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.