The same issues apply to the materials needed to manufacture wind turbines, solar panels, and the batteries needed to mitigate intermittency.
Uranium's incredible energy density means increases in raw uranium costs is negligible (enrichment is a much more expensive part of the overall nuclear fuel cost). From the previously linked article:
> Over the last twenty years, uranium spot prices have varied between $10 and $120/lb of U3O8, mainly from changes in the availability of weapons-grade uranium to blend down to make reactor fuel.
> So as the cost of extracting uranium from seawater falls to below $100/lb, it will become a commercially viable alternative to mining new uranium ore. But even at $200/lb of U3O8, it doesn’t add more than a small fraction of a cent per kWh to the cost of nuclear power.
True, however those materials needed to manufacture wind turbines, solar panels... can be recycled, most of them infinitely (at human scale), and it more and more becomes either legally or economically unavoidable.
Uranium isn't recyclable: there is no satisfactorily running fast-breeder.
My point was not about costs but about emissions. Extraction and immediate post-processing (before enrichment), and therefore ore grade, have a major impact on emissions: see figure 5 in the referenced communication (Werner, Heath).
Uranium recycling is not the same thing as breeder reactors. It's essentially the same nuclear enrichment we do to natural uranium to bring it up to concentrations of U235 as usable fuel, just used on spent fuel rather than virgin uranium.
Also, for uranium sea water extraction the plan is to drop buoys with the absorbtion material and let natural currents bring water into contact with it. Pumping all that water out of the ocean would of course be stupid.
Emissions: those are present (now) emissions. The paper I quoted (read above) is about future emissions (median up to 110g CO‐eq/kWh by 2050), bumped up by lowering ore grades.
Recycling: however breeders are AFAIK the most efficient way to tackle this (however it is so difficult there is no adequate industrial reactor, after ~70 years of prototypes and research). Other ways don't seem very appealing, for example France ceased to recycle in 2013.
Yes, since the 1980's a fair amount of Grand Plans aimed a extracting uranium from seawater. Nothing industrial yet. I won't hold my breadth.
Uranium's incredible energy density means increases in raw uranium costs is negligible (enrichment is a much more expensive part of the overall nuclear fuel cost). From the previously linked article:
> Over the last twenty years, uranium spot prices have varied between $10 and $120/lb of U3O8, mainly from changes in the availability of weapons-grade uranium to blend down to make reactor fuel.
> So as the cost of extracting uranium from seawater falls to below $100/lb, it will become a commercially viable alternative to mining new uranium ore. But even at $200/lb of U3O8, it doesn’t add more than a small fraction of a cent per kWh to the cost of nuclear power.