Comment by natmaka
5 months ago
I doubt so: 416 industrial nuclear reactors are deployed in the world today. They produce 10% of the electricity, itself 20% of the final energy, so nuclear power produces at best 2% of the energy consumed.
Nuclear power would provide 10% of the energy, which would be far from sufficient since it is necessary to electrify uses (in order to reduce the quantity of fossil fuel burned) and therefore produce more electricity, if we could multiply the power of the fleet by 5, therefore building around 1500 new reactors and keeping the existing fleet active. Hoping for this before 2100 would be absurd.
Well, its way too late now. 80 reactors were launched between 1960 and 1970, 185 between 70s, 237 in the 80s, in the 90s it was barely 60.
Instead if it kept doubling every decade it would be well over 10%.
Of course electrification of transportation etc. should have starter much earlier.
Obviously none of that was economical compared to coal/gas/oil back then.
> doubling every decade
Uranium deposits mined under the right conditions can supply the current stock for at best two centuries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining#Peak_uranium
To extend this beyond that, we must hope for a revolutionary production process (pursued in vain for decades: breeders...), the ability to exploit less promising uranium deposits, thus tolerating increased emissions and costs, or the discovery of a large deposit.
Hoping for such a discovery is risky because intensive prospecting began at the end of the Second World War (the quest for nuclear weapons), and the rapid and sharp rise in the price of uranium (a bubble) that occurred around 2007 triggered a massive investment in prospecting, the results of which (15%) are very inadequate.
Therefore, multiplying the stock by five would leave at best 40 years of uranium certainly available under current conditions, and would therefore be an inept investment (one needs to amortize the plant).
Moreover there are geostrategic considerations: many nations don't have any reserve not want to have to buy uranium (creating a dependency) or technical expertise.
Since the 70s, oil reserves only lasted for another decade.
"Current reserves" is a moving target: once scarcity raises prices, prospecting makes sense again. Uranium is incredibly cheap. Prospecting is not worth it as there are enough reserves to exploit in the foreseeable future.
Seawater extraction is starting to be competitive with mining. With that, even natural Uranium becomes essentially unlimited.
In addition, we currently throw away >95% of the energy potential of the Uranium we use. Why? Recycling is not economically viable, because raw Uranium is far too cheap (see above). So facto 20 of what we've used so far is just sitting in Castors. And fortunately not in deep geological repositories, out of reach.
And then there's Thorium, which is significantly more abundant in the crust than raw Uranium. And of the Uranium, only a small percentage is currently usable.
Fuel is simply not going to be a problem.
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Having a massive head start at stopping or slowing down climate change would have been quite nice, though. Even if it weren't a permanent solution.
But yes, I agree that fossil fuels also had a lot of very significant political, economical and technological advantages over both nuclear and renewables which is why coal/gas/oil won. For renewables it might be changing now it just might be a bit too late...