No 3MI or Chernobyl

Chris

Banned
Probabuly the longer that there were no disasters would mean less anti-nuke sentiment. Once one happens, bang!!

Chris
 
No nukes because of cost

Orders for more nuclear power plants collapsed because of cost overruns. We had already stopped ordering plants in the early seventies because coal power was too cheap. The only reason that the utilities ordered more nuke plants was because the nuke industry built some plants on turnkey contracts, they promissed that the next generation of nuclear plants would be even cheaper, but only offered cost plus contracts.
When the quoted price doubled half way through, then doubled again three quarters of the way through, it sort of soured the utilities on nukes. Then again, the attempt by Canada, Australia, South Africa and Southwest Africa, Niger, and Gabon, to rig the uranium price also helped. They jacked up the cost of uranium in time to force the utilities to sign high priced contracts, just before advances in geophysical prospecting increased the supply hugely and crashed the price.
The funny thing is that the utilities want to keep operating nuclear power plants at the most dangerous time, when they are already fatigued and worn out, but they can't because according to one of the mining magazines we are going to start running out of uranium in 2006 and have to start shutting down the older reactors anyway. We actually stopped producing enough uranium back in 1995, but made it up with dissassembled Russian nukes. Not enough exploration because no new advances in geophysical techniques, though I am working on one now.
 
wkwillis said:
Orders for more nuclear power plants collapsed because of cost overruns. We had already stopped ordering plants in the early seventies because coal power was too cheap. The only reason that the utilities ordered more nuke plants was because the nuke industry built some plants on turnkey contracts, they promissed that the next generation of nuclear plants would be even cheaper, but only offered cost plus contracts.
When the quoted price doubled half way through, then doubled again three quarters of the way through, it sort of soured the utilities on nukes. Then again, the attempt by Canada, Australia, South Africa and Southwest Africa, Niger, and Gabon, to rig the uranium price also helped. They jacked up the cost of uranium in time to force the utilities to sign high priced contracts, just before advances in geophysical prospecting increased the supply hugely and crashed the price.
The funny thing is that the utilities want to keep operating nuclear power plants at the most dangerous time, when they are already fatigued and worn out, but they can't because according to one of the mining magazines we are going to start running out of uranium in 2006 and have to start shutting down the older reactors anyway. We actually stopped producing enough uranium back in 1995, but made it up with dissassembled Russian nukes. Not enough exploration because no new advances in geophysical techniques, though I am working on one now.

I doubt we will actually run out of uranium, more likely the price will go up which makes somewhat more expensive mining areas pay off.
 
Well, there's always the problem of graphite-bed reactors being in greater use, with all of the problems that reactor type brings. (Chernobyl, at least, was a graphite-bed reactor)
 
Replies

Brillianlight
We have lots of depleted uranium. Regular uranium is .73% U235, and depleted uranium is .15% U235 in UCl4 form, so we could reprocess if somewhat expensively to .05% U235, and recover 600 tons of U235 from the 600,000 tons of .15% U235 containing UCl4 we have now. That will keep us going a while longer and let us start tapping U form phosphates and shale oil deposits.
Alasdair
Chernobyl was water cooled, graphite moderated. These are insanely dangerous reactors with the steam and hydrogen explosion possibilities of the Pressurised Water reactors and the Wigner strain dangers of the Pebble Bed reactors. They are accidents waiting to happen. Pebble Bed graphite reactors are much safer.
 
wkwillis said:
Brillianlight
We have lots of depleted uranium. Regular uranium is .73% U235, and depleted uranium is .15% U235 in UCl4 form, so we could reprocess if somewhat expensively to .05% U235, and recover 600 tons of U235 from the 600,000 tons of .15% U235 containing UCl4 we have now. That will keep us going a while longer and let us start tapping U form phosphates and shale oil deposits.
Alasdair
Chernobyl was water cooled, graphite moderated. These are insanely dangerous reactors with the steam and hydrogen explosion possibilities of the Pressurised Water reactors and the Wigner strain dangers of the Pebble Bed reactors. They are accidents waiting to happen. Pebble Bed graphite reactors are much safer.

Agreed, I was just commenting that like all natural resources the amount of uranium that can be profitably be mined goes up with the price of it. Usually it goes up faster then the price. IOW by making the price double of what it was you have more then twice the amount of raw materials available.
 
Costing

Right. We find mineral deposits all the time. We know exactly where to find lots of uranium at 100$ a pound, because we've already found it. Of course, your electricity bill will go up....
Same for other metals.
Not oil, though. It's too easy to just make methanol out of natural gas from Australian offshore and Canadian arctic, and with what's happening in Ti electrolysis technology, coal. We already may have peaked in oil production because while there is lots of expensive oil out there, the price won't go up because of methanol.
 
wkwillis said:
Right. We find mineral deposits all the time. We know exactly where to find lots of uranium at 100$ a pound, because we've already found it. Of course, your electricity bill will go up....
Same for other metals.
Not oil, though. It's too easy to just make methanol out of natural gas from Australian offshore and Canadian arctic, and with what's happening in Ti electrolysis technology, coal. We already may have peaked in oil production because while there is lots of expensive oil out there, the price won't go up because of methanol.


After a while even the more expensive raw material becomes cheaper via technology. That $100 uranium ore is going to fall in price in real terms once it is developed.
 
Punctuated equilibrium in technological evolution

Brilliantlight
The price of uranium may fall because I've invented a new geophysical prospecting method. This is not common and definitely not to be depended on. Otherwise sometimes the price goes up and doesn't come down.
 
wkwillis said:
Brilliantlight
The price of uranium may fall because I've invented a new geophysical prospecting method. This is not common and definitely not to be depended on. Otherwise sometimes the price goes up and doesn't come down.

Rarely happens, take virtually any raw material and check its price over a 20 or 30 year period and you will see the price fall in real terms.
 
The menace of a short memory

I spend a lot of time studying history. If you post regularly, you do to. Look at the last thirty years and you see raw material prices falling except when held up by cartels like oil. Look at a long enough time series and you will see more of an oscillation.
If you read the mining magazines you will see people talk about the last big stock market boom, the one that ended in 1966, and how it sucked away money from mineral development, and how it resulted in sudden peaks in mineral prices. Peaks that are happening again right now. Check the price of iron ore, lead, nickel, zinc, tin, copper, cobalt, etc.
Granted, iron ore is now a cartel, and tantalum is going down a little in price, and so is palladium because of the development of better deposition regimes for catalytic converters, etc, but the trend line is clear.
Oil is no longer a cartel. Every producer in the world is operating flat out. The price went up because of the Venezuela situation and then the Iraq situation, but we don't know if it is going to go down again when/if Iraq gets going again, or if the Iraqis will choose to increase production so the government can steal the money again, or if they will choose to just spend the money on medicine and food and produce the oil over a longer time.
Don't just look at the recent past.
 
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