I'm not sure what this article is saying. Perhaps it is a lament for the realisation that 'squeaky clean' wind and solar energy cannot replace coal despite the efforts of countries like Spain, Denmark and Germany. The choice now appears to be between a nuclear revival and a return to 19th century living standards. If nuclear gets the nod (before the economy loses its ability to make large investments) then we have to make it as safe and proliferation resistant as possible.

The green movement is now faced with a catch 22.

It has to choose between global warming or nuclear power.

If they wait long enough we will have both.

History is repeating itself.

Two centuries ago there were those who fought against mechanisation. There main concern was jobs but some might have argued that steam engines driven by dirty coal were polluting the environment. If only they had understood global warming theory in those day they might have been able to stop mechanisation in its tracks and we could still be living in peace and harmony tending our farms and enjoying our life expectancy of 25 years.

Now we not only have dirty fossil fuels we have dirty uranium as well to fight against. If we get rid of both we also say goodbye to reliable electricity which will largely fix the mechanisation problem that the luddites fought so hard against back in the early part of the 19th century.

We could wind the clock back to those good old days. Is that what you want Professor Lynch?

All issues of the military and chemical dangers of uranium aside, the basic numbers for a nuclear electricity future just don’t stack up. Consider the following, based on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IEA) own numbers:

World reserves of uranium (commercial at $US130/kg- present price $US120/kg): 5.5 million tonnes.
Present annual consumption by reactors: 66,500 tonnes.
Therefore, present lifetime of reserves: about 80 years.
Proportion of world’s electricity presently supplied: 16%.
Proportion of total energy demand: 6%
“Expected” (by IEA) annual demand by 2030: about100,000 tonnes.
Therefore lifetime of reserves in 2030: about 30 years- ie to 2060.
Present annual increase in global energy demand: 2.4% = 30 year doubling period.

The IEA optimistically estimates possible reserves at 10.5 million tonnes, which would stretch the lifetime to 60 years (2090) at expected 2030 production rates. This barely maintains the proportion of the total energy contributed by nuclear.

What does a “nuclear future” mean? Even if the proportion of nuclear energy were to double by 2050 (to about 30% of electricity and about 15% of total energy, assuming a moderate shift to electricity, the nuclear supply would have to quadruple (ie 4 times present). Assuming a linear ramp-up between now and 2050, about 6 million tonnes of uranium will have been consumed by that date, and the estimated 10.5 million tones will have been exhausted in about another 16 years (about 2075).

The IEA is optimistic that advanced reactors will extend the reserves to 1000 years. However, none are yet being built commercially, and commencement still looks decades away. Any sensible scenario for developing a stable of advanced reactors, starting from scratch in 2010, given the time taken to build a reactor (about 10 years at present), will still have the uranium resources pretty well depleted before advanced reactors can take over.

These numbers are never addressed publicly by nuclear boosters. And they are the IEA’s own numbers.

Surprisingly I agree with all the other commentators to date, even including Taswegian. The article does not acknowledge the basic reason for the increased interest in nuclear energy, that it remains the only partical way to provide base load power that does not emit many tonne of carbon.
The concern over nuclear proliferation which seems to be that article's main argument is sooo 70s, and arguably a shaky idea back then. Since then the Soviet Union had gone through a considerable period of upheaval in which a lot of its conventional arsenal found its way onto the black market. Why wasn't there a black market in soviet nuclear devices? Not sure, but one would have thought that was the real danger period for terrorist use of nuclear weapons - one of the arguments against nuclear proliferation. As for Nth Korea and Iran, where is that uranium coming from?
Then there is the issue of waste which has to be stored, but the volumes involved are infinitismal compared to the waste from a coal station. Safe storage is really only a problem in the mind of the article's author.

A long rambling essay which doesn't say very much at all!
Of course the world could be decimated by nuclear bombs,but that is a political matter which has nothing to do with the necessity of establishing nuclear power plants.
Already they are a major contributor to electricity production in Europe,for example in France 70% of requirements are made by them.
Australia is living in its usual isolated lotus land intellectual vacuum.We are still fantasizing about all the usual silly alternatives,none of which are realistic
If we really proceed to shut down the coal fired plants, we wiil really have no choice other than nuclear plants.
The latest ones are light years in advance of the Chernobyl designs as regards efficiency and safety.
In Australia,it has been calculated that an area the size of 5 Olympic pools could contain all our waste requirements for the next 1000 years!
If Nuclear fusion becomes practical within a few decades,there would be no waste at all.
Wake up Australia!

World reserves of uranium are in the order of 35 million tonnes not 5.5 and most experst think there is a ltest that much again to tbe found. Add that to the reality of the cusrrent generation of Nuke power plants only buring 1-2% of the fuel, then new tech that could burn 80-90% of the fuel would make these reserves last even longer. There are plans for nuke power that doesn't create waste and we should explore these as well. No new coal fired power stations should be build in Oz form now on. any new power station should be nuke,wind and solar. Nuke to supply the baseline and solar and wind to help with peak.

I'm surprised that no-one has so far mentioned the possibilities of thorium reactors.

Thorium reactors, while not yet developed I believe, offer many advantages over conventional uranium reactors. Firstly, the reaction in a thorium reactor is not self-sustaining, thereby reremoving the risk of meltdown. Secondly, thorium reactors produce about 3% of the waste of a uranium reactor; the waste also only stays radioactive for about 500 years.

Even better, thorium reactors do not breed plutonium, and can actually be used to convert existing weapons-grade plutonium into a non-weapons grade material.

Finally, guess which country has the world's biggest deposits of thorium?

Attendant irony: yes, I went to my share of anti-nuclear demos, in the late 70s and early 80s. Ralph Waldo Emerson was right.

Nuclear is the only solution. All energy, food and life on earth depends on our wounderful nuclear reactor, which we call the Sun.
All other forms of energy are detrimental to life on earth.
It is time for humans to modify our behavior to fit the environment.
smartie

Kenny- In the spirit of maintaining INFORMED opinion in OLO, could you please cite your information sources for your assertion of 35 million tonnes? I'm citing the International Atomic Energy Agency IEA- they are supposed to be the most authoritative source. Do you know a better source? The main point that I'm making is that these so-called "advanced" reactors have been mooted for many years, but all seem to have practical difficulties that prevent them from going commercial. In the meantime, the very limited uranium supply is being consumed in conventional reactors.

There seems to be very little comprehension of how darned complex and difficult nuclear power is. This translates into time and money and, more importantly, net energy. For a detailed analysis of the energy balance and nuclear power see http://www.stormsmith.nl/.

Wishful thinking and unfounded assertions won't cook our meals or power our cars.

BHP Billiton has published the EIS for its Olympic Dam expansion, in which it appears that to reach the first combined ores (of copper, uranium, gold and silver) 300 metres down around 2 billion tonnes of rock has to be set aside from the initial big hole. This is anticipated to take five years and requires the moving of the current Roxby Downs airport. It will need additional imports of diesel amounting to 2 billion litres. If it goes ahead it will take a decade before the developers get a return on the capital, as yet undefined.

In Canada uranium production has fallen 23% since 2005, because the new Cigar Lake mine is flooded and the existing mines have passed their Hubbert peaks and are closed or in decline. Australian production has fallen 11% in the same time frame. A 6% rise in global production last year was due to a 95% rise in Kazakh production, due to the opening of new mines.

To extract the uranium reserves needed for the so-called "renaissance" enormous capital sums will have to be expended to open the needed series of replacement new mines.

Meanwhile the cost of the new fleets of nuclear power stations is soaring, characterised by the overexpenditure of the first EPR in Finland.

Nuclear power can only be funded with state funds or loan guarantees and the latest "free market" stratagem is to glean carbon credits from levies on fossil fuel competitors to fill the income over expenditure deficit. As this will progressively bankrupt its competitors the developers in the UK have asked for the carbon credits to be state guaranteed for the 60 years' life of the projects.

The ten new starts in 2008 were all state funded. Perhaps we are fortunate that the Western states promoting nuclear power are debt laden and the "dark dawn of the nuclear age" will fail to rise, at least in the West.

For most countries the clean power choices are importing clean power across their borders or having nuclear power from within their borders. anyone who has followed the difficulties europe has had with the USSR playing games with their natural gas supplies would understand both the strategic and balance of trade implications of importing power, often via very long power lines that will cross a number of borders.

As far as the world is concerned the nuke debate is over. in the case of Australia there is no overwhelming reason to go nuclear for the next 20 odd years. In the mean time there are promising developments going on that may allow us to completely clean up eelctricty without the need for nuclear.

In the meantime it makes sense to keep tabs on gen 4 nuclear and thorium developments and develop the regs we would need to go nuclear.

Wind farms and solar power plants are also Government supported.
Development of both in Australia occurred because there was a Mandatory Renewable energy target set by the previous govt and when that target was meet the industries faltered .
If there is no Government support there is no renewable power industry.
Coal is just too cheap.
The first Thorium reactor was powered up in the 1950's but did not produce any plutonium so the authorities lost interest.
http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/TE_1450_web.pdf
leads to interesting paper on thorium powered power stations.

I’m still not sure where Jake Lynch is going with this obtuse article. Overall it smacks of anti nuclear and pro renewable. Some might suggest that had it not been for the “Green” opposition to nuclear energy, the West might have made a very large dent in carbon emissions over the last 60 years.

“We made the mistake of lumping nuclear energy in with nuclear
weapons, as if all things nuclear were evil. I think that’s as big a
mistake as if you lumped nuclear medicine in with nuclear weapons.”
Patrick Moore,
former Director of Greenpeace International

Uranium can be used 60 times more efficiently in fast breeder reactors, which burn up all the uranium. Almost all the recoverable uranium is in the oceans, not in the ground: seawater contains 3.3mg of uranium per m3 of water, which adds up to 4.5 billion tons worldwide. Japanese researchers have found a technique for extracting uranium from seawater at a cost of $100–300 per kilogram of uranium.

Thorium is a radioactive element similar to uranium, it is about three times as abundant in the earth’s crust as Uranium. Thorium is used in nuclear reactors in India. If uranium ore runs low, thorium will probably become the dominant nuclear fuel.

Professor David Mackay estimates total sustainable energy production of theoretical or practical renewable resources in the UK at 18 kWh per day per person.

Tide: 3 kWh/d
Offshore: 4 kWh/d
Hydro: 0.3 kWh/d
Biomass: 4 kWh/d
Solar PV: 2 kWh/d
Solar HW: 2 kWh/d
Wind: 3 kWh/d

His analysis is supported by the Institute of Electrical Engineers, the Tyndall Centre, the Interdepartmental Analysts Group, the Performance and Innovation Unit; and the proposals from the Centre for Alternative Technology.

This is 18 kWh per day per person against average demand of 125 kWh per day per person. Granted that this is for the UK but I can’t imagine Australia bettering their potential for sustainable alternative energy contributions.

Renewable energy? Surely we have to be joking.

All data sourced from Professor David MacKay’s book “Sustainable Energy” Visit www.withouthotair. The book download is free.

Did I miss a memo?
Does everyone here accept that the world is going to end in 100 years, or 200 years, or 500 years?
The problem with coal or oil or uranium, is that they are non renewable resources.
Once you use them, they are GONE.
Forever.
Do we really have the right to steal these valuable resources from the unborn generations for the next thousands of years, for just a few years of electric can openers?
Does anyone stop to wonder how historians a thousand years hence, will judge us?
Or will it be our fault that there will be no historians, a thousand years hence.

I think nuclear weapons proliferation is a greater concern than nuclear waste or reactor safety. People like Pr. Barry Brooks make strong arguments for the use of nuclear but he talks about IFR technology that would run entirely off existing nuclear waste, gradually eliminating most of the long lived stuff. It would need no fresh uranium for the foreseeable future.

Nuclear has to be on the agenda - the seriousness of climate change demands it but with a real carbon price a lot of other technologies look a lot more attractive. Right now most renewables would be cheaper than coal with sequestration and Australia should, being well endowed with renewable resources be going for them vigorously.

Economies of scale and ongoing technological improvements will continue their trend of getting cheaper. Australia will not be first to commit to new gen nuclear but can't sit idle waiting for it (whilst massively expanding coal mining and export) and seriously be considered to be facing the greatest challenge of our time head on with eyes open.

Inst it hilarious to see all these global warming skeptics with their blatant biases and inconsistancies.

On the one hand we have nuclear scientists and they are infallible, prescient and just "lets stick our tongues up their dates" worshipful.

But global warming and climate scientists! Oh no they are evil commo latte sippers out to destroy the world and send us back to the dark ages.

Youre a bunch of condescending idiots who dont seem to understand that the majority says no and since this is a democracy you suck it up and we dont get nukes

Hey some joke this nuclear energy thing.

Australia requires at least 25 nuclear reactors by 2050 to provide just one third of the nation's electricity (add a few more reactors given the predicted population explosion.) That's at least one reactor built every 1.6 years. Huh?

Will it mitigate Australia's abominable CO2 emissions? No, particularly given the myriad of low U grade operations ready to crank up thus increasing carbon dioxide emissions.

Will it mitigate the abominable record Uranium mining operations have in this country on occupational health and safety and environmental catastrophes? I doubt it.

“Western Australia has a strong regulatory
framework for uranium mining through existing
legislation under the Mining Act 1978, the Mines
Safety and Inspection Act 1994, the Environmental
Protection Act 1986 and the Radiation Safety Act
1975”

Funny that since “In its 1996 Environment Progress Report, released in July 1997, WMC (now BHP) "admitted leaving a contaminated trial uranium mine (Yeelirrie) exposed to the public, with inadequate fencing and warning signs, for more than 10 years".

"A spokesperson for WMC said a 1995 inspection revealed the problems and also admitted that the company could have known about the problem as early as 1992." 1992? Wasn't the mine abandoned in 1987?

“Western Mining said there were inadequate signs warning against swimming in a dam at the site, which was found to be about 30 times above World Health Organisation radiation safety standards and admitted that people used the dam for "recreational" purposes including swimming, but did not drink the salty water." Well that's comforting.

A friend of mine used to swim in a tailings’ dam at Yeelirrie. He's no longer with us.

More recent breaches of licence, spills, leaks and radiation exposure of workers in Australia continue in the 21st century.

And currently about 100,000 litres of contaminated water is seeping each day from a tailings dam at the Ranger mine in Kakadu. Legislation states that a dam lining must endure for 100 years. Yeah right you are boss!

Kenny thanks for getting the correct information out on Uranium reserves. It really gets my goat when the anti-nukes basicly lie like "jedimaster" in order to prove their point. Once agian kenny thanks for fighting the anti-nuke lie.

Dear jfarmer9: Asserting, without supporting evidence, that someone is a lier, is essentially slander, and has no place in OLO, which is endeavouring to lift itself above the major media cesspool. You are demeaning OLO by your utterances. I refer to Graham Young's Article 'The Age' and 'On Line Opinion' of 29/7/09.

If Kenny has some verification that there are more uranium reserves than the IEA estimates, then let him state it- and why the IEA is wrong.

I do not make up numbers- my ethics forbid it and my scientific training enables me to find and interpret the numbers that I state.

OLO is an online forum, not a lavatory graffiti wall. Respect it!

Jedi,

"Uranium 2007: Resources, Production and Demand, also known as the Red Book, estimates the identified amount of conventional uranium resources which can be mined for less than USD 130/kg* to be about 5.5 million tonnes, up from the 4.7 million tonnes reported in 2005. Undiscovered resources, i.e. uranium deposits that can be expected to be found based on the geological characteristics of already discovered resources, have also risen to 10.5 million tonnes. This is an increase of 0.5 million tonnes compared to the previous edition of the report. The increases are due to both new discoveries and re-evaluations of known resources, encouraged by higher prices."

If there is sufficient demand, the amount of uranium discovered will increase as others look for it. I can't find anything to justify 35Mt, but I don't see it being far from reality.

Was this article published on April 1? It's a wonderful combination of paranoia and conspiracy theory that should be made into another "Dr Strangelove" movie - as a comedy, of course. Lynch is the worst type of environmental campaigner - targeting our most base emotions with erroneous or irrelevant accusations and presumptions but contributing nothing to human understanding of the core issues. If the peace movement includes the author as one of its adherents, no wonder the world has so many wars.
Just one example of his lack of scientific understanding of matters nuclear: "Nuclear fission, an artefact of modernity". Maybe Lynch should find out the story of the Oklo natural reactor which operated some 1.7 billions years ago.

Thanks, Shadow Minister, for quoting a reliable source of information. It's good to infuse our debates with a bit of data. I can see now that we are quoting the same sources, but with somewhat different interpretations- which is what OLO is all about.

The difference of interpretation of prospects comes from the issue of price and availability and its connection to net energy: The higher price is not separate from net energy- the higher the cost, the more energy required to extract it and the less energy that is available for end-uses. See my article forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=8077 for more details. I admit that the cost/energy nexus is not resolved, but the correlation must be high. Storm van Leeuwin http://www.stormsmith.nl/ has done a lot of work on the uranium cost/energy issue. It cannot be ignored. Uranium from seawater simply doesn't give us any net energy.

Even if the uranium supply is 35 Million tonnes, simple calculations of the kind that I have shown in my earlier posting would give a best case scenario of 150 years and with net energy considerations, probably 100 years. Then what? The point is that we are looking for a sustainable future- to push nuclear any harder would not achieve that aim

Jedi,

The new generation reactors could quite easily produce power with less than 10% of the consumption of the existing reactors, and even use their waste.

This combined with the as yet un discovered reserves would be sufficient for millenia.

This does not even cover Thorium reactors, or even Fusion reactors in the future.