An Inconvenient Truth

[Lissa]

<mass snipage>

On a side note, I agree with you that nuclear power should be part of the solution. The most shocking thing about Bush for me lately was that he said something I agreed with: that we should implement "recycle-fuel nuclear", something you're no doubt aware of (esp since Lissa was mentioning it I think), but of which I only learned about 6 months ago. I used to be against nuclear power, but I feel that the combination of the lesser-risk fuel with passive safeguards (smaller, pebble reactors) have made it "safe enough". (Note that my level of knowledge about it is only as deep as that of a Scientific American reader.) ... but I also have questions-- where does all the uranium come from?? Will demand for uranium ever become another energy crisis? Will it make some African nation too powerful in world affairs? I am ignorant about this. Thank you. Do I just leave the microphone right here? Okay.

-V
<more snipage>

Reprocessing of spent Reactor fuel leads to many things. First and foremost, it lowers the cost of fuel as removing the unusable materials from the spent fuel is just chemical seperation which is much cheaper than enrichment by standard methods*. Second, most of the spent fuel is still usable either as being placed back in a reactor or used by other industries, mostly medicinal, meaning only about 1% to 2% of the total spent fuel is truly waste that needs to be stored and this waste, the longest lived isotopes have a half life of about 100 years (in about 700 years, 7 half lives, the waste is harmless as it has decayed to non-radioactive, stable materials). Third, it gives Humanity as a whole a way to get rid of nuclear weapons quickly by mixing the Plutonium pits and rods into fuel going into reactors to be used to create energy and not being used to blow people up. The end of reprocessing of spent fuel was Carter's biggest mistake during his Presidency, but he did it to try and stop proliferation of nuclear weapons (admirable, but ultimately has caused more issues than it has solved). It's time to sit down and put reprocessing back on the table for all countries, but to have a neutral body, like IAEA, deal with it to keep proliferation from getting out of hand.

Reactor design has come a long way from TMI and Chernobyl (I still shake my head at Russian designs that led to Chernobyl) and there were operational prototypes during the early to mid 90s that literally took sabotage to make them meltdown (there were so many passive systems built in, the reactor could run itself safely and efficiently without human intervention).

As to where does Uranium come from...out of the ground. There are a number of countries that have a good amount of Uranium resources (several countries in Africa, the US and Canada, most of western Europe and Russia, and probably a number of other sources that have not been discovered or reachable as yet).

As to it ever becoming another energy crisis, not a chance. We can design reactors that are called Breeders. In essense, they make their own fuel from the initial fuel you put in. What you are doing is converting Uranium 238 to Plutonium 239 (the material used in most Nuclear Weapons). You can then reuse the Plutonium 239 to make power and in fissioning it, create yet more Plutonium 239. The other option we have is Fusion if we ever start putting money into it. In this case, it's nigh impossible to run out of fuel there as 700# of water will produce as much energy as 39 Super Tankers full of the best grade of crude oil.

I hope that answered a lot of your questions.

* - At present, the standard methods of enrichment are gaseous diffusion and centrifuge, both are costly and time consuming. I have heard mention from professors and others that the US has perfected Laser enrichment which allows them to enrich to a very high level in one to two passes (as opposed to the thousands of passes required to get to the same level, it still takes several tens of passes to get Uranium enriched enough to be used in a reactor).