Energy Biz - September/October 2008 - (Page 17) high-grade ore to supply present needs for 40 or 50 years, not the 100 or more the industry touts. Ian Lowe, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation writes that at the current rate of use, high-grade ores “will last about 50 years.” He further contends that if the number of nuclear plants were expanded to replace all coal-fired plants, resources “would only last about a decade or so.” He also maintains that extracting and processing lower-grade ores will, in the end, require expending more conventional sources of energy and result in more greenhouse pollution. Fellow Aussie Martin Sevior, a physics professor at the University of Melbourne, disagrees. He says exploration has already put a positive spin on the numbers. As a result, “world uranium reserves in the commercially proved category have increased by 66 percent since 2003,” he says. “From a bigger perspective, uranium is not a particularly rare mineral in the Earth’s crust,” Sevior continues. “It is approximately as common as tin, which has been mined by humans for over 5,000 years and is currently produced at the rate of 300,000 tons per year,” he says, adding, “It is very likely the market will be supplied adequately in the near term.” Another way proponents hope to expand the supply of uranium is by recycling it. Plants in France, a country that relies on nuclear power for 77 percent of its energy, are already using recycled fuel. French-owned Areva NP operates a plant in La Hague that recycles spent fuel for a number of nations that besides France includes Japan, Germany and Belgium. The plant extracts reusable uranium. Areva says it recaptures 96 percent of the spent fuel, which also means less waste that has to be stored. “We could do that for almost any nuclear power plant in the United States now,” says Andrew Cook, Areva NP senior vice president of sales and marketing. The process, however, has been criticized by environmentalists and is not approved in the United States. Recycling requires building a special plant and the process is expensive. Most experts say recycling is decades off in the United States, mainly because of the cost. But if the price of and demand for fuel grows, recycling may begin to look more attractive. Areva is supporting a small U.S. demonstration project in partnership with the Department of Energy. “The question now is what is most efficient and what is most economical,” says Eileen M. Supko, senior consultant for Energy Resources International. “There are a lot of questions on how to move forward on recycling. We’d need new regulations put in place.” In the end, the biggest obstacle to meeting McCain’s goal by 2030 is the availability of the heavy forgings, vessels and components to make the plants themselves. If the plants aren’t built, demand and exploration for fuel will fall back into the doldrums. Thirty years without building a new plant has essentially cost the nation its “fabrication infrastructure,” says Paul J. Turinsky, professor of nuclear engineering at North Carolina State University. “When you say we can build 45 plants, that’s the thing I’m worried about. It’s going to be pushing it. We aren’t going to break ground at the earliest until the end of this decade,” he says. Currently the only manufacturing plant capable of building a reactor vessel for the new plants is in Japan. Utilities in the United States are waiting for components in a long line with contemporaries from other countries. China alone plans to build 30 new plants. So it’s not too surprising that the estimated cost of a new plant is rising as high as $12 billion. Cost overruns and delayed starts helped cripple nuclear power last time around. It didn’t help that vendors came up with a variety of designs that stymied uniformity in the licensing process. Now, experts say, the focus is on the licensing process. If new plants can be completed on budget and on time, confidence is assured, says Erich Schneider, an assistant professor of nuclear engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. “If it takes 11 years, forget it, that first plant will be the last one.” Still, in the end, meeting a goal of 45 new plants by 2030 may be less important than fitting nuclear power into a reliable, long-term energy policy along with other alternative sources, including wind and solar power, says Romberger of the Colorado School of Mines. The best way to win over the public, he says, is to ensure access to affordable energy and address the threat of global warming. “That’s the strongest argument to the average person,” he says. www.energycentral.com E n E rgyB i z 17 http://www.energycentral.com
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