Comment by pfdietz
9 hours ago
IF the world got its primary energy from today's kind of light water reactors, uranium available at up to 3x the current price would only last for about five years.
A fully nuclear-powered world (including all energy use, not just grid electricity) would need breeding of some kind; otherwise the uranium just gets too expensive. So when you hear people claiming nuclear is cheap, ask them if that cheapness includes the technologies that would actually be needed for nuclear to do the full job.
If we needed more nuclear fuel we would be producing more of it. Comparing current production to a world where we use a thousand times more of it is ridiculous. Uranium is not that rare, and spent fuel rods still have well over 90% of their potency so they can be recycled.
Nuclear energy could easily power the entire planet for thousands of years.
Sure, we could produce more. It would have to be from much lower grade ores, and so would be much more expensive and disruptive. This is why breeding would be needed, so the cost of the uranium would not make nuclear even more unaffordable than it already is.
The argument about affordability is quite ridiculous in a world that is becoming uninhabitable as a direct cause of the "affordable" alternatives.
We could easily afford to use nuclear, and we wouldn't have to rely on it entirely - we have many alternatives such as solar, wind, hydro, geothermal etc. I'm also quite confident that economy of scale would improve the fuel cost, and the higher investment would make breeding and other nuclear technology advancements much quicker than they are and have been. Not to mention fuel cost is quite insignificant in nuclear energy.
We can however not afford the consequences of fossil fuels. We are already severely impacted by global warming and it will get much worse very quickly. I think this chart conveys the severity of our situation very well: https://www.dpg-physik.de/veroeffentlichungen/publikationen/...
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