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The Forum > Article Comments > Uranium industry slumps, nuclear power dead in the water > Comments

Uranium industry slumps, nuclear power dead in the water : Comments

By Jim Green, published 23/2/2018

Demand and prices for uranium are low and set to remain so: bad news for Australia's uranium industry but good news for those opposed to nuclear power.

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Coal it is then. We are lucky to have such a cheap fuel. By the end of the century when the uranium price goes up we can reprocess spent fuel and use even more abundant thorium.

If wind and solar are so cheap why do they need generous subsidies and quotas? Where is windpower in heatwaves when air conditioning demand goes through the roof? Where is solar when people are cooking their evening meals? What will reliably power heavy industry and eventually millions of electric cars?

I'm puzzled why indigenous groups would have organised opposition to nuclear. A cynic might think it is a front run by city based agitators, some them not indigenous.
Posted by Taswegian, Friday, 23 February 2018 7:58:40 AM
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Here's a new paper presenting a counterfactual analysis that shows the global benefits forgone as a consequence of the disruption to nuclear power progress in the late 1960s and since:
'Nuclear Power Learning and Deployment Rates; Disruption and Global Benefits Forgone' http://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/10/12/2169/htm
The anti-nukes are encouraged to read the Notes in Appendix B, before repeating the usual anti nuke-talking points.

Root-Cause Analysis attributes the cause of the disruption and cost escalations since to the activities of the anti-nuclear power protest movement

Regarding the cause of the disruption to nuclear power progress in the 1960s and 1970s, this Rand report is informative: Daubert and Moran, 1985, ‘Origins, Goals and Tactics of the US anti-nuclear protest movement’ https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/notes/2005/N2192.pd
Posted by Peter Lang, Friday, 23 February 2018 8:35:28 AM
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Good news for those (internationally) who are building new nuclear power stations.
Bad news for those who want more development of thorium power.

Meanwhile development in SA is being held back by bigots like Jim Green who can't tell the difference between constructing a nuclear waste dump in SA and turning the state into a nuclear waste dump. We may or may not have suitable sites for such a facility, but decisions should be based on the truth.
Posted by Aidan, Friday, 23 February 2018 8:37:42 AM
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Strange logic: that because the cost of processing uranium is low, energy companies will be less likely to take up nuclear power ? That no government will be interested because the cost of nuclear fuel is too LOW ?

Ah, so that's why governments and energy companies ARE interested n renewables - because their costs are so high ?

Ah, got it.

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Friday, 23 February 2018 8:54:27 AM
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What this character says is good only for lunatics: those who don't like nuclear but don't like coal either. They think that we can survive with windmills and solar panels. Well, we can't, and we need to start building more coal-powered stations ASAP. China knows it. India knows it. These countries will replace us in the First World before much longer, and we will have to beg them for aid. The West is rooted, thanks to the white-anting, treasonous Left.
Posted by ttbn, Friday, 23 February 2018 8:57:25 AM
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And, just by the way, we had a black-out in our part of Adelaide on Wednesday. Only for two or three hours, and on not particularly hot day. Not a peep about it in the news. Election's in three weeks.

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Friday, 23 February 2018 9:03:24 AM
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What did they expect They mine something as rare as plaintium, then extract that part of it that won't support a nuclear reaction, through expensive enrichment! Then spend even more fabricating it into ceramic pellets that are loaded into sealed tubes. That then must be taken out from the centre of the reactor and moved to the outside perimeter every 18 months.

Only able to be done three times meaning the entire expensive billions worth of fuel rods must be replaced every 4.5 years, with less than 1% of the energy component spent i.e., the nuclear industries business model.

Who make billions from fuel fabrication almost alone. Events like Three mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, have made this industry less popular than ever!

There's only one nuclear energy system that spends virtually all the fuel and that is sternly resisted molten salt technology. Which puts nuclear fuel fabricators out of business!

Whether the fuel is Thorium or uranium.

Thorium's cheaper, much more abundant!

The reason why uranium is no longer in favour. Has a weapons spinoff, mountainous waste, huge refueling costs!

Whereas the molten salt approach uses refined thorium and fluoride, laced with lithium and beryllium.

Fluoride is a very poor receptor of neutrons it is an inherently safe method.

This is where we ought be heading, to ensure we become a leading nation once again with a resuscitated manufacturing industry based on dispactable baseload power with median price of less than a professionally estimated, 2 cents per KwH.

This in turn makes broad scale desalination affordable for some truly massive irrigation projects, Ushers in fuel from seawater technology with prices for finished automotive fuel as low as 20 cents a litre?

Cheap enough for joe average to buy it by the barrel from the producer, cutting out the paper shuffling, middleman profit taker!

Then there's a huge new plastics and fertilizer industry! All of it endlessly sustainable!

Finally the thorium model can be tasked with burning other people's nuclear waste, or weapons grade plutonium/uranium.
Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Friday, 23 February 2018 11:07:25 AM
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Uranium industry slumps! And our resident Russian troll of his alter ego, Adian says, good news for Uranium, bad news for Thorium?
I guess there's some profound logic there from our resident anti Thorium campaigner.

Who is on the public record saying, okay over there, but not here.

If there's logic in either statement escapes me!

Perhaps it's somehow related to Russian oil and gas exports? and their total collapse if Thorium made a successful entry into the enormously expensive economy killing, energy market!

Or maybe Adian lives on his own personal planet and escapes a few times a week by sliding down a beam of pure light, just so he can abuse our best thinkers and rubbish their better ideas? And is just trying ever so hard to be helpful!? Whadda ya think?

How did St Petersburg look from the air the last time you flew over it Adian?
Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Friday, 23 February 2018 11:25:57 AM
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Again the claim that wind and solar are "cheaper", whatever that means. So why are electricity prices so high and rising?
This is a rhetorical question of course.
Renewables are total and utter BS and they are the reason our power is now unaffordable. The corporations will keep ramping up prices until we get a couple of new, very large coal power plants!
Posted by JBowyer, Friday, 23 February 2018 12:04:36 PM
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Hi Jim,

The cost of renewables: does one include the actual manufacture of wind towers, blades, internal rubber bands bits, maintenance AND the subsidies to power companies as well ? How long does a wind tower have to operate before it has compensated for the CO2 produced in its making ? Or do the elves make them at night out of fairy dust for free ? No CO2 produced whatever ?

Similarly solar panels. When wind towers are manufactured using only wind power, and solar panels using only solar power, AND energy generated by renewable means no longer requires subsidies, then we can start to take them seriously. Otherwise it's all a fraud.

Until then, use coal and nuclear.

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Friday, 23 February 2018 1:18:56 PM
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//Until then, use coal and nuclear.//

Or just nuclear. It's much cleaner than coal. I don't why that bothers halfwits like Jim so much.

It's probably the mining. Mining is generally pretty bad for the environment. I presume Jim doesn't use any sort of metal, because mining.
Posted by Toni Lavis, Friday, 23 February 2018 3:13:13 PM
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Stop your trolling and switch your brain on, Alan B!
I'm actually pro thorium.
But I'm not so deluded as to think a price slump for thorium's main rival ISN'T bad news for thorium.
Nor am I so deluded as to think we can yet generate power from thorium for 2c/kWh.
I expect that price will be achievable some day, but by then we'll be able to generate it more cheaply from solar. However not everywhere's so sunny - that's why I predict it's elsewhere that it will become economically viable.

And the last time I flew over any part of Russia was in 2003, and IIRC it was nowhere near St Petersburg.

___________________________________________________________________________________

JBowyer,
Electricity prices are high and rising because renewables are still being denied access to the cheap finance they need. Instead we're having to rely on expensive cross subsidies, and meanwhile insufficient dispatchable capacity is being provided to replace the old power stations that are closing.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Loudmouth,
>How long does a wind tower have to operate before it has compensated for the CO2 produced in its making ?
ISTR the answer is several months, and with solar panels it can be up to 2 years, though that figure's rapidly falling.

Back in the 20th century the huge energy investment needed to construct solar panels and wind turbines meant they were suitable only for niche applications. But those days are long gone.
Posted by Aidan, Friday, 23 February 2018 3:16:06 PM
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Hi Aidan,

So we can soon look forward to wind towers and solar panels made exclusively using renewable energy ?

Joe
Posted by Loudmouth, Friday, 23 February 2018 4:42:47 PM
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Actually joe, wind towers needs to turn for around thirty years before they actually compensate for all the carbon created in their manufacture.

Solar voltaic creates mountains of environment harming toxic waste that take centuries to work its way out of the environment. And they can only supply intermittent unreliable power!

Imagine a steel mill when the power heating the arc furnaces dies in the ass, allowing the molten metal to harden inside multimillion dollar, refractory grade graphite crucibles!

They could all be ruined and send the operation straight into bankruptcy.

The green movement seem to believe all we need are our P.C's and mobile phones and she'll be right?

Moreover there's almost a religious fanaticism for these so called renewables, given they're allegedly carbon free and not coal.

This fixation on renewables by a tiny section of society shows the paucity of thinking inside the alleged greens, who in this guise are more like your average ecofascism personified?

Makes one think doesn't it? Herr Hitler was a tree hugging vegan! And lack of essential b12 can result in some strange psychosis and extremely poor memory, Perhaps Russian troll, Adian's problem?

And he sang a different tune when I accused him a couple of years ago of being a St Petersburg resident and one of Putin's trolls.

He replied the closet he'd ever been to St Petersburg was when he flew over it. And In the archives or stored on my old computer.

Adian is routinely abusive and challenges establish fact as a matter of course and typical of obfuscating Russian trolls.

He is not here to help, but like a good little Putin's personal pupett, here to bury thorium and virtually any emerging technology that could conceivably threaten Russian gas or oil sales.

Don't be taken in by his abusive denials, just look at what he actually condemns or supports!

As for thorium, if he is not condemning it? Kicking way way off into future our grandkids may not actually have?

As for him, he probably believes they could simply migrate to a warmer Siberia?
Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Friday, 23 February 2018 6:56:54 PM
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Not such good news for the recalcitrant anti nuke propagandists, as this could easily awaken interest in the cheaper safer alternative, cheaper than coal thorium?

Which deals with virtually every legitimate concern of the anti nuke lobby. Thorium is fertile not fissile and therefore thorium in its unaltered state can't be used to make a thermonuclear device, or produce plutonium!

Yes, some fissile material is created but would be notoriously difficult to first extract from a reactor! Live or use it to produce a weapon, given the very short half life of some of the critical hot elements.

The product that makes abundant cheap thorium capable of sustaining a nuclear reaction is U33. U33 produces xenon 133 used in nuclear medicine a a gas breathed in, which assists scans of lungs, brain and several other important organs.

In a molten salt reactor spent fuel is pumped to the treatment side of the reactor and processed to remove unwanted products like neutron eating xenon, which in a thorium reactor is exclusively xenon 133.

Xenon also exists in nature, has a half life of 12 million years, therefore not particularly radioactive!

After spent fuel is thus refreshed, it's reintroduced back into the reactor again and again, until every erg of available energy, 99% is extracted. The remaining far less toxic 1%, vital as long life space batteries! We are running out of this material.

Lots of noise is being made about corrosion. Of concern where one is running pressurised systems, like light water reactors operating at 150 atmospheres!

A molten salt reactor operates at unpressurised normal atmosphere, so corrosion hardly a concern. Particularly, where leaks are self sealing, just alerts the operator it's time for scheduled shutdown/routine maintenance.

A molten salt reactor can't melt down. In the event of a power failure, passive safety design shuts reaction down, drains the reactor to a purpose built safe holding tank where the molten salt cools/crystallizes! TBC.
Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Saturday, 24 February 2018 10:38:04 AM
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Sounds like a load of wishful thinking to me.
Posted by Hasbeen, Saturday, 24 February 2018 11:41:23 AM
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People and our alleged representatives need to get their facts from the world's most knowledgeable premier experts on thorium, rather than a chorus line of detractors, many of them facing ruination! If we are finally smart enough to give thorium a go! By the way, if you want the facts on thorium.

Suggest former NASA scientist and eminent nuclear technologist, Kirk Sorensen is the bloke you need to listen to and as close as U tube and google tech talks and where you can listen to former ivy League professor and world leading economist, Robert Hargreaves, encapsulate his authoritative book, Thorium cheaper than coal.

Where he estimates the median price of molten salt thorium to be, one point nine eight cents!

Or you could listen to prize winning investigative Journalist, Richard Martin and fully informed Author of, Thorium, Super fuel, subtitled, green energy!

Or don't look and take a leaf from economic illiterate, Adian's book and continue to blather! And or, raise non issues and or science already a century or two out of date, or blatant crap, your choice!
Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Saturday, 24 February 2018 11:45:27 AM
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Whenever I see an article by Jim Green I always wonder how he has managed to misrepresent the numbers this time.

This time he has pointed to the low spot price of uranium, and declared the nuclear industry dead. Using this logic the coal industry is also dead. One only has to look at all the new high power reactors and HELE coal plants coming on line to see that we are looking at the most nuclear and coal fired power running than at any other time in history.

With regards to nuclear power, the number of reactors being built will take this another 50% higher in the next decade or so.

So why is uranium so cheap? There are a number of reasons:
1 The expectation of many more reactors lead uranium producers to over invest in production capabilities.
2 More countries are now reprocessing the waste which means that much of the spent fuel and plutonium can be re used, reducing demand and waste.
3 Larger new reactors are far more efficient producing more power for less fuel.
4 Fast breeder (incl thorium) and hybrid reactors are "breeding" fissionable fuel, again producing vastly more power per unit of uranium.

Jim Green should stick to reading tea leaves.
Posted by Shadow Minister, Saturday, 24 February 2018 6:14:37 PM
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Alan B.,
"wind towers needs to turn for around thirty years before they actually compensate for all the carbon created in their manufacture"
What is your source for this extraordinary claim? Could it perhaps be something that was published in the 20th century before we got good at making wind turbines?

"Solar voltaic creates mountains of environment harming toxic waste"
Not mountains, but like other semiconductor industry products it does produce waste which must be managed.

"And they can only supply intermittent unreliable power!"
The power from solar PV is not dispatchable but it's disingenuous to claim this amounts to unreliability, and EXTREMELY disingenuous to suggest it would cause steel mills to abruptly shut down. Nobody's stupid enough to suggest that steel mills should only run on PV with no backup. But it will probably become feasible for steel mills to schedule their operations to exploit cheap solar power.

"Makes one think doesn't it? Herr Hitler was a tree hugging vegan"
Well you're obviously not the one who it makes think, since you've blindly parroted a debunked myth. In reality Hitler wasn't a vegetarian, let alone a vegan.

As for your libellous claims against me:
It seems almost every time when you lose a logical argument you resort to ad hominems - often vicious and sometimes outright libellous. Now for a troll who libellously accuses me of being a St.Petersburg troll just because I've said something you don't want to hear, no insult I could come up with is as vicious as you deserve. Yet for the benefit of other readers, I keep the insults very tame and use them only sparingly - usually only as a response to someone insulting me, though occasionally in response to people posting the same debunked claims over and over again.

And IIRC what I said was that I'd never been to St.Petersburg, and the closest I've been to any part of Russia was when I flew over it. There's no contradiction; the last time I flew over any part of Russia was November 2003.

I'll respond to your points about thorium tomorrow.
Posted by Aidan, Sunday, 25 February 2018 1:28:48 AM
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Hasbeen, you're right. There's a lot of wishful thinking on display here. Top of the list is that somebody/anybody, will finance a new coal fired power station or a new coal mine!

Second that our resident Russian troll will stick to the facts or read/listen to the material by the. listed by me, eminent experts, who are unquestionably leaders in their respective fields. Or that you, ttbn and diver would?

That Adian would respond from his own store of knowledge instead of tomorrow from wikipedia or some bogus link, or develop some manners or respect for his elders! Be less economical with the truth!

Stop threatening libel when folk return serve for once! If he can and does dish it out, he needs to be able to cop it sweet instead of resorting to a bully boys bluster and bellicose belligerence so typical of ill mannered Russians!

That the thinkers in the room would stop wishing we hadn't signed that pesky non proliferation treaty! And therefore be free to build several light water reactors, now that funding for coal is completely dried up.

That our alleged leaders would face facts and the evidence and just stop prevaricating, trying to talk new coal fired power funding into existence and understand, there's money out there for thorium R+D! That they just need to get themselves and their, thou shall not, government created prohibition,, rules and regs out of the statute books and the way!

That Adian would finally understand, in a land where free speech is rigorously protected and defended in law, one can't be libelous when voicing an opinion. And legally speaking everything posted or presented in OLO is just that and by both definition and inference! This is not his Russia!
Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Sunday, 25 February 2018 8:42:15 AM
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Alan B.,
'm not threatening you with libel; I'm accusing you of libel. This accusation would itself be libellous were it not true, but your false accusations of me being a Russian troll are there for all to see. People have been sued for less, though I've no intention of doing so.

As for thorium: it decays into fissile U233 after absorbing a neutron. And thorium (or U233) reactors do produce Xe133 (not exclusively AIUI, but far more than other xenon isotopes).

Something you appear to have failed to understand is that Xe133 does not have the extraordinary neutron capture ability that Xe135 does. Because of Xe133's very long half life, its environmental effects are insignificant, though it's still worth capturing due to its value for medical use.

Thorium power and molten salt reactors do have great potential. But nobody has built a commercially viable one yet, and there are technical problems that will take time to overcome. I suggest you research them. But I doubt you will, as you seem to be stuck on shoot-the-messenger bigot mode.
Posted by Aidan, Monday, 26 February 2018 12:31:34 AM
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Nuclear energy isn't justified to be developed further, and especially not for commercial use.
It's just too much risk.
See debate at DebateIsland.com on this topic

http://www.debateisland.com/discussion/1762/is-it-justified-to-develop-nuclear-energy-for-commercial-use
Posted by Debate507, Monday, 26 February 2018 10:09:44 AM
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Hi Debate,

Risk ? Like in France or Finland, you mean ?
Posted by Loudmouth, Monday, 26 February 2018 12:28:01 PM
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