| 30 year decommissioning is somewhat optimistic average based on current plans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAFSTOR “For nuclear power plants governed by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, SAFSTOR (SAFe STORage) is one of the options for nuclear decommissioning of a shut down plant. During SAFSTOR the de-fuelled plant is monitored for up to sixty years before complete decontamination and dismantling of the site, to a condition where nuclear licensing is no longer required. During the storage interval, some of the radioactive contaminants of the reactor and power plant will decay, which will reduce the quantity of radioactive material to be removed during the final decontamination phase.” For example, Crystal River 3
(Florida) “Duke Energy announced in Feb-2013 that the Crystal River NPP would be permanently shut down.” “Systems Removal & Building Remediation(2070–2072)“ and that’s if things go well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_decommissioning As to indoor farming. “It’s not just that the 4 billion tons of uranium in seawater now would fuel a thousand 1,000-MW nuclear power plants for a 100,000.” That sounds like a lot, but of you want ~100w of power per m2 that’s 0.1GW of power per km2. So your 1,000 GW power plants are only replacing 10,000km2 of farm land. Meanwhile agriculture takes 51,000,000km2 worth of land. In other words replace 20% of global farmland and you got ~100 years worth of uranium from all the worlds oceans, it’s replaced by rocks. But, “And those rocks contain 100 trillion tons of uranium.” gives you 2,500 years which is not bad, but that’s not going to be replaced. PS: You might be able to beat 100w/m2 indoors, but remember this is also for 20% of farmland. |
How did you arrive at these figures? I think you missed a conversion from pounds to tons.
Current global uranium consumption is in the hundreds of millions of pounds annually - hundreds of thousands of tons. And this is without reprocessing. Nuclear power already generates 10% electricity globally. Even if we assume a 200x increase in consumption from 200 million pounds to 20 billion pounds that still only 10 million tons of consumption annual. 100 trillion divided by 10 million is a lot more than 2,500.