The Coming Nuclear Crisis
The world is running out of uranium and nobody seems to have noticed.
The world is about to enter a period of unprecedented investment in nuclear power. The combined threats of climate change, energy security and fears over the high prices and dwindling reserves of oil are forcing governments towards the nuclear option. The perception is that nuclear power is a carbon-free technology, that it breaks our reliance on oil and that it gives governments control over their own energy supply.
That looks dangerously overoptimistic, says Michael Dittmar, from
the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who publishes the
final chapter of an impressive four-part analysis of the global
nuclear industry on the arXiv today.
Perhaps the most worrying problem is the misconception that uranium is plentiful. The world’s nuclear plants today eat through some 65,000 tons of uranium each year. Of this, the mining industry supplies about 40,000 tons. The rest comes from secondary sources such as civilian and military stockpiles, reprocessed fuel and re-enriched uranium. “But without access to the military stocks, the civilian western uranium stocks will be exhausted by 2013, concludes Dittmar.
It’s not clear how the shortfall can be made up since nobody seems
to know where the mining industry can look for more.
That
means countries that rely on uranium imports such as Japan and many
western countries will face uranium .shortages, possibly as soon as
2013. Far from being the secure source of energy that many
governments are basing their future energy needs on, nuclear power
looks decidedly rickety.
But what of new technologies such as
fission breeder reactors which generate fuel and nuclear fusion?
Dittmar is pessimistic about fission breeders. “Their huge
construction costs, their poor safety records and their inefficient
performance give little reason to believe that they will ever become
commercially significant,” he says.
And the future looks even worse for nuclear fusion: “No
matter how far into the future we may look, nuclear fusion as an
energy source is even less probable than large-scale breeder
reactors.”
Dittmar paints a bleak future for the
countries betting on nuclear power. And his analysis doesn’t even
touch on issues such as safety, the proliferation of nuclear
technology and the disposal of nuclear waste.
The message if you live
in one of these countries is to stock up on firewood and candles.
There is one tantalising ray of sunlight in this nuclear
nightmare: the possibility that severe energy shortages will force
governments to release military stockpiles of weapons grade uranium
and plutonium for civilian use. Could it be possible that the coming
nuclear energy crisis could rid the world of most of its nuclear
weapons?
Ref: The Future of Nuclear Energy: Facts and Fiction
arxiv.org/abs/0908.0627: Chapter I: Nuclear Fission Energy Today
arxiv.org/abs/0908.3075: Chapter II: What is known about Secondary Uranium Resources?
arxiv.org/abs/0909.1421: Chapter III: How (un)reliable are the Red Book Uranium Resource Data?
arxiv.org/abs/0911.2628 Chapter IV: Energy from Breeder Reactors and from Fusion?
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