2022 World Uranium extraction by country

Preface.  The World Nuclear Association estimates 90 years are left.  Today  67,500 tonnes of uranium are consumed a year world-wide and production in 2020 was 47,731 tonnes (WNA 2021). Sounds a bit peakish, thank goodness for stockpiles and the infinite amounts of money that can be printed to force uranium out of the ground.

In the news:

2022-9-5 Uranium Risks Becoming the Next Critical Minerals Crisis   Washington Post. “…uranium’s supply chain is as susceptible to geopolitical manipulation as those for natural gas, cobalt, and rare earths. If developed countries want to count on atomic energy as a reliable source of zero-carbon power in the 2030s and 2040s, they’re going to need to start locking down the mineral resources now. Nearly 75% of nuclear generation is in Europe, North America, and developed parts of Asia but provide just 19% of the 75,000 metric tons of uranium oxide needed to fuel these reactors every year.”

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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The latest NEA/IAEA Uranium resources, production, and demand report (2020) assures readers there’s enough uranium to meet world demand through 2040 if money is invested in new mining operations. But ramping up mining is a challenge with geopolitical, technical, legal, regulatory and NIMBY issues. Prices are already low due to the Fukushima Daiichi disaster and reduced demand.  In a recession, new investments might drop even further. Since 2017 uranium resources have only increased by 1%. Even if mining were ramped up, 87% of the 2019 resource base, recoverable at a cost of less than $ 80 USD/kgU, would be used up.  Though at under $260 USD/kgU there are sufficient supplies for 135 years at current demand if mining production increases despite higher prices.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a problem for the United States, the world’s largest uranium consumer, because 16% of uranium is imported from Russia and 30% from Russian allies Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Russia produces all of the enriched type of uranium needed by the next generation of advanced reactors. The U.S. has no facilities to do this because investors are waiting to see if new generation reactors actually happen. Nor can the U.S. supply itself indefinitely with only 1% of world uranium resources, much of it on Native American land, where uranium mines are likely to be rejected. For example, a uranium superfund site in New Mexico hasn’t been cleaned up despite decades of effort, and is still leaching radioactive waste into the groundwater (Montague 2022). The Navajo nation has also suffered tremendously from nuclear waste and groundwater contamination as well (NEA/IAEA 2020).

Much of the U.S. uranium has come from stockpiles of recovered uranium from Russian nuclear weapons. Today there are about three years of uranium stockpiled in the U.S. (Statista 2020, NEA/IAEA 2020).

Meanwhile dozens of nuclear power plants have shut down, and dozens more also will as they near the end of their intended life spans (Cooper 2013).

Any new mines or nuclear power plants also face huge opposition, because nothing is being done to store nuclear wastes (except for Finland in 2024), exposing future generations to hundreds of thousands of years of toxic radioactive pollution and ongoing threats of nuclear proliferation and dirty bombs.

Nuclear boosters might try to ease your worries with the idea of unconventional uranium. But much of this is found in phosphate rocks. Walan et al. (2014) cite 19 studies estimating the peak year or full depletion of phosphate rock in 30 to 400 years. Since phosphate is absolutely essential for agriculture, this resource isn’t likely to ever be exploited for uranium, though could be as a by-product if economically feasible (NEA/IAEA 2020). Moroccans have up to 75% of remaining phosphorus reserves (USGS 2020).

Nuclear power can’t be ramped up and down fast enough to balance wind, solar, and other intermittent, unreliable power sources.  Only natural gas can do that and functions as the storage for electricity as well. Natural gas is finite, once it’s gone, the electric grid will go down.

The only commercial way to store electricity today is pumped hydro storage (PHS), which can store 2% of America’s electricity generation currently. But we’ve run out of places to put new dams. Only two have been built since 1995. There are only 43 PHS dams now– we’d need 7800 more to store one day of U.S. electricity.

The only other commercially proven way to store electricity is compressed air energy storage (CAES). But we only have one small 110 MW plant in Alabama, because they need to be sited above rare geological salt domes 1650-4250 feet underground that only exist in 3 gulf states and a small part of Utah, and they use quite a bit of fossil fuels to compress the air.

What about batteries? The total storage capability of batteries in 2019 was only 0.001236 Terawatt hours (TwH). Every day the United States generates 11.43 TwH (4171 Twh/year in 2018, so to store one day of electricity generation would require 9250 times more batteries than existed in 2018. On top of that, because wind and solar are so extremely seasonal, and there’s no national grid or ever likely to be one, on average a region would need to store at least 42 days of electricity to make it through long periods when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. That’s 600,000 times more batteries than installed in 2018 (Friedemann 2016).

Using data from the Department of Energy energy storage handbook, I calculated that the cost of NaS batteries capable of storing 24 hours of electricity generation in the United States came to $40.77 trillion dollars, covered 923 square miles, and weighed in at a husky 450 million tons. Li-ion batteries would cost $11.9 trillion dollars, take up 345 square miles, and weigh 74 million tons. Lead– acid (advanced) would cost $8.3 trillion dollars, take up 217.5 square miles, and weigh 15.8 million tons. These calculations exclude the round- trip losses (Friedemann 2016). After 15 years, rinse and repeat, the battery lifespan ranges from 5 to 15 years.

So why would you want to build new nuclear plants? On top of that, not only is it impossible for nuclear reactors to keep the electric grid up, fossils are essential for transportation, manufacturing, 500,000 products made out of petroleum, fertilizer and can’t be replaced with electricity (Friedemann 2021).

Best to use declining energy and investment in burying the wastes that exist for the sake of life on the planet. There’s no reason to continue to build more nuclear reactors.

Adding to all these problems are supply chain issues, and above all, likely world peak oil production in 2018 (Friedemann 2021), leading to higher energy costs and oil crises and shortages.  That means that the cost of energy will reduce resource estimates as they become economically unfeasible.

Peak uranium may have already occurred or will within 10 to 200 years, especially if energy becomes scarce or very expensive after oil decline (Dittmar 2013, EWG 2013, Bardi 2014), and fossil fuels reallocated to agriculture and other essential services (DOE 1979,).   Uranium takes a tremendous amount of energy to mine and refine, so at some point the energy to mine it is more than the mined uranium will every supply. The option of extraction from seawater is not going to happen, that takes the most energy of all (Bardi 2014).

Breeder reactors you may ask in desperation?  After 60 years and tens of billions of dollars, these still aren’t commercial. And more like nuclear weapons than nuclear reactors, with seconds to stop an explosion if something goes wrong.

Nuclear power plants and mining depend on fossils for their entire life cycle for the construction, mining, milling, transporting, refining, enrichment, waste reprocessing/disposal, fabrication, operation and decommissioning processes of nuclear power fuels (Pearce 2008).  We learned from Fukushima that the biggest danger is a spent nuclear pool fire.  If that happened at the Peach bottom nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, as many as 8 million people would have to evacuate at a cost of over $2 trillion dollars, aquifers would be contaminated, and thousands of square miles of land would become uninhabitable (von Hippel and Schoepnner 2016; Lyman et al. 2017).

Clearly it’s time to stop uranium mining, start burying nuclear waste, and decommissioning nuclear power plants for the sake of the grandchildren. Let’s spend the energy instead on converting industrial to organic farms, improving infrastructure and so on to help future generations live better lives in a postcarbon world.

References

Bardi U (2014) Extracted: how the quest for mineral wealth is plundering the planet. Chelsea Green

Cooper M (2013) Renaissance in reverse: Competition pushes aging U.S. nuclear reactors to the brink of economic abandonment. Institute for Energy and the environment. Vermont school of law. http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2018/ph241/shi1/docs/cooper.pdf

Dittmar M (2013) The end of cheap uranium. Sci Total Environ 461–462:792–798

DOE (1979) Standby gasoline rationing plan. U.S.  Department of Energy. https://doi. org/10.2172/6145884.

EWG (2013) Fossil and nuclear fuels – the Supply Outlook. Energy Watch Group

Lyman E, Schoeppner M, von Hippel F (2017) Nuclear safety regulation in the post-Fukushima era. Science 356:808–809

Montague Z (2022) Russia’s aggression prompts calls to rethink U.S. Uranium imports. New York Times.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/us/politics/russia-uranium-nuclear-power.html

NEA/IAEA (2020) Uranium resources, production, and demand report. Nuclear Energy Agency and International Atomic Energy Agency.

Pearce JM (2008) Thermodynamic Limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology. International Journal of Nuclear Governance, Economy and Ecology 2(1): 113.

Statista (2020) Leading countries based on uranium consumption worldwide in 2020. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264796/uranium-consumption-leading-countries/

USGS (2020) Phosphate rock. World Mine Production and Reserves. U.S.  Geological Survey. https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2020/mcs2020-phosphate.pdf

von Hippel FN, Schoepnner M (2016) Reducing the danger from fires in spent fuel pools. Science & Global security 24:141–173

WNA (2021) Supply of Uranium. World Nuclear Association. Supply: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium.aspx Production: https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/mining-of-uranium/world-uranium-mining-production.aspx