The heightened health and security risks entailed by the much-heralded “nuclear renaissance” tend to obscure the fact that uranium is a finite, non-renewable resource. Like oil and gold, uranium production must eventually reach a peak, after which the amount recovered will decline irreversibly year after year. With the exhaustion of high-grade ore bodies (like Cigar Lake in Canada or Olympic Dam in Australia), the mining industry will then have to consider disseminated, low-grade deposits, which require proportionately greater capital investments. Ultimately, the point will come when the energy invested in production equals or exceeds that generated through controlled fission. Under those circumstances the nuclear industry would no longer serve a legitimate purpose.

The nuclear lobby has a vested interest in putting off that cross-over point into the far and hazy future. However, there is sufficient data now available to trace the future contour of the nuclear era with some confidence. The resulting figures do not support an expansion of the industry. On the contrary, they strongly suggest that the massive investments urged by government and industry will not be recovered before the fuel runs out.

An authoritative biennial publication known as the “Red Book”¹ asserts that global nuclear generation will increase by 80% from the current 372 terawatt-hours (TWh) to 663 TWh by 2030. Great Britain is especially ambitious in this respect, projecting a doubling of its nuclear generation within this period. However, for such a goal to make sense financially, investors need to be convinced that the nuclear fleet can be fueled for its full operational cycle of 60 years. Otherwise, the initial capital expenditure and operating costs cannot be justified.

The Red Book attempts to establish the “ultimate recoverable resource” for uranium at three different price thresholds. At the most favourable (i.e. highest) price, US$130/KgU, it estimates that 5.5 million tonnes can be extracted. Half of this would be recovered by 2030, while the remaining portion would be extracted by 2050.

In his “Red Face Book,” a cogent critique circulated on the Internet,² John Busby argues that in the long run this daunting volume will prove inadequate to satisfy global aspirations. But more to the point, a crisis of supply is almost certain to occur within a mere five years’ time, long before uranium reserves approach exhaustion.

Busby notes that nuclear fuels derive from two categories of supply:60% comes from uranium mining itself, while a full 40% derives from secondary sources, including dismantled nuclear warheads and spent fuel re-processing. By 2013 the latter category will be in sharp decline, yet world uranium demand under the “renaissance” scenario will have increased by 25,000 to 34,000 tonnes in annual production. To fuel this burgeoning nuclear fleet (even assuming that secondary supplies remain available), newly opened mines producing between 86,000 and 116,000 tonnes a year will need to come on line.

Alas, uranium production appears to have reached its peak in 2005. Presently among the major producers, only Kazakhstan has shown a significant rise in production since that year, while production in Canada and Australia has declined by 18.5% and 9.5% respectively. Overall, world production has decreased one percent below that of 2005. Despite “a Klondike-like frenzy of exploration,” no new deposits large enough to fuel the supposed renaissance have been found.

If this trend continues, by 2013 there will be sharp international competition for dwindling supplies. The United States and France, both of which are critically dependent on imported uranium, will undoubtedly become prime contestants in this radioactive arena. In fact, Busby predicts that the world situation in 2013 will resemble that of present-day India, where nuclear generation is now running at half capacity for lack of supply.

A boondoggle is a government-managed swindle in which production costs typically exceed yield http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boondoggle_). A path-dependent system is one in which the course of events cannot be easily altered once certain initial steps has been taken. Given the fact that it has no hope of fueling itself, the nuclear renaissance appears to be a classic boondoggle. But added to that is its path-dependent character, meaning that the enormous front-end costs will gobble up alternative investments opportunities in renewable energy.

A world-embracing path-dependent boondoggle, though awesome to contemplate, is something we can plainly do without.

Notes

¹ Uranium 2007:Resources, Production and Demand; a joint report by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

² http://sandersresearch.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1368&Itemid=103NOTES