Japan starts commercial operations at 55th nuclear plant.

The new reactor is capable of producing about 0.043 exajoules of electrical energy each year. The actual output of thermal energy (primary energy) is about 3 times higher, or 0.128 exajoules. The world primary energy demand is 440 exajoules. Thus the reactor by itself can produce about 0.03% of the world energy supply.

For comparison purposes, Plunkett's reports that the single reactor's output is equivalent to about 20% of the entire electrical energy production of the United States from biomass in 2004, which is about 0.22 exajoules (including burned municipal waste), and 71 times larger than the entire output of the United States attributable to solar electricity, which is 0.0018 exajoules. All of the electrical energy produced from wind power in 2004 in the United States combined slightly exceeded the capacity of this one Japanese reactor.

http://www.plunkettresearch.com/Industries/RenewableAlternativeEnergy/RenewableAlternativeEnergyStatistics/tabid/192/Default.aspx

Japan has one additional reactor under construction, and 12 others approved for construction. It already has the 3rd largest fleet of nuclear reactors, behind the United States and France. When these reactors are completed, Japan will have more reactors than France, no doubt.

More and larger nuclear plants. We do not need to throw caution to the wind but some of the red tape and bureaucracy is over kill making it absolutely prohibitive to build any plants.

We have to get over this addiction to fossil fuels. Let the rest of the world fight over what oil is left and we need to get independent using our own resources.

European, North American, Asian and South Asian nuclear power countries that also import significant quantities of uranium.

The World Nuclear Association, European Commission and the UK Sustainable Development Commission have concluded there will be a significant shortfall in global uranium supply relative to demand in the next decade.

When the shortfall occurs, Japan is going to have to compete with the rest of the nuclear world for dwindling uranium supplies.

It's going to be one nasty clusterfuck....

:)

(or not)

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9069-1735134,00.html

Read SDC research paper #8...

http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/

...and weep...

:evilgrin:

...you just said 100 years elsewhere.

:D

There will be a significant shortfall in uranium supply relative to demand in the next decade - that is not mean depletion.

At the current rate consumption, however, global uranium supplies will be depleted in ~100 years.

Does that clarify this for you????

Like the recent shortfall in PV-grade silicon, you mean?

:P

But, like you said, google is my friend...

...This is, however, an oversimplification of the situation. It is now clear that uranium is not scarce and it is known that it averages almost two parts per million of the Earth's crust. There are substantial resources that are not yet fully proven. These so-called speculative resources are likely to be of the order of 10 million tonnes, about three times the known reserves. While prices remain low, there is no incentive for exploration activities to identify new deposits. Experience with other commodities has shown that increased demand has led to increased prices, and a subsequent increase in exploration and discovery.

Newly mined uranium is not the only source of nuclear fuel. Reprocessing of spent fuel to extract plutonium and uranium for use in new reactor fuel is already being undertaken in a number of countries. This displaces about 2000 tonnes of mine production each year, but the potential for recycling is considerably greater than this.

The utilisation of highly enriched uranium (HEU) from military sources, by diluting it to the low level of enrichment required for civil nuclear reactor fuel, is replacing about over 10,000 tonnes of newly mined uranium each year. However, once again, the potential is somewhat higher. If all of the world's military nuclear material were to be made available for electricity generation, even more natural uranium could be replaced.
...
Currently, there is little financial advantage to be obtained from extensive use of recycling, and the breeder reactor technology is not clearly economic. With about fifty years of proven reserves there is no urgency to utilise these approaches to extending uranium resources.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/factsheets/uranium.htm

All of which ignores thorium, but we'll start you off gently... :)

with average concentrations of 2 ppm.

:rofl:

...and which country uses reprocessed uranium?????

clue: none - it's contaminated with 232U and 236U and worthless.

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

...as for weapons grade uranium - it puts off depletion for a only a couple of decades...

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,9069-1735134,00.html

<snip>

In 2001 the European Commission said that at the current level of uranium consumption, known uranium resources would last 42 years. With military and secondary sources, this life span could be stretched to 72 years. Yet this rate of usage assumes that nuclear power continues to provide only a fraction of the world’s energy supply. If capacity were increased six-fold, then the 72-year supply would last just 12 years.

<snip>

and reprocessed plutonium costs ~$2000 a kilo (before the cost of disposing the high-level liquid waste produced along with it) - it's completely uneconomic.

:rofl:

That's like saying that since only 0.03% of the earth's water is in rivers, no-one can use hydroelectricity. I hope you can see the flaw in your logic there :)

And you don't seem to read the bit about proven reserves that I posted.

But you DO get full marks for cheek, complaining about the economics of nuclear power, while advocating PV costing more than the global GDP. That's priceless.:D

Edit - Forgot to mention: I've no idea where you got "no-one uses reprocessed uranium" from. Your article says that France doesn't (which is a surprise, and according to the MOX wiki they do) but you're suffering from contry/planet confusion again. Lots of reactors do run with MOX (and the all-singing, all-dancing CANDU will run on just MOX).

not profoundly affected by U-232 or U-236.

The reference is found in William Stacy's "Nuclear Reactor Physics" John Wiley and Sons and I will elaborate just a little below to dismiss this absurd claim.

First let me quote this nuclear engineering text, page 236, in the chapter on fuel burn-up:



This pretty much disposes of the claim that reprocessed uranium is "worthless." Note that ²³⁹Pu can substitute for ²³⁵U in the enrichment scheme, as can ²³³U, obtained from thorium. In fact, the the ²³³U case, there is an advantage to using recycled uranium, inasmuch as this acts as a significant diluent further minimizing the small probability of weapons diversion. If ²³³U is diluted with recycled uranium, any plutonium resulting from the burn-up will further be denatured with ²³⁸Pu, complicating any attempt at weapons design.

Stacy writes further:



Finally he writes on page 236:



In other words, uranium recycling is not significantly used because cheap uranium is so cheap. It follows that uranium is cheap because it is so readily available.

Thus we see that the anti-nuclear argument contradicts itself. On one hand it wants you to believe that the world is running out of uranium. If this were true, of course, shrill anti-nuclear people would have no problem and would not find it necessary to raise so many specious and ill informed specious objections to nuclear energy. Nuclear energy would simply just "go away" as they have been predicting it would for decade after decade after decade with their usual level of disconnection from reality.

The fact is, that the world is not running out of uranium and people who are irrationally afraid of nuclear energy will be forced to live with their irrational fear, just as acrophobics sometimes must be in high places and agoraphobics sometimes must be in open places.

Now let's deal with the "Wise" website. Wise is one of the chain of self referential websites that continually use increasing desperate arguments to attempt to make more and more irrational misrepresentations about why nuclear energy won't work. They seem to know how to handle google to get their nonsense to pop up early, but of course, this has nothing to do with whether or not they have the remotest clue about the real situation. Of course, what they need to ignore is that nuclear energy is working - on an exajoule scale - and working quite well. One of the most common practices of these websites is to attempt to use pseudo-technical language to represent that nuclear technology is impossible because of x or y or z. The isotope argument I address here is just one such appeal. There are many others. In so doing, of course, they rely on the reader's ignorance of the real situation; in short they depend on the reader's ignorance. If one actually knows what one is talking about, it is easy to dismiss these representations for what they are: Nonsense.

The ready availability of cheap uranium has eliminated the need for uranium recycling up to the present time, but many nations are taking steps to assure that their spent uranium remains available for future use when uranium prices rise, as surely they will, since the world has rejected the luddite anti-nuclear position because of global climate change. When the time comes, there is some small technical consequences that will translate into somewhat higher prices, but these costs are trivial when compared to the cost of having no energy or, worse, having a destroyed atmosphere. My personal feeling is that we should commence with the use of this technology now so as pay our own way - rather than asking our children and great-great-great grandchildren to pay the costs, but that's just my opinion.

Most countries in the world do recognize that uranium may not be cheap forever, however: The current price is the equivalent of gasoline at much less than a tenth of cent per gallon. For this reason, there is a slow but steady increase in the number of countries that are keeping spent fuel or isolated uranium accessible to provide options for the future. It has been shown through experience that spent fuel can be stored above ground in casks for long periods of time with no loss of life or environmental damage of any kind. At some point uranium prices will rise high enough to make the payment of the reactivity penalty for the use of recycled uranium an economically acceptable thing to do. But we are a long way from that day.

I want to put forth a caveat that I often neglect in my discussions of the huge uranium and thorium resources available: It does not follow that since we have a large resource of this type that we should proceed as we have been doing for the last century or so. It is important to reduce our demand for energy, as important as providing energy in the first place. We cannot and should not live like drunken sailors, simply because we have energy resources. Uranium and thorium resources may be effectively infinite and then again, they may not. We should not therefore be wasteful. It is important to recognize the impact of uncontrolled population growth and that irrespective of the situation with energy, there are many other resource issues that are more problematic to solve.

I've read in passing that proven thorium reserves are 3X that of uranium. So, how many centuries does that add?

Thorium is more usable - you get something 30x times the energy per ton than you do from Uranium, so that would make for around 4,500 years worth.

All off the top of my head, though - I haven't checked any figures. Hopefully NNadir can provide a more definitive answer :)

you can't use thorium directly. It has to be turned into uranium-233 in a breeder reactor. I recall a claim that a thorium fuel cycle could last for 3000 years.

Glad one of know what he's talking about... :dunce:

...unlike the spent fuel that comes out of my car's exhaust pipe, which is spread all over the planet.

It is building a recycling plant in Japan, and a storage facility for once through uranium pending a requirement for its future use.

http://www.fepc.or.jp/english/nuclear_power/cycle/recycle.html

It is not noted here, but Japan will be recovering the precious metal fission products, rhodium, palladium, and ruthenium to sell.

but those prices would support even fairly expensive processing.

(Japan doesn't really produce precious metals from spent fuel)

(it's not true)

(they only said they might try it some day)

(palladium produced from spent fuel is contaminated with 107Pd (half-life 6.5 x 10^5 years) - its radioactive and no one wants it)

(and rhodium from spent fuel has to be stored for at least 30 years before it's safe to use)

(no one wants it either)

(there's lots of platinum group metals out there that aren't radioactive)

(google this up - minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/ pubs/commodity/platinum/550400.pdf )

(don't believe everything you hear on the Internets)

(LOL)

Rhodium is an important metal, having several important catalytic uses which are industrially very critical. One of the more important uses is to catalyze the oxidation of ammonia to nitric acid, the pathway to making nitrates. Another is to catalyze certain asymmetric reactions that are important, for example, in pharmaceuticals.

Rhodium is a by product of nickel processing. Only a few tons are isolated every year. Of course this material is continuously recycled, but inevitably, some catalyst is lost in processing.

The amount of rhodium in spent nuclear fuel easily exceeds the annual production world wide from ores. We can make an estimate for the amount of rhodium in spent fuel as follows.

In thermal fissions of U-235, which has produced the bulk of nuclear power generated thus far, the accumulated fission yield for thermal neutrons is about 3%.

Within a few years, about 75,000 metric tons of spent fuel will have accumulated from the operation of commercial nuclear power plants in the United States. The majority of this fuel is actually unreacted uranium, but about 5% is represented by fission products, or roughly 3,750 MT. On this, correcting for the atomic weight of Ru-103, and using the 3% fission yield figure, it can be shown that amount of rhodium is about 47 MT. This is about 1.6 million troy ounces. If rhodium prices are about $3,000/troy ounce, this is about 5 billion dollars worth of metal.

However, we should recognize that the recovery of fission product rhodium would necessarily depress the world price, by making the valuable metal more available. It is probably the case that the amount of rhodium found in fission products in the United States alone approaches or exceeds the total amount of this metal thus isolated so far since its discovery in Nickel ores.

Note that this rhodium would not be radioactive, because except for the single stable isotope, Ru-103, the neutron rich isotopes of rhodium that dominate fission products are short-lived and decay quickly into ruthenium and palladium.

The recovery of ruthenium - a cheaper but still valuable metal - conceivably would offer similar economic value. However, ruthenium will contain some Ru-106, a radioactive isotope that has a half-life of just over a year. As a practical matter, isolated ruthenium (which is easily separated by distillation of its tetroxide) would need about 30 years of decay time before any residual activity reached a non-detectable level. All of the ruthenium-106 would decay into more valuable palladium. Note that many spent fuel rods already are more than 30 years old.

Any palladium obtained from fission products - excepting any Pd-106 obtained through the decay of Ru-106 after isolation of fresh ruthenium and decay of ruthenium-106 into non-radioactive Pd-106 - would represent a low level radioactive substance. This owes to the presence of small amounts of Pd-107, which has a half life of 6.5 million years. Since it is a pure beta emitter with a long half-life, this represents a very small risk - although one would not wish to use such palladium in jewelry. However in closed systems, particularly catalytic industrial systems, or in pollution control systems, there is no rational reason such palladium could not be so used. As in all things nuclear there are lots of irrational reasons why people might object to this, but again, no rational reason. The specific activity of pure Pd-107, which is technically very difficult to obtain, since fission product palladium is always present with non-radioactive isotopes, is about 0.5 millicuries per gram. Fission product palladium therefore is always much less radioactive than this.

Palladium will be a very important catalyst in any scheme where hydrogen is used as an energy storage medium. It is also has important implications in the preparation of long lived low temperature fuel cells. The metal is already of huge importance industrially.

Here is a review article that discusses the recovery of important "platinoid" metals from fission products. It lists some catalytic uses for these metals. The article referring to the recovery and use of fission product precious metals begins on page 79 of the PDF filed journal. It written by a German chemist and a Russian chemist.

http://www.platinummetalsreview.com/pdf/61-108-pmr-apr05.pdf

I note that any scheme which transmutes technetium metal - and clearly this totally synthetic valuable metal has many applications which suggest it should be isolated for its own intrinsic value and not as a source of ruthenium - will yield large amounts of ruthenium and smaller amounts of rhodium.

You should be in full favour of this, Jpak - you'll be wanting all this stuff for your night-time TWh hydrogen storage plants...

How are they "recycling" this stuff - by voodoo???

:rofl:

even the words "In europe" seem to confuse you...
;)

strange remarks - desperate remarks in my opinion - that pretend that international borders are closed with respect to nuclear materials.

For instance, if I note, as is true, that new nuclear capacity is being planned, in say, Mexico, someone pipes in about Mexico's uranium reserves - as if Mexico could not import uranium, especially in note of uranium's very high energy densitiy.

Japan now burns MOX fuel using plutonium produced in Japanese reactors. The Japanese energy strategy calls for increased reliance on MOX fuels. The Japanese recognize that if they are to rely on nuclear energy for many decades - as they plan to do - they will need to maximize the energy density of the uranium they use. This involves the recovery of plutonium, and the Japanese know it.

The anti-nuclear argument consists entirely of such irrational arguments. I would think that the members of the Luddite organization Greenpeace would be well aware of Japanese nuclear policies. The members of Greenpeace burn lots of diesel fuel chasing Japanese nuclear shipments to France and back, showing once again that they do not value protecting the world from pollution if it in any way impedes their right to throw middle class and upper class tantrums.

Of course, the members of Greenpeace are mostly notable for what they can't grasp, not for what they do grasp. Not one of them seems to have grasped the magnitude of global climate change - although the Japanese apparently have done so.

World trade often consists of using plants that are not within ones own borders. I thought everybody knew that. In any case, in spite of lots of irrational predictions about the demise of the nuclear industry - it is proceeding quite nicely in Japan and elsewhere.

I repeat, Japan recycles its nuclear fuel. Some of the physical reprocessing is now done in France and Britain, but in the future much of it will be done within Japan.

A discussion of the 160 shipments of fuel materials between Japan and Europe are given here: http://www.uic.com.au/nip23.htm