> And these advances by PNNL and ORNL have reduced the cost by a factor of four in just five years. But it’s still over $200/lb of U3O8, twice as much as it needs to be to replace mining uranium ore.
> Fortunately, the cost of uranium is a small percentage of the cost of nuclear fuel, which is itself a small percentage of the cost of nuclear power. 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 U 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.
This is technology that actually has a demonstrated cost. Moreover it doesn't need to get cheaper at scale since raw extraction is such a small portion of nuclear power's cost. It's not like synthetic methane or hydrogen storage where it's all white papers promising cheap cost, but not actually delivering any storage systems at that cost.
Yes, and none of that is demonstrated, in the sense you seem to demand for renewables and storage. Lab exercises are smaller than what would happen in the field by many orders of magnitude and are happening in idealized conditions. The cost estimates are aspirational. This hypocrisy of yours is what I've been pointing out.
Extracting uranium from seawater on the scale needed to fuel burner reactors requires massive engineering. The estimate I've seen is that fueling one 1 GWe burner reactor takes a seafloor uranium absorption field (suspended in a strong ocean current; if you have to pump the seawater yourself it's already too expensive) of 170 square kilometers. The power/area is already much lower than the time-averaged output from PV.
Extrapolating from the lab bench to 170 sq. kilometers (x 6000 for the number of reactors needed to power a nuclear world) is a far larger stretch than extrapolating renewables and storage to what they would need. Your selective doubt is not being driven by any honest impulse.
> Yes, and none of that is demonstrated, in the sense you seem to demand for renewables and storage
All I demand is that people deliver at the specified cost. Not, for example, a prototype with unspecified cost or a pilot program with much higher cost to and promises that it'll get cheaper at scale.
> Extrapolating from the lab bench to 170 sq. kilometers (x 6000 for the number of reactors needed to power a nuclear world) is a far larger stretch than extrapolating renewables and storage to what they would need. Your selective doubt is not being driven by any honest impulse.
I could say the same about you.
Nobody is seriously considering pumping seawater to filter uranium. This is a totally bad faith argument.
And you give this estimate of 170 without actually giving a source for it nor specifying details like how far apart the buoys are spaced, or if reprocessing is used (which cuts down fuel use by more than an order of magnitude).
> And these advances by PNNL and ORNL have reduced the cost by a factor of four in just five years. But it’s still over $200/lb of U3O8, twice as much as it needs to be to replace mining uranium ore.
> Fortunately, the cost of uranium is a small percentage of the cost of nuclear fuel, which is itself a small percentage of the cost of nuclear power. 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 U 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.
This is technology that actually has a demonstrated cost. Moreover it doesn't need to get cheaper at scale since raw extraction is such a small portion of nuclear power's cost. It's not like synthetic methane or hydrogen storage where it's all white papers promising cheap cost, but not actually delivering any storage systems at that cost.