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There is No Danger That New Nuclear Reactors Would Run Short of Uranium for Fuel

Posted on: Monday, 6 February 2006, 09:00 CST

DAVID McEwan Hill has no need to be so concerned that new nuclear reactors will run short of uranium for fuel (Letters, January 30). No company is going to make the substantial investment in new capacity unless they can be sure of being able to fuel it at reasonable cost, and, if they were even to think of doing so, the rating agencies' assessments would have such a drastic effect on their share price that they would be unable to secure the finance.

So, far from uranium being a scarce resource, it is estimated to amount to some 2.7 parts per million of the earth's crust. As with other minerals, it is widely disbursed but also in considerable concentrations. These have easily provided the modest annual world requirement of 68,000 tons - compare this with coal-fired generation; Longannet requires some five million tons of coal a year. With coal or oil/gas generation, the fuel accounts for some 60percent of the electricity cost. With nuclear the uranium is only 2percent so there is plenty of scope for developing lowerconcentration ores without significant cost penalty. Nor is the energy balance for milling and treating even low-grade ores significant in terms of the output from the reactors and this is to discount advances in mining techniques such as leaching now being trialled in the vast Athabasca sands of Canada.

No other significant power source can match nuclear costs. For wind, adding to the energy purchase price, the Renewables and Climate Change Levy subsidies, the costs of providing stand-by generation as well as the extra transmission ([GBP]6bn in Scotland alone), the Scottish consumer is paying four times the cost of power from British Energy's Scottish reactors and that includes provision for eventual decommissioning and waste disposal.

Unlike nuclear, wind and marine have little scope for reducing costs. It is easy to be misled into thinking that the tides of the Pentland Firth have huge potential for cheap energy but the facts are otherwise. The energy density (kw/sq m) is proportional to the cube of the velocity so that even at peak it is rather low, not much more than wind, and of course very much less for most of the time. This is a fact of nature leading to high costs and will not change with technological developments. Add to that the high costs of operating in a hostile marine environment and it is easy to see why the Pentland Firth and similar schemes do not figure in any list of potential sites for marine energy. All those that do have tidal ranges in the 20-to-40ft mark.

By comparison nuclear has good scope for development, as for example the newAP1000 Britishowned reactor design presently being sold off cheap by government to Japanese interests - House of Lords debate, January 30 - and France has just announced a new design study by their joint company with Germany into a fourth-generation design. These represent a considerable advance on existing designs, with lower costs, shorter construction times and make even better use of their uranium fuel. All this without even deploying the fast reactor which increases uranium reserves 60 times.

Sir Donald Miller, Puldohran, Gryffe Road, Kilmacolm.

Source: Herald, The; Glasgow (UK)

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