| You just referred to a HTML page ... having a counter on the bottom which says: > The number of hits on this page since 1996 Feb 12 ... a HTTP Response Header > Last-Modified Sat, 27 Jan 2007 02:38:36 GMT Stating that these aren't "the latest insights" would be putting it mildly. My comment referred to commercial viability. It at this point in time, Uranium has only been extracted from seawater in a laboratory setting, per the Wikipedia article I referenced. Yes, there's always "but technology will advance to a point where it will be viable". But then I'd argue: Beware of optimism bias when predicting the future. You don't know whether economic, social and political circumstances will converge over the next decades towards such trajectory that extracting uranium from seawater and using it in nuclear reactors becomes a commercial viable enterprise. You yourself may be confident they will, but that doesn't make it so. |
Yes, John McCarthy hasn't updated his web page in a while, because he's been dead for nine years. Have some respect for the man who invented Garbage Collection!
But more importantly, do you think a lot of uranium has disappeared in the last 13 years? Has the use of uranium increased by an order of magnitude in the last 13 years? Have we forgotten how to extract uranium from low grade ore in the last 13 years? No?! Then how the hell is the age of this web site (13 years) or Bernard Cohen's book (35 years) even relevant?
> My comment referred to commercial viability.
Don't move the goal posts! You specifically wrote "Uranium is finite", and the counter point is that it is practically infinite. As McCarthy points out, this doesn't even depend on seawater extraction, because low grade uranium ores (phosphate ores, later Conway granites) are plentiful.