The Verge of Crisis in US Nuclear Fuel: A Gorgonian Knot

[NNadir]

I hear a lot from dumb assed antinukes about "peak uranium," the wishful thinking of their asinine and frankly deadly enthusiasm for the status quo coupled with a reactionary fantasy that we should return to a practice of depending on the weather for energy which was abandoned in the early 19th century for a reason.

It is impossible to consume all of the uranium on Earth; there is simply too much of it, which should be obvious if one considers that uranium, and to a lesser extent, thorium and radioactive potassium, powers plate tectonics. It moves the continents around.

Nevertheless, in the short term, in current industrial practices in the nuclear fuel industry - which I personally believe need to be changed - there is a problem.

An article on the topic from earlier in the last year:

On the verge of a crisis: The U.S. nuclear fuel Gordian knot

Some excerpts:

The naturalist John Muir is widely quoted as saying, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” While he was speaking of ecology, he might as well have been talking about nuclear fuel.

At the moment, by most accounts, nuclear fuel is in crisis for a lot of reasons that weave together like a Gordian knot. Today, despite decades of assertions from nuclear energy supporters that the supply of uranium is secure and will last much longer than fossil fuels, the West is in a blind alley. We find ourselves in conflict with Russia with ominous implications for uranium, for which Russia holds about a 14 percent share of the global market, and for two processes that prepare uranium for fabrication into reactor fuel: conversion (for which Russia has a 27 percent share) and enrichment (a 39 percent share).

No one really knows whether Russian exports will survive the war in Ukraine. Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned atomic energy corporation and the successor to the Soviet Minatom, is deeply tied to the war effort, and the U.S. government has already sanctioned three Rosatom subsidiaries as well as one person involved in Russia’s control of the Zaporizhzhia reactor complex. But this has not spurred efforts at self-sufficiency; so far, the effect has been paralysis.

This could be called a failure of the market, but it is really a failure of governments, here and abroad. “The uranium market was never an actual market,” said William D. Magwood IV, director general of the Nuclear Energy Agency. “It’s always been a government creature,” he said.

In hindsight, Congress and the Department of Energy have made some major miscalculations, the biggest being the assumption that imports from Russia would meet U.S. national security objectives and financial needs. Those imports included Soviet stocks of weapons-grade uranium downblended to meet civil reactor needs and a lot of inexpensive enrichment. But it now appears that the imports have allowed almost every step in the domestic fuel supply chain—from mining and milling to conversion and enrichment—to wither...

The article goes into some detail. One short term solution is the development, discussed in the article, via the focus on the materials science of nuclear fuels, to rely on fuels enriched above 5% to around 10% using recently developed accident tolerant fuels. These will be used in the new Vogtle reactors, as I discussed here: The Vogtle 4 Nuclear Reactor Will Feature the First Use of 6% Enriched Uranium in a LWR

Personally, I have long felt that we need to do away with uranium enrichment all together, and move toward reprocessing of used nuclear fuel. The US, still the world's largest supplier of commercial nuclear energy despite the serious efforts of antinuke ignoramuses, has about 80,000 metric tons of used nuclear fuel. About 1%, roughly of this fuel is plutonium by mass, with an energy content of about 65 exajoules, or about 65% roughly, in the "percent talk" used by antinuke reactionaries to defend useless and fossil fuel dependent so called "renewable energy," of annual US energy demand from all sources, including the coal, oil and gas about which antinukes couldn't care less. Since plutonium forms in used nuclear fuels, running MOX fuels in reactors means that the plutonium will not be entirely consumed. If we partner with the Canadians and their CANDU systems, in theory at least, we could do away entirely with enrichment facilities.

If we add a little thorium to plutonium/uranium based fuels we can extend burn ups - in nuclear fuels "burn ups" are the rough equivalent of gas mileage - to very high levels, especially given the robustness of fuels even in US light water reactors.

One thing is certain. We need to cut the Russians out of the supply chain.

I trust you'll have a nice weekend.