Posts by AndrewMcKillop:
The risk of Asymmetric nuclear war in Ukraine
March 20th, 2014
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First the Politics
March 18, newswires starting strangely with Kuwait’s KUNA, reported that protesters from French environmental action groups, headed by Greenpeace and supported by activists of the green EELV political party which is aligned with French president Hollande’s PS parliamentary majority, broke into France’s oldest nuclear power plant (NPP) at Fessenheim located on the Franco-German border in Alsace, and occupied several parts of the operating section and its roof. Their claims were given considerable coverage by French media, if only to keep minds off Putin’s victory in Crimea, fustigated as an “illegal act” by Hollande and his Foreign minister. One immediate result of this is the halt to construction in French shipyards of two Mistral-class helicopter assault ships for the Russian navy, one of the ships named ‘Sebastopol’, in a contract worth about 1.5 billion euros.
The political claims of the Fessenheim NPP occupiers, who were arrested in a mass helicopter-aided operation by French anti-riot troops, as well as State militia gendarmes, and armed civil police, featured their claim that Fessenheim, at 37 years of age is well past its original design lifespan of 30 years. It has experienced a string of nuclear and mechanical accidents, is located on a known geological fault line, and is the focus of repeated German criticism. This has gone into high gear as reported by ‘Suddeutsche Zeitung’, March 10, with the publication by Federal authorities of previously undisclosed earthquake hazards potentially affecting German NPPs, and a risk response plan including accelerated dismantling of German reactors, already scheduled for complete removal from service by January 2022.
For French greens, Fessenheim is above all a “sitting duck target” for terrorists or hostile military strike action by helicopter assault or missile attack, by any enemy country – Russia for example.
This theme, quite surprisingly, was aired and developed on French 24/24 CNN-clone “news and views shows”, BFM TV and iTele, which are basically geared to selling advertising space for producers of anything that can be sold to couched potatoes. Why the couched potato masses should be interested in nuclear power – when they can slaver over Club Med holidays, Nespresso Gold capsules or really neat iPhone apps, while they munch a McDo and choose their next “low carbon” German saloon car – was not explained by the newzak TV channels. Instead, they were shown long interviews with EELV spokespersons including former presidential candidate Eva Joly (a Franco-Norwegian), advancing the thesis of a possible missile or RPG or air-launched drone attack against any French nuclear power plant, including Fessenheim. Pointing out that occupying nuclear power plants is rather easy, they went on to suggest that pushing a button on a missile launcher a few kilometres away, or hundreds of kilometres away will also be “no problem”. The talkshow hosts were aghast!
Your turn, Mister Hollande! The media shifted back to normal government-friendly mode, and aired long black and white newsreel clips from the heroic days of French nuclear power, with the obligatory views of French atom bomb testing in Algeria and the south Pacific. How that protects French NPPs was not explained, but newzak TV obviously thought “the bomb stuff” was great material for reassuring the couched potatoes.
Next the Problems
The official tally of functional and operating major civil power reactors in France is given as 58, at present, but the count is affected several factors and the real total is closer to 62 or 63. These tallies also ignore the minimum of 4 “non-civil or military reactors” operating in France, which are only operating for the simple reason it is too expensive to turn them off. As long as they are called “operating” it is not necessary to dismantle them.
Attempts at the sale of 1960s and 1970s-era semi-military reactor were given press coverage during “les annees Sarko” (2007-2012) of former president Nicolas Sarkozy. This politician is now heavily implicated in a vast network of kickbacks, fake invoices and donations to his UMP party and his failed re-election campaign, from sources including “his friend” Muammar Gaddafi (while still living). In Dec 2007, Sarkozy made an open and public attempt to sell 2 ex-military French nuclear reactors to Gaddafi’s Libya. The possible kickbacks from the aborted deal are now included in French justice investigations into Sarkozy’s UMP financing during that period.
To be sure the problem is not solved by selling outdated and dangerous military reactors to MENA dictators, in return for oil, but at least dismantling such reactor for sale abroad kicks the problem down the road like a can. These old and dangerous reactors are basically “plutonium brewers”, similar to the UK’s 4 Magnox-type reactors now in their eighth year of slow decommissioning, but the continued existence of “plutonium brewers” sets the question of why a country like France would need or want to produce an additional 7 or 8 tons of plutonium each year for its present semi-official stock of 750 nuclear warheads.
Unofficial tallies of French plutonium stocks published by anti-nuclear associations like Reseau Sortir du Nucleaire run well above 200 tons, and are enough to build at least 25 000 smaller sized “tactical and compact” nuclear devices. France could take on the world with that – or irradiate its national territory and cause tens of thousands of cancer deaths, per year, with it. For the moment, French deciders prefer the second choice, but public awareness is rising.
One major problem is simple – nuclear weapons cost money whether used or not, and the Fessenheim occupation shows that NPPs are a fabulous alternative – as long as they are located in Enemy Territory! In theory at least, offensive or ‘classic’ nuclear weapons are no longer needed, and this is a game changer, when or if our couched potato political “leaders” care to wake up to it.
Baseload Power
Another key French nuclear problem is shown by Figure 1 in the following breezy OIES comment on the nation’s nuclear power programme (www.oxfordenergy.org/2014/01/the-french-disconnection-reducing-the-nuclear-share-in-frances-energy-mix/). The report has tinges of English jealousy due to the UK being too de-industrialized to build anything as complex, mechanical, or Industrial Revolution style as an NPP in England these days, and has to call for high-priced help from France’s EDF-Areva. This OIES report shows how France’s peak load power demand, and baseload demand have grown ever further apart, the power gap growing by 33% in 10 years.
This report takes a pro-French reading of what it says national deciders should do about this in France – basically nothing – because any rapid retirement of the existing 58 or 60 NPPs would create a fantastic spending need for replacing them, far above 300 billion euros. The French response is classic: kicking the can down the road by raising NPP “safe operating lifetimes” from 30 to 40 years, and then possibly to 50 years or more.
As the report also says, prolonging their lifespans – which ironically only in the Fessenheim case is accepted by Hollande’s government as not an option and this single NPP will be retired – is also expensive, as well as risky. Reactor fleet retirement and-or operating lifetime extension cost estimates published by the French General Accounting Office (Cour des Comptes) in January 2012 give an outline cost tally – for decommissioning the present fleet in the period starting no later than 2025 – of around 265 billion euros.
Too Expensive to Stop – Too Expensive to Replace
Nuclear France, due to a large number of convergent factors has higher and higher peak power demands at times of winter-time cold and high industrial and commercial power demand, but only slow-growing baseline or baseload power demand easily covered by France’s “legacy nuclear” power plants. The economic rationale, in France for keeping the NPPs is bolstered by this growing peak-base gap, but the solution to covering the growing peaks will not be nuclear.
The OIES report does not explain this peak-trough problem can easily get worse as national baseload demand ceases to grow at all. Current energy and power-saving programs and laws, including obligatory shutting down of shop and office lighting at night, can even result in a decrease of baseload demand. The French nuclear lobby, like its allies in other countries is therefore beating the drum for rapidly developing electric car fleets.
The reasons why baseload demand is likely to decline – not stagnate – also include the impact of decades of underpriced nuclear electricity, subsidized in France as elsewhere by “non-electric subsidies” to the nuclear-industrial complex stretching from nuclear weapons to reactor building and uranium mining, including fuel fabrication and reprocessing, as well as nuclear waste disposal. For as long as these subsidies, estimated by the Cour des Comptes as an accumulated total near 240 billion euros since France’s nuclear system, in 1956 was declared “majority civil”, continued to be paid out by central government, the nuclear party could continue.
Underpriced electricity and therefore fast-growing power demand was an essential prop for the French national “all nuclear” policy rationale or strategy. From 2013 under the Hollande administration, however, electricity prices in France are set by government to grow at 10% a year for at least the next 3 years. The same government caps public sector pay growth to 1% a year.
The impact of this on power demand can only be downward, the only question is how much. Having had a record-mild winter in 2013-1014 “obviously due to global warming”, power demand peaks in winter were low, preventing the logical result of large-area blackouts and brownouts. The problem is therefore kicked down the road – but the green NGOs and political parties have kicked a major dent in the couched potato article of nuclear faith, especially well brainwashed into French minds, that NPPs are clean, cheap and safe and therefore “the only solution”.
We can leave the last word to Ihor Prokopchuk, Ukraine’s ambassador to the UN IAEA who was quoted, 6 March, saying this to the NTI (Nuclear Threat Initiative): “Potential consequences of a military invasion would be a threat of radiation contamination on the territory of Ukraine and the territory of neighboring states”. He added: “In addition, a significant amount of spent nuclear fuel, which is stored on the territory of the nuclear power plants, would pose potential very high risks.” The scarcely veiled threat of the all-new Kiev Flash Mob government striking back against Putin’s Russia with a dirty bomb is therefore on the table. Problems, problems!
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Sochi and the lost lady of Islam
January 23rd, 2014
By Andrew McKillop.
Putin Winds Back His Gains of 2013
News reports now place the probable cost of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia at more than $51 billion making them the most expensive-ever. Security costs help explain this. Vladimir Putin’s ironclad determination to make the games a success – makes them a rising political risk, not only for domestic political consumption but also a challenge to Russia’s federal unity and relations with its Asian neighbors, and internationally. Making the Sochi games a PR disaster is the goal of Putin’s enemies.
Source: http://www.blogsochi.ru/category/temy-publikatsii/novosti-sochi
The Islamic Bomb Lady was officially seen by Russian police. They identified her as 22 year old terrorist Razmena Ibragimova, displayed on Russia’s official Sochi blog sites like the one above. Her terrorist credentials were bolstered by a clumsily falsified side-profile photograph, portraying her bulging neck probably hiding explosives behind her scarf. Officially she was part of the Volgograd bombing conspiracy and Razmena is now the Most Wanted Lady in Russia.
Once Upon a Time There was Pingpong Diplomacy
Cold war-era diplomacy of the 1960s included the “ping-pong diplomacy” US-China phase, but today’s Russia-Saudi Arabia jousting is measured by the number of body parts on the pavement after each designer bomb attack by a throwaway human suicide bomber. To date, Saudi Arabia has scored several direct hits against Putin’s Russia, but the ex-KGB chief is unlikely to take that lying down. Revenge hits against Saudi-backed Arab capitals, and against Riyadh-backed forces active in Syria are either certain or not impossible, to ram home the Putin message that Saudi Arabia is a small country on the edge of “The World Island” that talks a lot too loud – only thanks to oil.
At home in Russia, the Islamic kamikaze bombing scare, which in fact may have been Soviet-era agitprop not needing any Saudi petrodollars or American nods to be executed, enables Putin to further seal the power of his New State apparatus. The new state is little changed from the old USSR, which set the southern Caucus Republics as the acid test arena for total power by Moscow.
Today, Razmena is placarded on wanted posters all across Sochi. According to one poster on display at all security checkpoints in Sochi’s airport, Ibragimova is “currently located on Sochi territory” and could attempt a suicide bombing at any time, according to the poster. Ramming home the fear message for visitors who will pay at least $500-a-day to be in Sochi for the Winter Olympics, she is described as having been spotted on the street near the Russian foreign ministry building, and in streets near the upmarket hotels of Sochi.
Stalingrad and the Terror Republic
Under its former name Stalingrad, today’s Volgograd was the Martyr City for Soviet resistance to Nazi Germany, but security analysts estimate that hundreds of the 2000-odd Islamic terror attacks on Russian Federal territory since 1990 have been in or around Volgograd. Veterans of the 1990s-era conflict waged by Moscow against breakaway independence movements state that at the time most of them flew the Islamic flag and were eager to receive Saudi petrodollars. The theater was however already widening across the Caucasian Republics including Chechnya, Ingueshetia, Daghestan, Tatarstan, and in Russian satrape republics such as Azerbaijan, and the 1990s veterans recall that in that period, ruthless terror-versus-terror tactics and strategy became the norm.
These veterans, some of them now Douma parliamentarians say the intensity of conflict has moved up, from that previous terror war level to a much wider “conflict of civilizations”, even a threat to the continued existence of Russia. Tom Nichols, a professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College cited by Stripes .com 15 January said the intensity of conflict.. “ has made the Russians — who already are used to a strong state security apparatus — far more willing to empower its internal security forces way beyond anything Americans would ever allow”.
Saudi terror strategy may be comfortable for its Riyadh purveyors, players and payers safe in Riyadh, when it concerns Mali, Niger, South Sudan, the Central African Republic or Riyadh’s other low income Black African asymmetric war theaters, but in the Russia Caucuses this is a high risk gambit and historic conflict that Islam always lost. Inside the Russian Federation, longstanding political conflicts are already sufficient to make government difficult. Adding a layer of Saudi-financed and American-tolerated Islamic extremism may create a runaway process of domestic conflict – which for Putin and his oligarchs is exactly what they want to intensify and seal their total power.
For Russian leaders, the calls by some Syrian rebels for the creation of a fundamentalist Islamic state in their homeland sound uncomfortably similar to the goals of Doku Umarov, the Chechen leader of the so-called Caucasus Emirate. The stated aim of Umarov’s group, designated by Moscow, and by Washington as a terrorist organization, is to establish an Islamic state on Russian territory. Chechen fighters like Omar Abu al-Chechen, who leads an expatriate jihadist force known as the Faithful Immigrant Brothers in Syria, have sparked Kremlin fears that the real goal of extremists is to make Syria into a base for future terror operations inside Russia.
Chechnya has become ever more critical to Kremlin strategists, the front line theater for Russian-Saudi conflict with Sochi an easy ride from its borders. This theater is particularly acute due to the fact that Syria has thousands of fighters who, according to the Russian Spetznaz special services, are a serious and real threat for the country. Ramzan Kadyrov, the former Chechen rebel placed in charge by Kremlin and an adept at counter-terror war, has on many recent occasions said that Islamist insurgents in Chechnya have reached “plague proportions” and in his view are only biding their time before moving north to Russia – and to Europe.
Destabilized Russia
State Douma deputy and Foreign relations commission chief Anatoly Ermolin, with a long military track record in Chechnya and the Caucuses during the 1990s bluntly says : “I think this is one of the most dangerous things for any government. They (the Islamists) are very serious and believe they can organize an Islamic state….They consider (Russia) to be their territory. We are dry wood; it’s very easy to set fire to the situation.”
Ermolin is openly alarmed and alarmist because he believes the disastrous conflict in Syria divided Russia and NATO-member countries into two camps, with the US-led west leaning to support or at least tolerance of the Islamists, despite the increasingly frenzied extremist nature of Syria’s opposition. For Russia this means it is next in line for destabilization, by Islam under the guise of, and stoked by Western-Russian rivalry and conflict. Ermolin says there can soon be a major realignment of international relations and vital interests.
As in several European countries including Germany, France, the UK and Italy there is fear in Russia of what happens when thousands of young “jihadis” return from the Syrian war. Russian foreign relations experts like Ermolin say this will be the acid test, and in the Middle East will surely and certainly coincide with the equally rising threat of more open and wider conflict between sunni Saudi Arabia and shia Iran. The dangers of another Iran-Sunni war like the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war are claimed by Russian policy experts to have been completely underestimated in the west. As they and Russian military analysts say, the potential for a repeat of the 1980-88 war “going nuclear” is high.
Russian experts also say the dangers of Iran itself destabilizing and “turning to terror” have been ignored or underestimated in the west. Both Saudi Arabia and Israel, backed by the US and several EU countries, especially France give either open or covert support to anti-Iranian sunni terror movements, making all out Iran-versus-sunni war the logical follow-up. In the case of Iranian defeat, spillover will, the Russians say, be large scale regional, not contained. As a result, although never stated as a driver for US and European thawing towards Iran, the risk of Iran being destabilized have to be taken seriously.
Whistling in the Dark
To date, western understanding of the war theater’s dimensions and component drivers is, Russians say, woeful. The USA’s Boston bombings, for example, were laughably unprofessional pinpricks. European domestic experience of eradicating Islamist insurgents, they add, is close to zero making for permanent underestimation of the threat.
Reasons for this western blind spot to the insurgent threat, which in Russia now straddles both ethnic religious and nationalist political lines – notably in Tartarstan – can be traced to different Russian and western interpretations of geopolitics. For Russians, even in the 1930s Stalin era, Halford Mackinder’s theory of “The World Island”, centered on Russia but spreading south through the Caucuses to Arabia, North Africa and Europe was taken as a game plan and threat – or prize – for the USSR. Putin’s Russian Federation of today is driven by geopolitical hopes and fears linked to the Mackinder theory.
To be sure, Washington has decided the dispatch of a small anti-terror group of experts to Sochi, more for protecting US athletes and comforting domestic political opinion than aiding Moscow, but soon, analysts and Russian leaders say, Moscow and Washington will have to collaborate better. To do this, they will have to set aside other issues that get in the way. The USA’s new isolationism, however, may also hamper this needed collaboration, and like the Europeans, the US may be tempted to turn Russia’s difficulties to its advantage – pouring oil and Saudi petrodollars on the fire.
Senior Russian political figures like Alexander Khinshtein, Vice chairman of the State Douma’s Security and anti-corruption commission, make it plain that formerly contained, localized and specific Islamic terror threats and action have massively changed since the 1990s. Khinshtein says that “Terrorism cannot be a local problem; it is not a problem for just one place.” Russian news releases and investigations concerning the Volgograd bombings already say these attacks – which are part of a longstanding organized campaign – link closely to non-Islamic political independence movements in Russia’s Caucasian republics.
The challenge from the Islamic south, to Russia’s “world island” has now mutated and coalesced with other movements and issues that, in the 1990s, were totally separate. The Sochi theater for terror war and counter-terror war concerns the whole world.
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Myths of our time: Cheap nuclear power and abundant uranium
January 10th, 2014
By Andrew McKillop.
EXPENSIVE POWER AND THE URANIUM PINCH
Nuclear power is now one of the most capital-intensive, highest cost types of electricity generation which exists, around 5 – 8 times more expensive on a cost-per-kilowatt of capacity basis, than key alternatives like gas-fired power plants, windpower and solar photovoltaic plants. Uranium is far from abundant and only the near-zero rate of nuclear power capacity growth prevents a supply pinch from driving up prices – with uranium fuel costs presently making up about 12%-17% of typical operating costs for nuclear power plants.
THE URANIUM FLAG : NAMIBIA
Electron configuration 2-8-18-32-21-9-2
Atomic number 92 Atomic weight 238.02891
SOURCE/ MINING WEEKLY
In 2010, after two lost decades of low activity, with zero orders some years starting long before the Chernobyl catastrophe of 1986, and spanning the 1990s and start of the 2000s, the nuclear renaissance was in full flood. Just months before the Fukushima catastrophe struck Japan.
In July 2010, the WNA-World Nuclear Association (previously named the Uranium Institute) hailed the fact that over 50 reactors were under construction in 13 countries. Nuclear power capacity added through 2010-2020 was forecast by the WNA in 2010 as at least 75 GW (75 000 MW). Other estimates went beyond 100 GW.
Some country plans and proposals, especially as outlined by India’s NPCIL, claimed that India alone could develop 400 GW of nuclear capacity by around 2040. World total operating capacity of all 440 civil reactors operating in 29 countries in 2010 was about 340 GW.
New entrant and possible “new nuclear” countries in the 2010-2030 period were outlined by the WNA as possibly including Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Venezuela, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Algeria, Sudan, Egypt, UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Vietnam, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Poland and several others – such as Libya – whose civil nuclear intentions are rather likely on hold, right now.
BATTLE OF THE BULGE
The chart below shows what expansion of uranium output would be needed if the Nuclear Renaissance was to happen:
(Source/ http://www.roperld.com/science/Nuclear )
Taking only 2010-forecasts and projections for nuclear power growth in the period 2010-2020 this would raise world total civil power capacity by over 400 GW in more than 45 countries by 2020, in other words at least a doubling of total capacity from today’s level around 340 GW.
Under this scenario, world uranium requirements could rise to 120 000 tons a year by 2020, from their 2010 level of about 65 000 tons, further driven by increasing demand per “tranche”, that is bigger-sized power plant unit sizes, due to the trend for reactor sizes of around 1000-1200 MW each, compared with the present industry standard of 900 MW per tranche.
The massive uranium mining shortage is explained by the figure for world total mine output in 2010: about 53 000 tons. The balance of 12 000 tons was supplied from uranium stocks held by miners, power plant builders and plant operators, as well as government stockpiles.
The nuclear industry’s claim is that uranium prices are not important. Taking an industry standard 900 MW LWR, this typically needs around 350 tons of low enriched uranium fuel on start-up, and about 150 – 160 tons per year after that. At the most recent peak price for uranium, in 2007 at over US $ 130 per pound ($ 285 per kg or $ 285 000 per ton), compared with present prices (Dec 2013) reported by UxC at around $40 per pound, fuel costs of nuclear plants are relatively easy to figure. However the extreme problem of forecasting reactor fuel costs is underlined by the most recent-historic low price of uranium, in year 2000, at around $ 8 per pound. Uranium prices have swung from $8 to $130 and back to $40 in the space of 13 years.
The nuclear lobby and its industry spokespersons often counter this clear problem – of forecast shortage or surplus of uranium playing havoc with prices – with a smokescreen of technical, industrial and economic rationales which downplay the role and importance of uranium fuel and its prices for nuclear power. One favoured rationale is the “coming generation of fast reactors”.
THE PLUTONIUM SOLUTION
This “high tech rationale” is that an average industry standard 900 MW LWR produces around 0.225 grams of plutonium per day, and the world’s present 440-strong reactor fleet produces about 36 tons of plutonium per year. This could palliate or avoid potential future uranium shortage – and is also enough plutonium to produce about 3600 Hiroshima-size bombs of 1945, or 4900 Abdul Qdr “Bombs R Us” Khan nuclear device of 1987 with the same explosive and radiological fallout potential, per year.
Recycling this plutonium, using firstly MOX fuel in which low grade uranium is “cut” with plutonium oxide to produce reactor-capable fuel, and then moving to the use of plutonium to power Fast Breeder Reactors, which produce more plutonium that they consume, are favoured solutions to uranium shortage and high or unpredictable prices. Apart from the fast reactor route being a technological fantasy with stupefying human health risks, environment impacts and national security implications, this claimed-as-feasible shift is advanced by the nuclear lobby only because uranium shortage remains a dark shadow hanging over the industry.
Welcome to the plutonium economy.
Uranium prices, often with a delay, faithfully track oil prices and are not under control. When they soar, they add more negative weight to the economics of atomic energy. Possibly unknown to the most eager shills for nuclear power such as the Global Warming Boomers, Jim Lovelock and Al Gore, uranium mines operate diesel fuelled heavy machines on a 24/7 basis. After oil-majority fuelled uranium processing into “yellowcake”, it is exported in oil-fueled container ships to the “carbon conscious consumers” of the mature democracies, for energy-intensive fuel fabrication before final use in reactors, then transported using oil-fueled transport to reprocessing and disposal sites.
In the case of European countries using nuclear power, over 97% of their uranium fuel needs are imported.
The sheer physical shortage of uranium makes its production, stocks, supply and prices of key importance to the minds of political and corporate deciders, exactly like oil. The reasons are mainly simple ones, notably that supply is far behind demand and competition for supplies is now global, since the majority of consumer countries are heavily dependent on imported uranium – exactly like oil.
Exactly like the world oil industry, the uranium industry must resolve mine ownership and revenue disputes with host governments. In some cases – such as Niger – they must also handle geopolitical and national security issues, including hostage taking and world terrorism.
URANIUM MINING AT HOME ?
The world shortfall in uranium supplies can be related to the constantly shrinking, often completely abandoned uranium mining activity in the ‘old nuclear’ countries, and China and India, for a net combined total of nearly 99% of world uranium consumption being imported. The 2010 net shortfall of supply, about 12 000 tons, was around 7 times the USA’s total mine output, more than 14 times China’s total mine output, and close to 17 times India’s uranium mining output. It was also several hundred times French, German or British domestic uranium mine output.
Reasons why uranium mining “at home” was abandoned – making a mockery of claims for “national energy security” from nuclear power – include uranium depletion and the simple fact that uranium mining is dirty, generates huge spill and waste zones covering hundreds of square kilometres. Mining wastes also cause cancer through low level radiation and chemical toxins in affected water bodies. Impacts on agriculture, water resources and land values are all negative – so the problem is exported “over the horizon” to low income countries.
The uranium shortfall can also be understood by comparing the shortfall (12 000 tons in 2010) with Kazakhstan’s status of N°1 world uranium miner and exporter. In 2009, its record total production, which it equalled in 2010 and 2011 was about 13 500 – 14 500 tons. This only just exceeded the net 2010 shortfall of “fresh mined” uranium relative to world uranium fuel demand.
The uranium pinch will not go away.
POST FUKUSHIMA
The world uranium mining industry, following the 3/11 Fukushima disaster for nuclear power, now faces low and probably declining prices, certain to cause a shakeout of producers in which only low-cost miners can survive – comparable in fact to outlooks for gold mining! In other words, uranium prices, like gold prices have to rebound at some stage due to falling mine capacity and output, but also have to fall like gold prices for as long as miners dump their finished stocks on the market to try maintaining revenues. In addition, also like gold, the uranium market is very small in absolute size (about 55 000 tons a years, gold about 2 600 tons a year), easy to rig and heavily manipulated.
The world nuclear industry and its lobby, in classic style continues to argue that the world needs nuclear power and no uranium shortage exists – for example citing the US-Russian “Megatons to Megawatts” program of dismantling and recycling the radioactive materials from surplus nuclear weapons, to produce MOX-type fuels. At best this is a small stopgap and does not change the real outlook of uranium shortage – even with no expansion of the world’s current civil reactor fleet.
World accumulation of presently unusable plutonium from civil reactors (about 36 tons a year) is called “reactor grade plutonium” to distinguish it from bomb-grade plutonium, but its radiological health hazards are as extreme as bomb-grade material. Its capability for utilization in nuclear weapons devices is very high.
The mega-shift of the industry, from uranium fuel to plutonium fuel, is still considered both feasible and desirable by nuclear lobby stalwarts. Other “silver bullet solutions” touted by the lobby feature thorium fuels, but shifting the current reactor fleet to this supposed “alternate fuel” would take decades of extreme-high investment spending. Only one other semi-feasible alternative to uranium fuels would be the development of nuclear fusion reactors, but in this case a major limiting factor will be world mine supply of lithium for reactor blankets – also needed for rapid growing li-ion battery production.
The nuclear lobby and its related uranium mining lobby can be credited with continuing to play a spoiler role in world energy transition. By denying nuclear power plants are extremely capital-intensive and extremely high cost relative to alternatives – either fossil or other – and by denying there is any existing or future uranium fuel shortage, some political deciders continue to “believe in nuclear”. This can only increase the real and existing problems for rational energy transition, hinder its progress, and increase energy security problems.