In article , Java Jive scribeth thus
Nope .. it's all to point out how renewables might be sufficient for a very small area of the country with the right sources of power to hand BUT it also shows just how all of the country cannot be serviced by the same sources...
I think any person apart from those who won't see.. can see and understand that very well!...
:)
a decade since the IAEA prepared its forecast of uranium supply to
2035." I've had trouble finding numbers, not graphs, for the forecasts - but they seem to talk about numbers not widely dissimilar to the the other two sources for current day. 69,400 for 2012 as the middle number, similar for the low (from the graph on p13) and perhaps 80,000 for the high. Incidentally it mentions U from seawater at $300/kg. That's only about 3x current market.They all seem much the same to me. About 70k tonnes. Or tons, the difference is trivial.
When we are talking about 20 years or 200 this is not the factor.
I see nothing major.
Looks like the WNA don't agree with themselves even.
Here's where I differ. Those figures look to me like the amount needed to _construct_ reactors in that year. If the figure is 5 times higher - perhaps they can run for 5 years on the fuel. 5 years in fact seems low to me, I suspect some of that is refuelling.
Remind me of the URL for Mackay.
... which means that whether we are counting tons of U3 O8, or tonnes of U metal is immaterial when the differences are a factor of 10.
:) see above
Not instability. Rises. And if it's true that there's 4Gt in seawater available at 300$/Kg that's the limit to the rises. It'll hurt, but it won't kill us.
It won't kill us the way global warming might.
It won't kill us the way going to a peasant economy would (90% death rate. At least.).
We might have to learn not to fly to Florida for holidays. I might have to telecommute to work, instead of driving.
I bet we burn it anyway.
Let's treat coal ash the way they do nuclear waste of the same radioactivity. The processing plant can then charge the coal fuelled station for waste disposal :) and the output can feed the nuclear building program.
The trouble is that all this requires thinking 20 and more years ahead, and the big hole in our political system is that no politician can think past the next election.
Andy
Yes.
Although proved in a Japanese experiment, I suspect it's not viable on an industrial scale, see below ...
That agrees with the figure above (but not the one of 220 tU/GWyr in a following quoted para which I calculated in my previous post from their own figures for 2009) ...
44 million kWh/tU = 44 GWh/tU = 44/(24 x 365) GWyr/tU = .005 GWyr/tU... inverting which gives ...
199 tU/GWyr
Why do you think the figures are five times too high? Ten times too high I could understand, it would be the difference between tU and tLEU, but five?
But it might kill us by either of these methods through diverting our attention from technology that makes more sense in our situation. Read Mackay ch24, and then try and scale up the seawater experiment to the percentage of UK power generation that you think desirable. The length of coastline that you need depends on how deep the cages are. Because they would have to be hung in the water, and therefore presumably must be suspended from buoys - so they can't be too heavy
- and also for reasons of anchorage, maintenance, and tapping off the product you'd want them easily accessible - which means near the coast - there is likely to be a practical depth limit, which I assumed to be 10m. To provide all the UK's electrical power needs, that would require more than the entire coast of mainland Britain. See my calculations to this effect in previous incarnations of this debate.
But if we continue to do so, we'll have to capture the carbon, SO WHY NOT CONCENTRATE ON THAT NOW? Then we might not need to depend on nuclear at all, and certainly not on the scale envisaged in The Committee on Climate Change's Renewable Energy Review.
That would seem perfectly reasonable.
Indeed!
Too long.
"No politician can think."
There. That's better.
When Putin or one of his KGB mates throws a wobbler about late payment of the UK gas bill and the lights go out, questions will be asked about the shortsighted decision to screw the UK coal industry without developing a viable alternative. Pissing ones own gas reserves away generating electricity and exporting gas at a rock bottom price to Europe which led to exposing the UK to world gas prices is the result of corporate greed enabled by someone with no loyalty to their country, a senile evil traitor.
The confusion arises from the fact that what you mine is not reactor fuel, and even refined uranium needs enriching and even enriched uranium is not all burnt and even the U235 in uranium fuel rods is not all burnt.
The actual amount of U235 'burnt' by a reactor in a year is a few hundred kilograms. Maybe. Maybe less because the reactor breeds plutonium from the U238. And that and the decay products contribute up to 30% of the power.
So a one GWe reactor will burn say about one tonne of uranium 235 which will come in the form of about 50-100 tonnes of U238/U235 'enriched fuel' and require mining of a fair bit more yellowcake etc etc. And will still have most of the U235 left in it after its finished its burn cycle.
The confusion is increased by selective facts being cherry picked and bent out of shape by the renewables lobby, who fear nuclear not because it is a threat to the nation or the planet, but because it is a threat to their profits.
Sorry to hijack, but do you have any data on those becalmed days in febs gone by?
Its all there
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