It will likely become significantly more expensive at scale. At current nuclear usage we use about 60,000 tons of uranium year powering nuclear reactors. [1] Global reserves are around 6 million tons, with estimates putting potential reserves around double that. [2] So that's enough for about 2 centuries of usage at current levels. Bump up nuclear by 10x and we're at 20 years until we're out, assuming all those potential reserves can be found.
The claims of endless nuclear energy rely on salt-water extraction which is like 3 parts per billion and not at all economical, or the development of breeder reactors which as of yet also remain prohibitively expensive, significantly more dangerous/finnicky owing to using liquid sodium as a coolant, and offer much easier weaponization.
Back in the 70s Exxon predicted the impacts of widespread CO2 output, but hand-waved it away. I feel people are doing the exact same thing with nuclear, and probably under the exact same motivation. They are biased towards nuclear and want it to work, and so are either ignoring the issues or assuming/hoping for a future technological breakthrough to resolve them, but as of yet that breakthrough appears nowhere in sight.
> Global reserves are around 6 million tons, with estimates putting potential reserves around double that
In the mining industry reserves are a technical term. They can be proven, probable, likely, etc. qualifying a deposit as a reserve of a certain grade costs money. Reserves are used as colateral for secured financing, so in some cases the cost is justified. But if the sum of reserves is about 100 years of current consumption (our case here), mining companies will not spend one dollar more to certify new reserves.
For all practical purposes, uranium is an inexhaustible fuel, even if we never develop fast reactors.
global reserves are much higher. Anything above 100ppm can be extracted more or less economically. That's a ton of stuff even without purex/pyroprocessing/fast reactors or seawater
"feel people are doing the exact same thing with nuclear, and probably under the exact same motivation. They are biased towards nuclear and want it to work, and so are either ignoring the issues or assuming/hoping for a future technological breakthrough to resolve them, but as of yet that breakthrough appears nowhere in sight." - France decarbonized in 90s and to this day no country got similar emissions/kwh in similar timeframe with similar or lower hydro resources.
The hopium lies in exactly the opposite way where ppl hope H2 will become dirt cheap and will be used for firming
First: I completely agree that extrapolating current ressource use towards a "exhaustion date" is naive, and historically things never worked out that way.
But copper price is still up by >500% since the early 2000s.
If it wasn't clear in my post, the entire point is not that we'd run out, but that it'd become economically unviable. As the supply starts to run out and/or we turn to more expensive sources, prices go up - sharply. We'll never really run out of anything - it will just become so expensive that it's no longer viable for widespread usage. Nuclear is quite sensitive to this issue because the primary, and arguably sole, argument for it is that it's cheap.
Ore is currently about 2% of the capex of a reactor. And many mines globally have lowered production because it's too cheap. Even if you 10x the price of the ore, it'll still be cheap
The world will not run completely out of copper, be we can expect much higher prices.
"Copper and lithium are major exceptions where expected mined supply from announced projects falls short of projected demand in 2035, with implied deficits of 30% for copper and 40% for lithium"
