[Mutjake]

As a Finn I think this is the correct way. To add to some other comments here I presume uranium is so abundant even if we multiply our usage that the opportunity cost of reusing the spent fuel is not a major issue. We have a lot of spent fuel in places like the bottom of the ocean we can tap into first. There are a lot of different materials we're burning or burying even if it might be useful in the future, I'd look into repurposing those first as they carry a much bigger risk in e.g. polluting the ground water before worrying about a marginal amount of global spent fuel being buried (you need to account for the fact that we are a small country with non-optimal geography, it is less probable that it would be viable for us build processing facilities to recycle spent fuel as it is much more viable in e.g. France where there is much more raw materials available relatively close + shipping the spent fuel from Finland is probably quite expensive as especially in the current geopolitical setting we are somewhat of an island logistically).

Take what I said with a grain of salt as I am not an expert in the matters of nuclear technology, just sharing my layman's viewpoint. It's probably a complex system so I'm not sure if anyone has definitive answers as it all depends on the amount of nuclear power the world is going to build, how the reprocessing technology and know-how develops, how the alternative means for electricity production develop etc. etc. -- so we can only make educated guesses for now, but I see that we're making a good compromise here with the marginal amount of the global spent nuclear fuel we possess considering our options. For other parts of the world the equation probably plays out differently, e.g. not having suitable solid bedrock to utilize might be an obvious showstopper.

[atombender]

> the opportunity cost of reusing the spent fuel is not a major issue

Uranium mining is extremely destructive to the environment, not to mention using a lot of energy, so this isn't just opportunity cost, it's externality cost.

[otikik]

I don't think we need to go over the externality cost presented by Coal, Gas or Petrol.

I'll assume that you are a proponent of Solar/Wind/Hydro. Which also have externalities, including human death, but let's ignore that.

But I am onboard with all of those. My problem is that I think solar, wind and hydro are not enough. We don't have a way to store energy in massive ways, so in order to account for cloudy days, non-windy days and nights, we need something else.

I see uranium filing that niche. If not uranium, what else? All the options I see mentioned are along the lines of "let's continue burning stuff, then, and keep adding solar/wind/hydro".

But that is what we are doing now already. And the temperature and CO2 concentration graphs keep going up. So, what is the alternative?

[Kon5ole]

>>We don't have a way to store energy in massive ways, so in order to account for cloudy days, non-windy days and nights, we need something else.

So we can build either energy storage or nuclear plants. Storage must surely be the better choice!

It seems quite obvious to me that it will be cheaper, faster, simpler and more reliable, not least because it will be distributed and we can engage many more people to the task of building storage than we can to the task of building nuclear plants.

Heat storage, pressure storage, gravity storage, hydrogen, methane, batteries, all so easy to make (compared to nuclear plants) that you can have thousands of "small town scale" projects going at the same time.

With few notable mega-projects, solar has still grown in capacity equivalent to several nuclear reactors per year the past few years. I think a similar thing will happen with energy storage.

It's kind of happening already (several storage projects are underway and some are online) but the results are good and it's early days.

[specialist]

Renewables and storage today. Nuclear tomorrow (hopefully).

We need all of it. ASAP.

It's "yes and", not "either-or".

[reshlo]

> It seems quite obvious to me that it will be cheaper

The New Zealand government estimates that a gravity storage scheme with a capacity of 5TWh would cost 14 billion NZ dollars to construct.

https://www.mbie.govt.nz/building-and-energy/energy-and-natu...

[specialist]

Advanced geothermal. Fervo Energy solved that problem. Now the challenge is scaling up.

I enthusiastically support any and all nuclear options. Especially traveling wave and SMRs.

Unfortunately, nuclear won't arrive in time to keep us under 2C. Fortunately, we'll still need it to help with going net-negative.

[hakfoo]

What is it about nuclear that keeps it from coming online quickly?

Is it solely regulatory red tape? Do we not have off-the-shelf designs (i. e. from when the French built scores of plants), or are they dependent on a catalog of no-longer-available parts?

I was hoping for modular reactors that were neighbourhood-scale-- the size of a a small shipping container, and able to be delivered rather than site built. Maybe RTG instead of steam-turbine for mechanical simplicity.

[butlike]

I imagine it's regulatory for fission plants. Fusion is still a ways off, in terms of us having net-positive energy, but is the "true" nuclear energy solution as far as I'm concerned.

The difference is a fusion's byproduct is helium, and if the core "melts down," it implodes rather than explodes. Fission creates waste who's half life is 4.5bil years (which is demonstratedly toxic to humans, hence where I imagine the apprehension for bringing reactors online is coming from)

[specialist]

I wish I knew. I'm sure I'm not alone.

My current belief is that it just comes down to lack of investment.

Compare the current outlooks of biofuels, "next generation" nuclear, and now green H2.

The IRA is building a H2 economy, from scratch. Soon, the govt will pay anyone anywhere a stupid amount of money to make "green" H2 (details are still being hashed out). It's stupid to not get in on the action. So that govt investment begat a torrent of private investment. And now we're off to the races.

Just like how the Obama administration bootstrapped PV solar and lithium ion batteries, in 20 years we'll look back at the passing of the IRA as the genesis of our H2 economy.

In their times, both biofuels and nuclear were supposed to be the next big thing.

But instead of forging industrial policy and committing to moonshot level investments, our neoliberals predecessors had faith these nascent industries would magically emerge from the "free market".

[Retric]

Reprocessing is more destructive to the environment. It looks clean to have stuff take place in large buildings but the externalities are significant.

[sophacles]

> Reprocessing is more destructive to the environment.

How so? Any pointers for more info - I'm somewhat ignorant on this topic.

[Retric]

This was from speaking to an expert, but from what I recall recovering plutonium is perfectly reasonable trying to recover the uranium isn’t helping.

First you don’t actually reduce the number of atoms of highly radioactive waste products. You’re simply chemically separating material not transmuting it to something non radioactive. Which doesn’t really make the nasty stuff easier to deal with.

Second, you end up contaminating a great deal of additional material which then becomes a high volume of low level radioactive waste. At the same time you need an input stream of various chemicals, steel, rubber, etc to replace what’s been contaminated/used which then causes environmental harm when you’re extracting them.

Finally plutonium is useful as fuel, but the ratio of u235:u238 changes so you still need enrichment. Which means at the end of this process you’re spent a great deal of effort only to throw away most of the uranium recovered.

There are reactor designs that don’t need enrichment such as CANDU, but they need far less raw uranium mined in the first place.

TLDR; What you’re recovering is u235 which is a small percentage of spent fuel and it takes a huge amount of resources to get at it.

[orwin]

Sources on that? I thought uranium mining was mostly leaching (which is very, very, very energy efficient, and non-destructive if you take care of the used solution) with open mining on the decline.

[DennisP]

Yep, 57% of the world's uranium mining is in-situ leaching, which is basically two pipes in the ground. One pumps water down, the other brings uranium-rich water back up, into a building where the uranium is filtered out.

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

[m4rtink]

Um, its not water down, its sulphuric acid and similar kinds of fun. We are still working out how to get ridd of side effects of that here in Czech Republic decades anfter most such mining ended.

[atombender]

In-situ leaching contaminates aquifiers, and remediations have not been shown to be effective [1]. Meanwhile, this still leaves all of the mining which is not ISL.

[1] https://www.nrdc.org/bio/nrdc/epa-tries-sign-away-authority-...

[mschuster91]

It's certainly very convenient that, sans Canada and Australia, all significant uranium mining countries are developing or virtually lawless (i.e. the government can do whatever the f..k it wants without needing to take care of nature) countries - and to be honest given how past Australian governments outright sharted on nature protection or Aboriginal activists in favor of mining conglomerates, I'd classify the country as lawless as well.

Nuclear fission based on uranium is a lot of things, but definitely not "clean" or "green" even on the raw material sourcing side like the pro-nuclear crowd keeps blathering.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_p...

[namdnay]

> Nuclear fission based on uranium is a lot of things, but definitely not "clean" or "green" even on the raw material sourcing side like the pro-nuclear crowd keeps blathering.

Depending on your criteria, no human industrial activity is green. Digging up precious metals for solar panels? Pouring tons of concrete in mountain valleys to make dams? Building forests of windmills?

At the end of the day, the question becomes “does this enable us to reduce our carbon emissions whilst keeping a reasonable quality of life”. And to that question nuclear is without a doubt a good thing

[mschuster91]

> At the end of the day, the question becomes “does this enable us to reduce our carbon emissions whilst keeping a reasonable quality of life”. And to that question nuclear is without a doubt a good thing

Solar and wind don't leave a ton of radioactive material behind.

[ska]

> Solar and wind don't leave a ton of radioactive material behind.

But they are not a plausible global replacement at this point, and - without radical storage technology changes - for the foreseeable future.

So really what you should be asking is, is nuclear cleaner than fossil.

[mschuster91]

> But they are not a plausible global replacement at this point

Do they need to be? Cut back on crap (i.e. advertising billboards, city lights), invest into decentralized storage for households (let's be real, even the demand of a home with two teenagers with gaming rigs can easily be met with a standard Powerwall), and get as many industrial processes shifted to shift operations to save on nighttime base load. The remainder can be, at least in Continental Europe and America, caught by a well-built continental grid (China manages thousands of km long lines!) and biogas/hydrogen peakers.

[gottorf]

> given how past Australian governments outright sharted on nature protection or Aboriginal activists in favor of mining conglomerates, I'd classify the country as lawless as well

Making human lives better means that you have to do dirty, destructive work like mining, drilling, and manufacturing. To some degree, we're trading pristineness of nature for increased living standards for people. As technology improves, there is potential for our footprint to get smaller, but that's almost always balanced out (or more) by an increase in population.

It's easy to make the whole country a nature preserve. You then either import things that were produced in a dirty manner overseas, or your living standards drop to that of our Aboriginal ancestors.

[AussieWog93]

>Australia ... lawless

OK buddy

[detaro]

maybe read the sentence again

[ekianjo]

> so this isn't just opportunity cost, it's externality cost.

Everything has externalities, even the "renewables" (which are not, by definition, because nothing is renewable) - if you want to have an adult conversation you need to talk in terms of pros and cons across multiple dimensions.

[idiotsecant]

The difference is that renewables mostly end up paying for those externalities. Particularly nuke. We've managed to internalize the idea as a society that if I decide to burn an enormous amount of hydrocarbons I get to profit from the power generated (or whatever desirable outcome is present) but society gets to deal with the byproducts, none of which I am expected to contribute to handling.

This is an obviously silly structure and yet it persists.

[ekianjo]

solar panels and wind turbines are not produced out of thin air and need to be thrown away and replaced constantly.

[idiotsecant]

Oh? Solar panels made today have an expected e80 of 30 years before refurb is required. What is the expected capital lifetime that you'd consider not to be replaced 'constantly'? This compares pretty decently with natural gas turbines, especially considering that panels have a small fraction of the capital cost.

[Brusco_RF]

This is disinformation and you should delete it. I don't use that term lightly, Nuclear FUD is spread by Russia to keep the west dependent on their oil, and you're helping them whether you know it or not.

In reality, Uranium is mostly mined by leaching which is the least destructive form of mining. Not to mention the quantity actually mined is several orders of magnitude less than other things we mine in much more destructive fashions like Copper, nickel, zinc etc

[flangola7]

I don't know anything any mining. What makes it so destructive? Or more destructive than other mining?

[littlestymaar]

Mining is destructive whatever you mine. The worst kind of mining is open-pit mining, which isn't the most common method for uranium, so in average uranium mining is probably less destructive than most mining operations.

[FredPret]

The alternative is a pre-technology existence.

EDIT: if you're downvoting this, do you expect that we can create and maintain a technological life without building blocks like metals and energy minerals? Did that M1 CPU just appear out of thin air and started powering itself?

And if we do need minerals to create a good life for the 7 billion people we have, do these simply materialize?

We have to dig for it. Holes are ugly and messy. But the alternative is living in one.

[littlestymaar]

Or we could stop building throwaway things. Sure it won't reduce mining to zero, but when a significant fraction of what we mine is ending up in landfills after just a few years, there sure is margin of improvement.

[FredPret]

Why "or"? Why not "and"?

We have massive numbers of people who are still really poor. Making quality infrastructure and products for these people involves lots of brand-new metals.

In the meantime, increasing quality and recycling is merely a multiplier increasing the efficiency of our system. You can't recycle your way to economic greatness.

[trenchgun]

Uranium mining is not necessarily more destructive to environment or energy intensive than any other mining.

And in fact, a major part of uranium is in-situ leaching, which is less enviromentally damaging than most other mining.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

You’re wrong.

Zoom right in on Olympic Dam on Google maps.

This is the largest known single deposit of uranium in the world.

Now zoom out. Keep zooming out. Now zoom out further. Australia is big.

Uranium mining causes approximately zero damage.

[titzer]

Compared to coal and natural gas, though?

[tsimionescu]

Uranium is actually pretty rare - using fuel the way we have for now, we would pretty quickly exhaust all the known accessible uranium deposits - I believe I read the estimate is something like 50 years?

The story changes significantly if we start using breeder reactors and other designs.

[titzer]

> exhaust all the known accessible uranium deposits

Uranium is everywhere. While there are mines that have extremely high concentrations of Uranium, it is present in trace amounts in almost everything from granite to sand to soil to groundwater. There are 4 billion tons of Uranium dissolved in the oceans. A number of projects have looked at filtering and extracting it from the oceans. It's relatively expensive to extract it from seawater, but not insane--4x-10x the cost of mining. We won't run out.

https://deeply.thenewhumanitarian.org/oceans/articles/2018/0...

> I believe I read the estimate is something like 50 years?

It's more like 200 years. And that's "economically accessible", not accessible.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-will-glo...

[peoplefromibiza]

> Uranium is actually pretty rare

> estimate is something like 50 years

those are pretty pessimistic estimates.

From a 2009 article on Scientific America

According to the NEA, identified uranium resources total 5.5 million metric tons, and an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered—a roughly 230-year supply at today's consumption rate in total

the extraction of uranium from seawater would make available 4.5 billion metric tons of uranium—a 60,000-year supply at present rates

fuel-recycling fast-breeder reactors, which generate more fuel than they consume, would use less than 1 percent of the uranium needed for current LWRs. Breeder reactors could match today's nuclear output for 30,000 years using only the NEA-estimated supplies.

[Mutjake]

Yeah, and to my understanding we're not specifically looking for it as the uranium isn't really that expensive at the moment. The largest plant in Finland needs 128 tons of uranium for the fuel to be fully loaded which on a quick calculation is $57 per pound * 2.2 pounds per kilo * 128000 kilos = around $16M and based on a quick search it lasts from three to five years.

Since the fuel is cooled in water ponds for decades before it is processed, even in the case of a nuclear industry boom there's ample lead time to alter the plans if running out of materials seems to become an issue. I'd be much more worried about usage of oil as it is the base material for a lot of different things like medicines, and we're burning the stuff away (granted, we can do synthetic hydrocarbons, but the whole thing with oil is a bigger problem in my books than running out of uranium; it's still there to be retrieved if it really comes down to it).

[Ekaros]

Also, stuff that we need at scale to keep things running, but are somewhat harder to source like sulphur... Which is used for agriculture.

[denton-scratch]

> an additional 10.5 million metric tons remain undiscovered

If it's "undiscovered", presumably that 0.5 metric tons amounts to spurious precision. Call it ten million, and it becomes clear that it's a wild guesstimate.

Also: the location of these Uranium deposits is not evenly distributed. I understand that substantially all of France's Uranium, for example, comes from Niger, a politically-unstable country where much of the mining is controlled by the Wagner Group.

[defrost]

Niger has been on the wane for some time as two of the three Orano (formerly Areva) group mines hit near exhaustion.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decodeurs/article/2023/08/04/h...

( Or, if you prefer, the Nuclear Energy "Red Book":

https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_79960/uranium-2022-resource...

    In France, although no domestic uranium exploration and mine development activities have been carried out since 1999, majority government-owned Orano (formerly Areva) and its subsidiaries remain active abroad.

    As of 2020, Orano S.A. has been working outside France, focusing on discovery of exploitable resources in Canada, Gabon, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Namibia and Niger. In Canada, Kazakhstan and Niger, Orano is also involved in uranium mining operations.

    In addition, as a non-operator, Orano holds shares in several mining operations and research projects in different countries. In 2020, Orano started exploration in Uzbekistan.

    Total nondomestic exploration expenditures remained relatively steady from 2017 to 2018 at about USD 30 million per year, before declining by 17% to around USD 25 million in 2019 and 2020.

)

[Mrdarknezz]

With breeder reactors we have enough uranium to last us until the sun goes out https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html

[pjc50]

If we turn out to need the uranium, we know where it is: in the special spent fuel storage facility. It's just very contaminated with radioactive elements that aren't uranium and have shorter, more dangerous half-lives.

[LordShredda]

Isn't shorter half lives better? That means radioactivity reduces faster

[pjc50]

Each decay event is when radiation is emitted.

So: very short half-life is good, because the element turns into something else very quickly and ceases to be a problem. This is the nanoseconds-to-days range.

Very long half-life: not actually all that radioactive. e.g. U238 itself with a half-life in the billions of years.

Medium half-life: emits a dangerously high level of radiation in the process of decaying. This is the real problem stuff as "medium" can mean "centuries".

[roenxi]

If it can generate enough energy to be dangerous then it probably has an economic use if enough of it can be gathered in one place Like the sun - as I recall per-m3 it isn't all that energetic but there is enough sun that it provided the energy for ~99% of all life on earth. Lots of not-quite-enough energy is enough energy.

That is part of why this "no human should set foot for 100,000 years" is silly. We only have recorded history going back a few thousand years, and all of civilisation was invented in that time. If humans are exist in 100,000 years we'll be using that century-long half life material for something important.

[pjc50]

> If it can generate enough energy to be dangerous then it probably has an economic use if enough of it can be gathered in one place

This is the basis of the radiothermal generator (RTG); but generally, the spent fuel is deemed spent in the first place because it's no longer emitting enough heat/neutrons to be worth keeping in the reactor. It's already got to the point of "it's no longer worth the hassle of handling this and dealing with all those neutrons/gamma radiation in exchange for a mediocre amount of warmth".

[ben_w]

> If it can generate enough energy to be dangerous then it probably has an economic use if enough of it can be gathered in one place Like the sun - as I recall per-m3 it isn't all that energetic but there is enough sun that it provided the energy for ~99% of all life on earth.

The sun is also a third of a million times the mass of the entire planet, or about 1.4 billion times the mass of all our oceans.

And the power output being in the form of ionising radiation is really bad: the power density of the core of the sun is 276.5 W/m^3, but in a form which will, if you leant against it for a minute and given reasonable guesses as to your body mass and shape, give you a remaining conscious lifetime of vomiting, diarrhoea, seizures, bleeding everywhere inside and out, relieved only by being followed with a coma after about an hour then death within a day or two.

(That's ignoring the fact that it's also hot and dense and would immediately explode, it's just the effect of the radiation coming from it).

> If humans are exist in 100,000 years we'll be using that century-long half life material for something important.

There are three possible futures: business as usual, collapse, transcendence/singularity.

With business as usual, there's a fairly good chance that everything from our era will be forgotten and dismissed as myth and legend.

With collapse, all of society might of forgotten how the abstract concepts of "money" and "writing" work, reinvented them, gotten up to our level, and then collapsed again 50 times over.

With the singularity: the planet itself and every star visible to the naked eye (and many which aren't) may have been physically disassembled in that time frame.

I think we should be the kind of civilisation that plans for how to minimise the damage of bad outcomes, even if only to make sure we don't mess up the "singularity" option.

[darkclouds]

And I'm to assume that decay events are like a fundamental law of physics in that they will never change, so they cant be speeded up, or slowed down, or even reversed?

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Sure you can speed it up: get something else to decay neutrons, protons or alpha particles, on to it.

An atomic bomb is when you convince a lot of Uranium-235 or Plutonium to decay all at once in an uncontrolled way.

A nuclear reactor is what happens when you convince material to decay at a controllable rate.

It's way more complex than that but you can look up the rest, e.g. "Nuclear chain reaction".

Where I think you're going with this is

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/594598/destroyin...

tl;dr: it's more trouble than it's worth, since you need radioactive materials as the neutrons sources, and stray neutrons tend to bump into other matter and cause yet more radioactive waste.

[pjc50]

Well .. yes? (I wouldn't count neutron activation as "decay")

[theelous3]

Faster can still be a very long time, relative to the kind of time we typically operate projects on, and also means that the decaying material is more radioactive in terms of exposure risk.

[photochemsyn]

The long-lived transuranics are also a problem, such as plutonium and so on.

[AnthonyMouse]

The long-lived transuranics are fuel.

[credit_guy]

> quickly exhaust all the known accessible uranium deposits

The key thing here is "known". In order to "know" of the economic viability of a mining source you need to invest serious money. Mining companies have serious money, and they invest them to "prove" new reserves, because that's how they can get loans from banks. But once the reserves exceed whatever demand there is in the world for more than a hundred years, there's absolutely no incentive to keep exploring further. That's where we are now: there are about 8 million tons of proven uranium reserves [1]. The annual production fluctuates very slightly around 50,000 tons [2]. At the current production levels we have more than 150 years of proven reserves.

But if we were to suddenly double the number of reactors, we would very quickly double the proven reserves. If we were to multiply 100-fold the number of reactors, we'd multiply the proven reserves by 100, or more likely more than that.

In the end there is absolutely no limit. The current market price of uranium is about $130 per kg. It is estimated that it can economically be extracted from seawater for $1000/kg, so less than a factor of 10. Such a cost would not increase the cost of electricity by even one cent per kWh ( see the math in the notes).

As for breeder reactors or other designs. The current generation reactors produce about 40 to 60 GWday of energy from 1 ton of uranium fuel (which is generally enriched to close to 5% U-235). New designs will increase this number (called burnup) to 100 [3] and some even to 180, but generally not because they are more efficient, just because they'll use fuel enriched to up to 20% U-235. There are 2 designs that will exceed that, but they are supposed to burn thorium rather than uranium. We have easily 100 times less experience with thorium than uranium, so I wouldn't hold my breath that it's a piece of cake to achieve higher burnup with it. In theory we could, but practice finds ways to disagree with theory.

Notes: the math of 1 cent per kWh: you need about 10 tons of natural uranium to produce one ton of fuel-grade uranium, and with that you get about 50 GWd, or 50 x 24 = 1200 GWh = 1.2 billion kWh of electricity. 10,000 kg at $1000/kg is $10 MM for 1.2 billion kWh, or 0.83 cents/kWh.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_uranium_r...

[2] https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/facts-and-figu...

[3] https://aris.iaea.org/sites/burnup.html

[ekianjo]

> Uranium is actually pretty rare

Where did you get that notion?