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The Forum > Article Comments > Uranium bulls 'as rare as white unicorns' > Comments

Uranium bulls 'as rare as white unicorns' : Comments

By Jim Green, published 26/11/2019

Uranium exploration and mine development expenditures in 2016 were just one-third of the 2014 expenditures and are expected to continue to decrease.

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Nothing to worry about, then. Hopefully we will see a stop to the anti-nuclear harangue, and goodbye to Jim Green.
Posted by ttbn, Tuesday, 26 November 2019 8:31:35 AM
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So, what's Jim green's alternative for cleaner energy ?
Posted by individual, Tuesday, 26 November 2019 9:03:02 AM
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The article seems to undermine the Peak Uranium trope. Thermal coal at $70/t and 24 MJ/kg gives about $1.68 per MJ. Yellowcake at US$31.50/lb or A$47.23 per kg for 45,000 MJ gives $0.001 per MJ or a tenth of a cent. That's a fantastic advantage and with virtually no CO2.

Those mines currently on hold will go back into production in decades to come. Next century we may need 4th generation nuclear to re-fission single pass uranium fuel. We're lucky to live in a country where we can easily replace fossil fuels. As the years go by the rest of the world will come to Australia begging for cheap uranium.
Posted by Taswegian, Tuesday, 26 November 2019 10:18:16 AM
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Maybe, who knows? But not as rare as the current appetite for new coal!

Why?

Something else has finally started to register, i.e., MSR thorium?

Thorium is the most energy-dense material on the planet and is less radioactive than a banana.

Even with the disaster of Chernobyl,l a nuclear reactor malfunction! And Fukushima, A flood event, nuclear power generation still maintains the lowest fatality rate per gigawatt-hours than any other dispatchable electrical energy generation including Jim's beloved renewables!

And why a diabolically disingenuous Jim is now on the anti-nuclear bandwagon. Did he ever get off?

Jim will ask if MSR thorium is so good, why haven't we got one?

Good question that needs to be directly addressed to those folks who've prohibited it. The US congress and Canberra, which includes all nuclear power generation in its self imposed prohibition.

You'd think someone endlessly banging away abut nuclear waste etc. would be all over any technology (MSR) that made it far, far safer to store/reduced the half-life to just 300 years. All while providing electrical energy for less than a cent PKWH.

With the remaining waste product being eminently suitable a long life space batteries that stabilize in around thirty years and burn up with reentry.

And this dispatchable CARBON FREE energy can replace and then some all our current energy exports, via undersea graphene cored cables. That of their own have no carbon footprint as they reticulate, reliable, dispatchable, affordable, electrical energy to all who want it!

WE could become an energy superpower that not even Jim's much-vaunted renewables could touch!

All that prevents this change and the affordable desalination; and real action on climate change, that would also ensue, is activists just like Jim!

Why? Good question! Of note is his remarkable silence on coal?

Could there be a connection we've all missed?
Alan B.
Posted by Alan B., Tuesday, 26 November 2019 11:01:54 AM
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replying to Alan B.

HE CLAIMS " thorium is less radioactive than a banana.
FACT. Emission of gamma rays: Presence of Uranium-232 in irradiated thorium or thorium based fuels in large amounts is one of the major disadvantages of thorium nuclear power reactors. It can result in significant emissions of gamma rays.

HE CLAIMS Thorium wastes are " far, far safer to store/reduced the half-life to just 300 years"
FACT. the fission products from a Thorium reactor are a worry, Technetium-99 has a half life of 220,000 years, uranium-232 produces thallium-208 (a nasty wee gamma emitter), Selenium-79 (another gamma emitter with a 327,000 year half-life), even Thorium-232 is a problem with its half life of 14 Billion years (and while the T-232 isn’t a major worry, all the time during this 14 Billion years it will be decaying and producing stuff that is!

HE CLAIMS. Thorium nuclear power is CARBON FREE energy.
FACT. All Nuclear power has a big carbon footprint. At the front end of nuclear power, carbon energy is used for thorium mining, milling, processing, conversion, and enrichment, as well as for transportation, formulation of rods and construction of nuclear reactors (power plants). At the back end, there is the task of isolation of highly radioactive nuclear waste for millennia - more transport, building of containers, digging of repositeries.
Posted by ChristinaMac1, Tuesday, 26 November 2019 12:59:51 PM
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@ChristinaMac thorium is ubiquitous in beach sand as grains of the the common mineral monazite. It's the UV from the sun that harms beachgoers not the sand. The problems with thorium power are not the ones you list but engineering problems. Carbon emissions in uranium mining are trivial, about 12 grams of CO2 Scope 2 emissions per kwh. Those trivial emissions could reduce even further with ore leaching not crushing and laser enrichment.

In contrast Australia's average electricity emissions are 820 grams of CO2 per kwh according to a recent report. Wind and solar need open cycle gas or fast ramped coal to firm their output which is why after two decades of the RET we still have high electricity sector emissions. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Posted by Taswegian, Tuesday, 26 November 2019 3:01:54 PM
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China is the world leader in MSR thorium research.

China - "148 gigawatts of coal-fired plants are either being built or are about to begin construction, according to a report from Global Energy Monitor, a non-profit group that monitors coal stations. The current capacity of the entire EU coal fleet is 149 GW."

Hands up all those who think China thinks MSR thorium is viable.
Posted by mhaze, Tuesday, 26 November 2019 3:37:11 PM
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Another great article by Jim Green, building fact upon data that Uranium-nuclear energy is not the energy genie nuclear enthusiasts wished it was.

And Thorium? A shallow distraction of some techno-dreaming odd-bods at OLO. Thorium is pie-in-the-sky, never proven commercially. Thorium has not even reached the stage of being proven a power failure like Uranium 235 reactors.

And Australia's lack of experience with commercial use of nuclear power makes Australia the middle-power least equipped to develop improved power reactors of any type.

There IS a successful nuclear power technology that millions of Australians now rely on. OLO's odd-bods just don't recognise it.

- Its solar energy which relies on rays produced from permanent FUSION reactions on the Sun. This FUSION solar energy has none of the downsides of trying to make nuclear FISSION a viable energy source here on Earth.
Posted by plantagenet, Tuesday, 26 November 2019 8:25:37 PM
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Jim Green still hasn't proposed an alternative !
Posted by individual, Wednesday, 27 November 2019 6:19:25 AM
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The alternative that millions of Australians now rely on are solar cells on a home or larger scale. These harness FUSION solar energy from the Sun.

Ever cheaper more efficient batteries are now storing the solar energy unused during daylight hours.

This solar-battery technology has none of the downsides of trying to make nuclear FISSION a viable energy source here on Earth.
Posted by plantagenet, Wednesday, 27 November 2019 9:43:23 AM
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The Molten Chloride Salt FAST reactor has the following properties.
+ It *cannot* melt down because the fuel is already a liquid.
+ It requires power to keep the fuel up in the core and reacting. In a power failure the hot liquid salt pours down to the drain tank and the moment it cools to 400 C the salt crystalises into a solid block that's not going anywhere.
+ The Molten Chloride Salt Fast Reactor eats uranium and thorium and nuclear waste and nuclear warheads!
+ It burns all the longer-lived 'waste' out of it, getting 90 times the energy out of the waste, turning a 100,000 year storage problem into today's energy solution.
+ The final wastes are fission products that you melt into ceramic blocks and bury under the reactor carpark for 300 years. Then they're safe! Your whole life would only result in 1 golf ball of waste. That volume for Australia would only come to 1.4 Sydney Olympic pools of nuclear waste after 70 years of abundant, reliable, carbon free electricity!
+ Uranium from seawater can run the world for billions of years. It's essentially 'renewable' because geological activity and erosion tops up the oceans.
+ Dr James Hansen, the world's most famous climatologist, says we need nuclear power and we should look to the history of the French. They built out a mostly nuclear grid in just 15 years. It can be done, fast and cheap. The French electricity bill is about half Germany's, and Germany is only a third done with their unreliable wind and solar plan. According to Hansen the choice is nuclear power or climate change.

If Jim Green thinks he's a better environmentalist than Dr James Hansen, he should check himself in for help.
Posted by Max Green, Wednesday, 4 December 2019 5:09:09 PM
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PLANTAGENET

Even 'clean' power like solar PV uses 15 times more building material and 5000 times more land than nuclear. http://tinyurl.com/y2n45cz9 It also quite worryingly produces 300 times the waste per unit of energy than nuclear! http://tinyurl.com/ybpwgrsc By 2050 Australia could have 1.5 MILLION tons of solar e-waste to try and recycle, and we currently don't include that cost in the price of solar installations. http://tinyurl.com/y6clgxa8 Indeed, renewables expert Matthew Stocks (rightly) demanded I show the cost to decommission nuclear power plants and store the waste. But when asked, he admitted he hadn't done the same for solar! Why does solar 'cost modelling' not include the *huge* task of cleaning up and recycling 300 times the waste? http://tinyurl.com/y8vwdgp4

"Clean" solar is not so clean. But the real worry is EROEI - Energy Returned over Energy Invested - which measures the energy profit of a power plant after all the energy it cost to build it in the first place. Renewables have an OK EROEI on their own. But what about a 100% renewable grid? What about the energy to build all those pumped-hydro dams as 'batteries' for when the sun goes down and wind goes quiet? The figures on this paper might be a little old, but show that renewables + storage may not even be a high enough energy source to run our world. http://tinyurl.com/ya3c3esp Dr James Hansen — the climatologist that diagnosed our climate problem — says believing in 100% renewables is like believing in the Easter Bunny or Tooth Fairy. http://tinyurl.com/yclaf2sn

Normal reactors have an EROEI around 60.
Breeder reactors get 60 to 90 times the energy out of each bit of uranium! Because they eat 'nuclear waste' they cut the energy intense mining and refining stage.
In other words, their EROEI is 40 * 60 (going conservative) = an EROEI of 2400 or much higher!
Posted by Max Green, Wednesday, 4 December 2019 5:31:38 PM
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