Seeing Red: What a New Mining Report Says About The Rebirth of an Industry

For those of you who tend a bit more to the wonkish end of things, a new joint study from the OECD and IAEA on the world’s supply of uranium could make for some interesting reading.

The biennial OECD “Red Book” (officially known as Uranium 2009: Resources, Production and Demand) on uranium supply was just released and it has some interesting tidbits on uranium mining and exploration that bode well for the health of the nuclear energy industry.

…uranium resources, production and demand are all on the rise…Worldwide exploration and mine development expenditures have more than doubled since the publication of the previous edition…These expenditures have increased despite declining uranium market prices since mid-2007.

It’s an odd thing for mining expenditures to increase as prices of a commodity drop. Usually as the value of a resource drops, there’s a pullback on production and exploration. After all, who wants to dig up a worthless rock? But with uranium, prices are down, yet expenditures are up, which indicates that customers are anticipating uranium will be more valuable in the future and are snapping it up while they can. Two recent deals by Cameco and a Chinese utility and another between Exelon and TENEX might be an indication of this.

For its part, the OECD’s Nuclear Energy Agency linked the growing expenditures to a healthy nuclear energy industry:

The recognition by an increasing number of governments that nuclear power can produce competitively priced, baseload electricity that is essentially free of greenhouse gas emissions, coupled with the role that nuclear can play in enhancing security of energy supply, increases the prospects for growth in nuclear generating capacity, although the magnitude of that growth remains to be determined.

The report also found abundant supply of uranium over the long term.

At 2008 rates of consumption, total identified resources are sufficient for over 100 years of supply.

Of course, this raises the question of what happens in 2110? Well, the report remains upbeat on this question as well. Technologically, 100 years is a long time and by then new fuel cycles, fast reactors and other technologies could help enhance the fuel efficiency of uranium and greatly extend supply.

…it should be recognized that the deployment of advanced reactor and fuel cycle technologies can positively affect the long-term availability of uranium and could conceivably extend it to thousands of years.

That’s a hard act for any fossil fuel to follow.

For those who want to dig deeper, here’s a chart of the uranium spot price from Cameco.

Activists' Claims Distort Facts about Advanced Reactor Design

Below is from our rapid response team . Yesterday, regional anti-nuclear organizations asked federal nuclear energy regulators to launch an investigation into what it claims are “newly identified flaws” in Westinghouse’s advanced reactor design, the AP1000. During a teleconference releasing a report on the subject, participants urged the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to suspend license reviews of proposed AP1000 reactors. In its news release, even the groups making these allegations provide conflicting information on its findings. In one instance, the groups cite “dozens of corrosion holes” at reactor vessels and in another says that eight holes have been documented. In all cases, there is another containment mechanism that would provide a barrier to radiation release. Below, we examine why these claims are unwarranted and why the AP1000 design certification process should continue as designated by the NRC. Myth: In the AP1000 reactor design, the gap between the shield bu...

How many nuclear plants does it take to meet the world's energy needs?

Several weeks ago Joshua Pearce at Clarion University in Pennsylvania released a study titled “ Thermodynamic limitations to nuclear energy deployment as a greenhouse gas mitigation technology .” In the study he stated... nuclear energy production would have to increase by 10.5% per year from 2010 to 2050 to both replace fossil-fuel-energy use and meet the future energy demands. This line, of course, made the headlines and has been picked up by several outlets and blogs . When looking into his calculations for this statement, he made one assumption error that overstated the above sentence by nearly a factor of three. Page 121, Section 4.1 of the study states: Richard Smalley pointed out that in 2004, the global economy consumed the equivalent of 220 million barrels of oil per day, which converted into electricity terms is the equivalent of 14.5 TeraWatts (TW), or 14,500,000 MegaWatts (MW) (2005). … With a nuclear plant having about 1000 MW (1 GW) of capacity, we would need 14,500...

What Happens During a Refueling Outage?

You may have noticed over the past few weeks that a number of nuclear plants are shut down for refueling outages or are resuming operations after just returning from one. This type of routine outage usually occurs in the spring or fall when electricity demand is low so that nuclear reactors can replace about one-third of the spent fuel rods with new fuel and conduct other routine maintenance and repairs at the plant. To get a better sense of how refueling works at a nuclear energy facility, I spoke with Marcus Nichol, NEI’s senior project manager for used fuel storage and transportation, and asked him to explain the basics. Why does a nuclear plant need to replace one-third of its fuel? Nichol: The main purpose of a refueling outage is to replace older fuel that is depleted—meaning it can no longer efficiently produce energy from nuclear fission reactions—with new fuel. This “used fuel” has typically been used in the reactor for four-and-a-half to six years before it is pe...

NEI Nuclear Notes

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