Abstract
Already in the 1950s King Hubbert pointed out the limited availability of fossil and uranium resources for energy usage. Many agree that reserves of oil will become scarce within this century and that to meet the world’s increasing demand for energy while simultaneously mitigating climate change, carbon intensive fossil fuels must be replaced by decarbonized energy sources. Thus, at least theoretically, nuclear energy could play a relevant role in the future energy system. However, uranium still is the main source material for all nuclear programmes world-wide and one should carefully examine its future availability before investing in a nuclear renaissance. Furthermore, uranium enrichment, a technology necessary to fuel today’s nuclear reactors, can be used to produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. This sensitive technology is already a cause of conflict in the international arena due to the fear that additional states get access to the bomb (nuclear proliferation).
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Notes
- 1.
Hubbert introduced the famous Gaussian bell-shaped depletion curves of exhaustible resources, modelling the production cycle by depicting production rate over time (Hubbert 1956). Such models provide also the base for “peak-oil” or “peak-uranium” prognosis.
- 2.
Note that most of the Japanese reactors were not in operation in the aftermath of the Fukushima accidents.
- 3.
This is discussed in much more detail in (Englert et al. 2011).
- 4.
- 5.
One exceptional deposit type is the large Canadian unconformity type in the Athabasca Basin. These deposits have an unusually high ore concentration in the per cent range (up to 20 %) and are therefore very attractive for mining even though the mining in wet sandstone is technically very challenging and energy intensive.
- 6.
Cf. e.g. Deutsches Atomforum (ed.): Gute Gründe für die Kernenergie [Good reasons for nuclear power]. Berlin, Sept. 2007.
- 7.
- 8.
“If no new rich uranium resources of significant size are discovered during the next decades, the nuclear system will fall off the energy cliff in the period 2050–2080, within the lifetime of new nuclear build, depending on the capacity of the world nuclear capacity.” (van Leeuwen 2012) Of course, the “energy cliff” will be reached quite earlier if nuclear power will be expanded in the near and mid term future.
- 9.
The mean value is 66 gCO2/kWh (Sovacool 2008). As a comparison natural gas in a combined cycle turbine emits 440 gCO2/kWh over the life cycle.
- 10.
Within these scenarios a linear increase of nuclear capacity worldwide over the coming years is assumed which is covering also the drop in capacity by decommissioning of old reactors (a lifetime of 40 years is assumed). For simplicity it is assumed that nuclear capacity will be constant after the expansion period of 2015–2050 and 2015–2070 respectively.
- 11.
An illustrative example are the current AREVA rector projects in Finland and France striving for the construction of Generation III type European Pressurized Water Reactors (EPR). Cost overruns and time delays will lead to specific overnight construction costs of at least 5,300 Euro per kW.
- 12.
This cannot be discussed here. More detailed information can be found in (ISR 2013).
- 13.
That is about one tenth of the global uranium production until now, having made Wismut for several decades one of the biggest uranium producers of the world.
- 14.
Ärzte-Zeitung, 30th April 2012.
- 15.
If one assumes that all uranium from the Wismut mines would have been used for electricity production, which is definitely not the case, the restoration costs would correspond to about 0.1 Euro-Cent per kWh. (Assuming an uranium demand of 180 t per GWel and a load factor of 0.8, 1 t uranium provides 7000/180 GWh electricity. Hence, 230,000 t uranium mined at Wismut could have produced 9,000 million kWh. The remediation costs of more than 7 billion Euro lead to about 0.1 Euro-Cent per kWh hypothetically produced electricity in (light water) nuclear power reactors.)
- 16.
Not only small clandestine uranium centrifuge facilities are undiscoverable, but also declared facilities are very hard to safeguard by the IAEA (Boyer 2007).
- 17.
URENCO was established as a trilateral uranium enrichment consortium (Germany, Netherlands, U.K.) in the 1970s.
- 18.
Iran, Argentina and Brazil also have enrichment facilities, however they are still small.
- 19.
Today Japan does not make full use of it’s existing nuclear capacity. If this policy is prolonged possible shortages might be postponed for a couple of years.
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Liebert, W., Englert, M. (2015). Nuclear Fuel Chain: Uranium Resources and Associated Risks. In: Hartard, S., Liebert, W. (eds) Competition and Conflicts on Resource Use. Natural Resource Management and Policy, vol 46. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10954-1_6
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