The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [87]
In 2006, the 104 operating U.S. nuclear power plants purchased 66 million pounds of uranium, of which 11 million pounds came from domestic sources and the balance from foreign sources.14 Over the past decade, the world’s nuclear power plants have been running, in part, on the uranium from decommissioned U.S. and (former) Soviet warheads, with some 13 percent15 of the world’s total reactor fuel coming from the “Megatons to Megawatts” program.16
If the United States cannot currently meet its own needs for uranium domestically with only 104 operating reactors, how much hope should we place on the idea of building and operating hundreds more over the coming years? Even if the United States somehow managed to double its total number of operating reactors, it would still only be obtaining 16 percent of its total energy needs from nuclear power. And even this assumes that power demand does not grow at all between now and then.
For the world to move significantly to nuclear power above and beyond current levels, it will first need to figure out where the uranium to fuel the reactors will come from. The short answer is that it won’t come from conventional mining, because that industry is having a hard time keeping up with the plants that are already in operation. It couldn’t possibly service a doubling or tripling from these levels, let alone meet the 18-fold increase implied by the gap being left behind by Peak Oil.
Some hopeful nuclear power proponents then turn to the idea of fast breeder reactors, possibly those running on thorium (which is much more abundant than uranium), which could theoretically provide energy for the next thousand years. At least that’s the story brought about in a couple of thought papers put out in the popular media. It bears noting that only a handful of experimental fast breeder reactors have been constructed for demonstration purposes. As of 2010, no commercial breeder reactors have yet been deployed. Not one.17 Several of the early experiments have already been shut down and/or decommissioned, but a small handful of experimental, demonstration, and pilot breeder reactors remain: one in India, one in Japan, and two in Russia.18 The basic story here is that fast breeder reactors look very good on paper, but they have proved to be something of an operational nightmare, which is to say nothing of the intense national security risks that they pose by virtue of their production of plutonium if running on uranium, and uranium 233 (a fissile material useful for making nuclear bombs) if running on thorium.
Whether or not breeder reactors are a good idea is relatively insignificant when you consider that no commercial reactors are yet on the drawing boards, let alone currently built, operating, and adding to our available energy. If we are going to entertain hopes that these complicated machines will contribute to our energy story, we must first admit that they can’t possibly do this if they aren’t built. This seems a trite concept, but you’d be surprised how many people earnestly inform me that we are going to solve our energy predicament with breeder reactors. If Peak Oil arrives in 2014 (as I write this near the end of 2010), it seems incredibly unlikely that the world will somehow manage to build hundreds of breeder and nuclear reactors in the span of a decade, which is what would be required to offset the energy decline.
Here’s how the possibility of nuclear energy breaks down:
Time: Decades. It will be at least 10 years (and probably more like 20) before the number of operating nuclear reactors in the world, currently standing at 440 (in 2010), could possibly be doubled.
Scale: Enormous. The world’s capacity to build nuclear plants depends upon a limited number of engineers with the requisite training and skills, and there are a limited number of factories that can manufacture the specialty items needed to build a plant. More worryingly, it’s not clear that the necessary fuel will be available