| > 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 |