MIT: Lack of Fuel May Limit U.S. Nuclear Power Expansion
March 29, 2007 // Published as a news service by IHS
Over the past 20 years, safety concerns dampened all aspects of nuclear energy development. No reactors were ordered, and no investment was made in uranium mines or in building facilities to produce fuel for existing reactors.
Instead, the industry lived off commercial and government inventories, which are now nearly gone. Worldwide, uranium production meets only about 65% of current reactor requirements.
That shortage of uranium and of processing facilities worldwide leaves a gap between the potential increase in demand for nuclear energy and the ability to supply fuel for it, said Dr. Thomas Neff, a research affiliate at the MIT Center for International Studies.
"Just as large numbers of new reactors are being planned, we are only starting to emerge from 20 years of underinvestment in the production capacity for the nuclear fuel to operate them," Neff said. "There has been a nuclear industry myopia; they didn't take a long-term view. For example, only a few years ago, uranium inventories were being sold at $10 per pound; the current price is $85 per pound."
Neff has given a series of talks around the world about the nature of the fuel supply problem and its implications for the so-called "nuclear renaissance," pointing out the sharply rising cost of nuclear fuel and the lack of capacity to produce it.
Much of the uranium used by the U.S. is coming from mines in such countries as Australia, Canada, Namibia and Kazakhstan. Small amounts are mined in the western U.S., but the U.S. largely relies on overseas supplies. The U.S. also relies on Russia for half its fuel under a "swords to ploughshares" deal that Neff originated in 1991. This deal is converting about 20,000 Russian nuclear weapons to fuel for U.S. nuclear power plants, but it ends in 2013, leaving a supply gap for the U.S.
Further, China, India and even Russia have plans for deployments of nuclear power and are trying to lock up supplies from countries on which the U.S. has relied. As a result, the U.S. could be the "last one to buy, and it could pay the highest prices, if it can get uranium at all," Neff said. "The take-home message is that if we're going to increase use of nuclear power, we need massive new investments in capacity to mine uranium and facilities to process it."
Mined uranium comes in several forms, or isotopes. For starting a nuclear chain reaction in a reactor, the only important isotope is uranium-235, which accounts for seven out of 1,000 atoms in the mined product. To fuel a nuclear reactor, the concentration of uranium-235 has to be increased to 40 to 50 out of 1,000 atoms. This is done by separating isotopes in an enrichment plant to achieve the higher concentration.
Neff said that reactor operators could increase the amount of fuel made from a given amount of natural uranium by buying more enrichment services to recover more uranium-235 atoms. Current enrichment capacity is enough to recover only about four out of seven uranium-235 atoms. Limited uranium supplies could be stretched if industry could recover five or six of these atoms, but there is not enough processing capacity worldwide to do so.
Source: EurekAlert!