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by throwup238 771 days ago
Those are proven reserves, not all the uranium in the crust. It’s just the confirmed high value locations that people have bothered to prospect.

At over 3 ppm there’s at least 4 billion tons of uranium in seawater alone.

1 comments

Fun fact: the estimated cost of extracting uranium from seawater is $1000/kg [1] (the link shows a lower number, but I'm making it round and higher to account for inflation), which is about 7 times higher than the current market price. If we were to use this, it would increase the price of nuclear generated electricity by ¢0.83/kWh. For comparison the average price of electricity in the US in February 2024 (last month published) was ¢ 16.1 / kWh.

Here's the math, for those curious: modern nuclear power plants produce about 50 GWd per ton of uranium fuel. It takes about 10 tons of mined uranium to produce one reactor grade ton (because of the enrichment). So, that's about 5 GWd per ton, or 120000 MWh/T, or 120000 kWh/kg. If one kg of Uranium is $1000, you get 120000 kWh out of that, which comes at $1/120 = ¢0.83 per kWh.

[1] https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/...

[2] https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...