Russia takes aim at US nuclear power by throttling uranium
Limits creates potential supply risks to utilities operating American reactors that generate almost a fifth of the country’s electricity.
Kazakhstan will continue to dominate the world’s production of uranium up until 2025, according to Kazatomprom, the state-owned entity that mines and explores for uranium, and also produces atomic power in the former Soviet republic.
Developing a new development strategy for the next decade, Kazatomprom says it will preserve the company’s leading position as extractor of natural uranium, by developing existing mines, building new ones and introducing technologies to improve efficiencies and reduce the costs of uranium extraction:
“One of the strategic directions of Kazatomprom is the business diversification in all subsequent stages of front-end nuclear fuel cycle,” said Kazatomprom. as reported by Trend News Agency, based in Azerbaijan. “The company plans to gain access to services for the conversion, enrichment and fabrication of nuclear fuel for nuclear power plants.”
Kazakhstan became the world’s largest uranium producer in 2009; since then, its domestic uranium industry has dominated global competitors. In 2012, Kazakhstan eclipsed its closest pursuer, Canada, by more than twofold in annual uranium production.
According to the World Nuclear Association, two thirds of the world’s uranium comes from mines in Kazakhstan, Canada and Australia. As of May 2015, Kazakhstan produced 41 percent of the nuclear fuel, followed by Canada at 16 percent and Australia at 9 percent. In 2014, Kazakhstan increased its uranium production by 1.5 percent, to 22,829 metric tons, says Trend News Agency.
For more on Kazakhstan and uranium, including an analysis of production capacity, click here
2 Comments
Be
Enjoy it while you can.
The IAEA says that we will have uranium shortages starting in 2025, then getting worse fast.
http://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/publications/PDF/Pub1104_scr.pdf
“As we look to the future, presently known resources
fall short of demand.”
Fig 16 show the shortfall in 2025 and it going 1/4 of that 2050
fig 20 also show shortfall.
Solar and wind are now available cheaper than any other sources.
http://www.lazard.com/media/1777/levelized_cost_of_energy_-_version_80.pdf
We need to go solar, wind, hydro, waste to energy and fuels from air,water and electricity as fast as possible.
We are facing peak coal, oil and nuclear way sooner than we thought.
stevek9
You need to learn something about mineral resources and mining. Take any mineral resource … for example, copper, there have been 30 years of known reserves … for over 100 years. Why?, because people look for more or more reserves are identified as the price goes up.
We are barely at the beginning of the uranium mining age. Think about oil. We’ve been running out of that for an awfully long time.
We will never run out of uranium. Long before it even gets expensive, we will be using fast neutron reactors which can extract ~ 100X the energy from a pound of uranium mined as todays light-water reactors. By that time the amount of depleted uranium and spent fuel we will have (both of which will be fuel), can power civilization for hundreds of years, without even digging up any more.
As a last resort for uranium, we could also economically extract uranium from seawater. And finally, thorium is about 3X more plentiful than uranium and can also be burned ‘completely’ in a fission reactor.
Fission will be an adequate source for energy as far into the future as one can practically look.
Solar and wind are not cheap … they are artificially supported. And, they will never support an advanced civilization which simply cannot depend on an energy supply that is constantly fluctuating (especially wind) on practically any time scale you consider. Once these sources reach a certain level of use, they can no longer be balanced adequately. You need to match your total capacity of wind/solar with gas turbines that can (and need to be) turned on and off as needed. Even they don’t like being jerked around like that and for coal it’s impossible.