How much uranium is there out there for future use? 2

[frankiee]

How much uranium is there out there for future use?
Is there any truth to what some are saying that there will be a shortage in the future.

 

[EdStainless]

No. This is from the World-Nuclear.org
There is similar inforation avaialble from worldenergy.org

Current situation
According to the summary of uranium resources published jointly by the Nuclear Energy Agency of the OECD and the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, known reserves of uranium from conventional sources are slightly more than 3 million tonnes. Reactor requirements are fairly steady at about 60,000 tonnes per year. Thus there is about 50 years supply of uranium known at this stage to be available.
This is, however, an oversimplification of the situation. It is now clear that uranium is not scarce and it is known that it averages almost two parts per million of the Earth's crust. There are substantial resources that are not yet fully proven. These so-called speculative resources are likely to be of the order of 10 million tonnes, about three times the known reserves. While prices remain low, there is no incentive for exploration activities to identify new deposits. Experience with other commodities has shown that increased demand has led to increased prices, and a subsequent increase in exploration and discovery.


Fuel supply
Newly mined uranium is not the only source of nuclear fuel. Reprocessing of spent fuel to extract plutonium and uranium for use in new reactor fuel is already being undertaken in a number of countries. This displaces about 2000 tonnes of mine production each year, but the potential for recycling is considerably greater than this.
The utilisation of highly enriched uranium (HEU) from military sources, by diluting it to the low level of enrichment required for civil nuclear reactor fuel, is replacing about over 10,000 tonnes of newly mined uranium each year. However, once again, the potential is somewhat higher. If all of the world's military nuclear material were to be made available for electricity generation, even more natural uranium could be replaced.

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[ziggi]

frankiee, from what I understand there is plenty of raw uranium out there, ie. uranium which hasn't been mined or processed.
A shortage in usable uranium already exists as evidenced by the 700% increase in uranium prices in the past 7 years. The reason, many new reactors are coming online increasing demand, however uranium mining operations are not expanding as quickly, hence the increase in price.

I personally think that uranium suppliers will continue to ramp up operations, although slowly, they will let supply dwindle until a premium price can be reached. They've been living off bread and water for the past decade or two, I think they'll try their hand at champagne and caviar now. Will this strategy dissuade some companies from building reactors, not in my opinion. Nuke plants are not like coal plants, the majority of their costs come from setup, nuke fuel is cheap compared to coal or LNG, plant operators can afford to eat 700% increases b/c their bottom line decreases by a minimal amount. Besides once a plant is built you're pretty much a slave to prices.

 

[dpc]

There's plenty of raw uranium ore. We won't run out of that for a long time. That's why breeder reactors don't really make economical sense - there's just too much uranium out there.

As mentioned, processed uranium is a different matter - but that is just economics (and politics, I suppose)