, hampered by inefficience in the processing (and economic) chain.

Cheers
Phitio

PS
What do you know about KiteGen? ;-)

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mbkennel on April 18, 2007 - 2:41pm

The Japanese research group's work doesn't appear to
require intensive amounts of input energy, like fossil
fuel, as opposed to e.g. corn-based ethanol.

It is a complex inorganic chemistry adsorption tecnnology, and is reusable. It is uranium fishing (dip in seawater, wait, pull out), not distillation.

I doubt it will be necessary---there is a current enormous boom in uranium exploration and mine development. I suspect the figures in the original post of uranium reserves available at a given price are highly underestimated.

Uranium exploration is not remotely as deep and comprehensive as petroleum exploration.

And then, there are fast neutron fuel cycles which let one use the enormous amount of depleted U-238 currently sitting around in dumps.

Perhaps there are other non-fossil technologies which in the future will be economical for baseload electricity generation---that's wonderful.

I believe that it's important to look not just at the marginal cost (c/kWh) but total capacity availability as well. Nearly all of the geophysically sensitive methods, e.g. wind, solar and geothermal, have strong siting restrictions, in aggregate worse than nuclear plants. This means that there are diseconomies of scale.

I believe that maximum effort in both nuclear and non-nuclear sources of non-fossil electricity is imperative.

If we go entirely by hypothetical economic computations, the answer comes out to be not stored solar or wind, but cheap coal, which will ALWAYS be cheaper than anything else for 3 centuries, without external regulation.

It isn't solar versus nuclear, it's solar & nuclear etc versus coal.

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Miquel Torres on April 18, 2007 - 3:13pm

Hi advancednano,

I think they made an experiment in which some 1kg of uranium was extracted, and then tried to estimate costs for industry scale extraction.

In this estimation, the annual scale of uranium collection was set to 1200 t/y which corresponds to the uranium amount consumed by six nuclear plants.

It certainly looks interesting, but attaining a $130/pound price seems optimistic to me. I would reserve judgement until they demonstrate larger scale extraction over a period of time.

With the uranium spot price lately going ballistic and fast leaving the $100 mark behind, that price level may be reached in the near future. But before committing to such a project, industry scale feasibility will have to be demonstrated, and people will have to believe that prices will consistently stay above $130 (or whatever the final extraction price will be) for a number of years.