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this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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We have reserves that will last centuries, and it can literally be extracted from seawater just like lithium if the economics allow for it. Can't comment on the mining impact, though. Is it any worse than rare earth metals?
There is no economical way to extract fissile material from sea water. This is no different from people saying you can mine gold that way. Technically, yes. Practically, no.
The only way we know to get the uranium necessary for reactors in the quantities we need to do it is to mine it. And we don't even have enough to mine to last for a century at current consumption.
https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/uranium-resources/supply-of-uranium
Sure, maybe some new practical way to make a reactor without uranium or to find uranium elsewhere might happen. But that's a MIGHT. With what we know now, we need uranium and we need to mine it and there isn't enough.
Dude. Read the rest of your source.
Literally half the page you linked discusses how we're not going to run out of resources anytime soon.
Known reserves are sufficient for 90 years because nobody wants to bother with further prospecting when supply hugely exceeds demand.
I did read that, which is why I said this:
Building tons more nuclear reactors in the hopes that we'll find new resources to power them all because we haven't spent enough time prospecting does not make much rational sense to me.
You appear to be severely misunderstanding the source. You may want to take the time to read through it again.
Also, did you think we checked each and every resource we industrialised to make sure we had a few millenia worth before we started using them? Last I heard, our known lithium resources are only sufficient for a decade or two at current rates, never mind the increasing usage.
Are you asking if we did smart things before we began exploiting resources? Because the answer is no, never. Not once.
You're missing the point, which is that we don't normally measure reserves in centuries. We prospect as needed, and there is no reason to think that we would be unable to locate new deposits as necessary. All this and more is covered in the source you linked.
Which has never once caused a problem before, am I right?
Love how you ignored their actual point to focus on the one thing they said that didn't apply to the topic
That's what we normally do, which is a problem
But for nuclear we have centuries worth of stockpile, so we dont have to do that
We don't know we have centuries worth of stockpile. That's just an assumption.
In fact, I think it's a foolish assumption to make since if the world's nuclear powers haven't been quietly prospecting the globe for new sources of Uranium since 1945, they sure should have been. But you don't hear about a lot of new uranium mines opening.
And what if this big stockpile us close to a major waterway? Or under a bunch of people's homes?
Acting like "we can just look and find more" as if it's that simple doesn't make sense to me.
We have centuries worth of Thorium in mine tailings alone.
It's considered a waste product, but can easily be used for power, China already has a Thorium power plant up and running. The US had a Thorium test reactor in the 60s.
This article from September 5th claims they are planning a power plant and their prototype reached criticality but was not designed to generate electricity.
If it works, great. That's not a guarantee. Test reactors do not make practical power plants.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-06/china-building-thorium-nuclear-power-station-gobi/104304468
The only difference between a test reactor and a live reactor is attaching a turbine.
But that article was talking about one specific type of reactor. The Molten Salt Reactor. Those are good. Completely walk away safe. They also are key for having nuclear power in areas with little water. But they're not the only type of reactor that uses Thorium.
CANDU reactors can burn thorium. It was part of the design specifications. They can also burn natural uranium. i.e. unenriched.
And your explanation for why no country is powering a city with one yet is what?
There have been CANDU reactors online for decades...
It was the reactor of choice for something like 20 years, before falling out of fashion.
MSRs are good, but are Thorium only, which wasn't fashionable until recently.
See, prior to about 10-15 years ago, the automatic answer to "how do you get a lot of power in a water poor area" was fossil fuels. Now we have options. Nuclear is one of them, but we need to dust off some older tech and bring it up to modern standards.
That takes time, but less then inventing new types of battery that can handle grid loads.