wkwillis said:Orders for more nuclear power plants collapsed because of cost overruns. We had already stopped ordering plants in the early seventies because coal power was too cheap. The only reason that the utilities ordered more nuke plants was because the nuke industry built some plants on turnkey contracts, they promissed that the next generation of nuclear plants would be even cheaper, but only offered cost plus contracts.
When the quoted price doubled half way through, then doubled again three quarters of the way through, it sort of soured the utilities on nukes. Then again, the attempt by Canada, Australia, South Africa and Southwest Africa, Niger, and Gabon, to rig the uranium price also helped. They jacked up the cost of uranium in time to force the utilities to sign high priced contracts, just before advances in geophysical prospecting increased the supply hugely and crashed the price.
The funny thing is that the utilities want to keep operating nuclear power plants at the most dangerous time, when they are already fatigued and worn out, but they can't because according to one of the mining magazines we are going to start running out of uranium in 2006 and have to start shutting down the older reactors anyway. We actually stopped producing enough uranium back in 1995, but made it up with dissassembled Russian nukes. Not enough exploration because no new advances in geophysical techniques, though I am working on one now.
wkwillis said:Brillianlight
We have lots of depleted uranium. Regular uranium is .73% U235, and depleted uranium is .15% U235 in UCl4 form, so we could reprocess if somewhat expensively to .05% U235, and recover 600 tons of U235 from the 600,000 tons of .15% U235 containing UCl4 we have now. That will keep us going a while longer and let us start tapping U form phosphates and shale oil deposits.
Alasdair
Chernobyl was water cooled, graphite moderated. These are insanely dangerous reactors with the steam and hydrogen explosion possibilities of the Pressurised Water reactors and the Wigner strain dangers of the Pebble Bed reactors. They are accidents waiting to happen. Pebble Bed graphite reactors are much safer.
wkwillis said:Right. We find mineral deposits all the time. We know exactly where to find lots of uranium at 100$ a pound, because we've already found it. Of course, your electricity bill will go up....
Same for other metals.
Not oil, though. It's too easy to just make methanol out of natural gas from Australian offshore and Canadian arctic, and with what's happening in Ti electrolysis technology, coal. We already may have peaked in oil production because while there is lots of expensive oil out there, the price won't go up because of methanol.
wkwillis said:Brilliantlight
The price of uranium may fall because I've invented a new geophysical prospecting method. This is not common and definitely not to be depended on. Otherwise sometimes the price goes up and doesn't come down.