Thanks for a great article. Building a strategic uranium reserve should be a national priority but who could take such a decision. Nuclear policy like many important decisions in the UK has been handed to a quango called Great British Nuclear. They won’t be taking a final investment decision on SMRs until 2029, which is the end of the next Westminster political cycle.
“GBN has launched the next phase of the SMR technology selection process and invites SMR vendors to register their interest. This is an important next step in identifying those companies best able to reach a project Final Investment Decision (FID) by the end of 2029, which could result in billions of pounds of public and private investment in SMR projects.”
Meanwhile according to the Tekegraph Rolls Royce CEO Tufan Erginbilgic is promising to build his first SMR project in Europe, before the UK.
Fascinating. Even with friendly Five Eyes nations like Canada and Australia supplying a large part of our Uranium requirements, the supply is still subject to global fluctuations in demand, supply and price. If Net Zero fantasists get their way, our electricity supply will rely largely upon 'home grown' wind and solar, which, if they do not solve the storage problem, will be entirely dependent upon the ever so dependable British weather. Meanwhile, Labour intend to curtail investment in North Sea Oil and Gas, vastly expand 'renewables' and who knows what they will do about nuclear energy. The net result is that we shall be totally dependent upon global supply chains for our energy resources, apart from 'home grown' intermittent renewables. Maybe they should rename DESNZ as the DEINZS - the Department for Energy Insecurity and Net Zero Supply.
In the short term, it probably won't matter whether Uranium global enrichment capacity is tight, because our remaining nuclear power stations will be closed down just 5 years after the complete decarbonisation of the grid in 2030 under a Labour government:
"Whoever wins the general election, the next government will be committed to decarbonising the National Grid – by 2035 in the case of the Conservatives and by 2030 in the case of Labour. That means either closing all the gas power stations or fitting them with carbon capture and storage technology – which does not yet exist on scale in Britain and whose costs are likely to be massive. At the same time every single one of our existing nuclear power stations is currently due to reach the end of its life by 2035. If Hinkley C is delayed much beyond its latest estimated completion, we could end up with no nuclear at all."
Hinkley C looks to me like it will become a white elephant on the scale of HS2.
Imagine if China , as part of its belt & road initiative, hoovered up a great portion of the worlds Uranium deposits, as they’re doing in DRoC with cobalt!?
Uranium resources are not a significant issue. The problem is enrichment capacity and/or nuclear fuel reprocessing capacity and/or fuel stingy reactors like PHWRs, MSRs and FBRs.
France used 5oz of uranium per capita per year in order to supply 88% of their domestic electricity supply. But they do partially reprocess their spent fuel.
Highly informative and interesting article! Easy to read as well.
It is ironic the Urenco is still owned in part by 2 German utility companies - they won't have much use for uranium now that the Radical Greens forced closure of German nuclear plants. Another irony is that China's build out of nuclear infrastructure is built on the back of coal energy and selling the West EVs and other garbage also produced using coal energy.
I agree fully with your points - in the UK, we should be fracking the shale gas sat under our feet and building more CCGT to support our transition to a completely nuclear future
Many nations around the world are ahead of us in this, yet again, we play catch up
We need DESNZ to drop the nonsense net zero claptrap and instead of pouring £Billions into inept, intermittent renewables, our energy security needs common sense and a gas/nuclear solution
Yesterday evening, the UK electricity grid was kept alive by gas, coal, nuclear and interconnectors (mainly French nuclear), meanwhile solar was 0GW and Wind was 0.24GW (from a total installed wind & solar of 45GW) - even someone with zero energy competence can see power outages ahead if we don’t change course sharpish
The real holy grail is fusion, however and despite recent miniscule successes, it’s always 30 years away, but once do-able on a commercial scale, that’s a game changer - in the meantime, there’s enough shale gas under our feet to allow a transition to a completely reliable, secure & affordable fission powered future, via SMR technology
It is doable on a commercial scale, called PACER fusion. Especially now with highly sophisticated robotics & automation. You just have a plant that makes 1-10kt fusion bomb cores with U-233 fission triggers. Drop them in a giant tank or cavern of thorium molten salts. Extract the U-233 from the salt to make more fusion triggers. This can all be automated. And the high energy fusion neutrons emitted will breed excess U-233 from Th-232 which can be used as fuel for MSRs or startup fuel for LFTRs.
No way PACER fusion would be cost competitive with LFTRs but there are difficulties getting the U-233 or Pu-239 startup fuel for LFTRs. This tech would never be implemented in the West but if China or Russia was desperate for energy I doubt they would have qualms about it. At one time peaceful use of nuclear weapons was a goal. And if China or Russia started the ball rolling, countries in the West might well follow.
The safety question is looking like a joke nowadays. As we now know very well our big risk is bioweapons, genetically engineered, financed by our own governments in places like Ukraine, China & Georgia far removed from public scrutiny. And the MSM and our own governments could care less.
"Phasing out nuclear power is the dumbest thing the Germans have ever done. Each time I say this on twitter, people come and tell me that Hitler did a few things that were even dumber. I disagree. Hitler wasn’t dumb, he was evil, he knew full well what he was doing. I’m not at all sure the current German government knows what it’s doing, and that isn’t a good thing either.
The German opposition to nuclear power is especially curious as our next door neighbors, the French and Dutch have no hesitation to use nuclear power to its full potential. Indeed, companies in both countries recently teamed up to bring small thorium reactors to Europe. Let’s have a look at what’s new. "
RR SMRs can be relatively quickly deployed over the next 20-30 years in the background to fracked gas CCGT supplying the heavy lift period between
A new 1500MW (twin turbine) CCGT can be built in 6 months, so multiple builds together, can reasonably quickly remove an ever increasing number of parasitic renewables off grid, giving greater grid stability, reliability and affordability
The only problem for the net zero mob then, is where to bury all the wind turbines & solar panels (the same problem they’ll have in years to come as they are forced to replace aging units)
Thorium and MSRs are both necessary to economically utilize spent fuel; plutonium breeders will require lavish subsidies, and burning waste should not be the primary goal, and certainly not something we pay extra for. Going down that path will clamp the growth of nuclear, which I suspect is also the true goal of those pushing HALEU; continuing to utilize only ~1/200th of mined uranium will limit scaling of nuclear. Reactors can be mass manufactured and almost arbitrarily cheap given the right regulation and technology. However, there is no shortcut for sourcing fissile, or rather, thorium is that shortcut, and the reason to start now.
A perfected LFTR and even fast reactors can wait; the prime goal (of advanced nuclear) should be converting thorium to U-233, using excess neutrons from fissioning transuranics in an MSR. Their fuel salt is the residual component after removing the unused uranium from spent fuel, which is a relatively simple process, since MSRs are not averse to hot fuel or fission products. The recovered (essentially natural) uranium could be sold, and the U-233 could turn CANDUs into thorium breeders overnight, also freeing up their uranium supply.
The converter MSRs need not be breeders; plutonium burns fine in the thermal spectrum, and would still greatly reduce the waste volume. Fast reactors could later finish the job, increasing the rate of U-233 production. The process doesn't need to be perfect, but we should at least be moving in that direction, instead of backwards. U-233 also has tremendous value for medicine (https://youtu.be/ltiU5ZUXKCE), and LFTR can afford to pay a premium for it, since very little is needed, and it is truly a one time cost. It is offset by the ability to indefinitely consume essentially free fuel at near 100% efficiency, producing almost no waste.
Spent fuel represents a tremendous opportunity, that if used wisely, could accelerate the replacement of fossil energy by many decades, because it completely bypasses the mining and enrichment bottlenecks. HALEU and plutonium breeders make it worse; HALEU needs yet more LEU and enrichment, and doesn't substantially improve uranium utilization, while fast reactors require an enormous amount of fissile, and each needs many decades to breed enough plutonium for another core. Plutonium breeding makes no sense, but replacing the fertile U-238 with thorium in fast reactors, allows them to produce enough U-233 to start a new thorium breeder every year, more or less.
Back when the UK was considering a new reactor for Hinkley Point, GE offered to build PRISMs that would burn the UKs excess reactor grade plutonium and SNF, which they claimed they really wanted a solution for. At a much lower electricity cost than the French EPR boondoggle, the most expensive, poorly designed GenIII reactor on the planet. They could have gone with the South Korean APR-1400 at a far lower cost for a far better reactor, as the UAE did. Of course they would have had to have the cojones to tell the EU dictatorship to F-OFF and the meddlesome Austrian government should have been sued for maybe $100B. After sending the Austrian ambassador home with a good swift boot to his rear end and told never to come back. Unfortunately the British government woozed out, as usual.
They had an excellent SMR design in the UK, Moltex Stable Salt Reactor, which Pratt's analysis concluded it would be the cheapest electricity in Britain. And would run on the spent nuclear fuel the Government is always whining about, that they need to do something with. And they were not allowed to develop them in the UK. So they had to move to Canada where they have passed their 1st stage licensing. And this while the UK gov't claimed to have an SMR program and were promoting their development. Lying, corrupt politicians.
'Self described elite' are 'deliberately DISMANTLING' Western democracy - Neil Oliver - YouTube:
"'The time has come again to be rid of the whole rotten lot of them'. Neil Oliver says the 'self described elite' have been carefully and deliberately dismantling Western democracies and holding on to power for too long."
Thanks for a great article. Building a strategic uranium reserve should be a national priority but who could take such a decision. Nuclear policy like many important decisions in the UK has been handed to a quango called Great British Nuclear. They won’t be taking a final investment decision on SMRs until 2029, which is the end of the next Westminster political cycle.
“GBN has launched the next phase of the SMR technology selection process and invites SMR vendors to register their interest. This is an important next step in identifying those companies best able to reach a project Final Investment Decision (FID) by the end of 2029, which could result in billions of pounds of public and private investment in SMR projects.”
Meanwhile according to the Tekegraph Rolls Royce CEO Tufan Erginbilgic is promising to build his first SMR project in Europe, before the UK.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/02/22/rolls-royce-boosted-post-pandemic-jump-demand-jet-engines/
Fascinating. Even with friendly Five Eyes nations like Canada and Australia supplying a large part of our Uranium requirements, the supply is still subject to global fluctuations in demand, supply and price. If Net Zero fantasists get their way, our electricity supply will rely largely upon 'home grown' wind and solar, which, if they do not solve the storage problem, will be entirely dependent upon the ever so dependable British weather. Meanwhile, Labour intend to curtail investment in North Sea Oil and Gas, vastly expand 'renewables' and who knows what they will do about nuclear energy. The net result is that we shall be totally dependent upon global supply chains for our energy resources, apart from 'home grown' intermittent renewables. Maybe they should rename DESNZ as the DEINZS - the Department for Energy Insecurity and Net Zero Supply.
Right on cue, there is this in the Telegraph:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/02/25/the-uk-is-much-closer-to-blackouts-than-anyone-dares-to-admit/
In the short term, it probably won't matter whether Uranium global enrichment capacity is tight, because our remaining nuclear power stations will be closed down just 5 years after the complete decarbonisation of the grid in 2030 under a Labour government:
"Whoever wins the general election, the next government will be committed to decarbonising the National Grid – by 2035 in the case of the Conservatives and by 2030 in the case of Labour. That means either closing all the gas power stations or fitting them with carbon capture and storage technology – which does not yet exist on scale in Britain and whose costs are likely to be massive. At the same time every single one of our existing nuclear power stations is currently due to reach the end of its life by 2035. If Hinkley C is delayed much beyond its latest estimated completion, we could end up with no nuclear at all."
Hinkley C looks to me like it will become a white elephant on the scale of HS2.
There is a simple rule of thumb. Any government department that is "for" something is actually against it.
Department for Transport
Department for Energy Security
etc.
Imagine if China , as part of its belt & road initiative, hoovered up a great portion of the worlds Uranium deposits, as they’re doing in DRoC with cobalt!?
Uranium resources are not a significant issue. The problem is enrichment capacity and/or nuclear fuel reprocessing capacity and/or fuel stingy reactors like PHWRs, MSRs and FBRs.
France used 5oz of uranium per capita per year in order to supply 88% of their domestic electricity supply. But they do partially reprocess their spent fuel.
They're doing it already. The have operations at the Rossing and Husab mines in Namibia together with JVs and big offtake agreements with Kazatomprom.
Highly informative and interesting article! Easy to read as well.
It is ironic the Urenco is still owned in part by 2 German utility companies - they won't have much use for uranium now that the Radical Greens forced closure of German nuclear plants. Another irony is that China's build out of nuclear infrastructure is built on the back of coal energy and selling the West EVs and other garbage also produced using coal energy.
An interesting detailed look at Niger and its environs
https://www.fpri.org/article/2023/11/perfect-storm-nigers-uranium-amidst-sahelian-chaos/
Kudos David, another superb, analytical article
I agree fully with your points - in the UK, we should be fracking the shale gas sat under our feet and building more CCGT to support our transition to a completely nuclear future
Many nations around the world are ahead of us in this, yet again, we play catch up
We need DESNZ to drop the nonsense net zero claptrap and instead of pouring £Billions into inept, intermittent renewables, our energy security needs common sense and a gas/nuclear solution
Yesterday evening, the UK electricity grid was kept alive by gas, coal, nuclear and interconnectors (mainly French nuclear), meanwhile solar was 0GW and Wind was 0.24GW (from a total installed wind & solar of 45GW) - even someone with zero energy competence can see power outages ahead if we don’t change course sharpish
So, would this supply issue encourage faster development of thorium-based nuclear technology?
The real holy grail is fusion, however and despite recent miniscule successes, it’s always 30 years away, but once do-able on a commercial scale, that’s a game changer - in the meantime, there’s enough shale gas under our feet to allow a transition to a completely reliable, secure & affordable fission powered future, via SMR technology
It is doable on a commercial scale, called PACER fusion. Especially now with highly sophisticated robotics & automation. You just have a plant that makes 1-10kt fusion bomb cores with U-233 fission triggers. Drop them in a giant tank or cavern of thorium molten salts. Extract the U-233 from the salt to make more fusion triggers. This can all be automated. And the high energy fusion neutrons emitted will breed excess U-233 from Th-232 which can be used as fuel for MSRs or startup fuel for LFTRs.
No way PACER fusion would be cost competitive with LFTRs but there are difficulties getting the U-233 or Pu-239 startup fuel for LFTRs. This tech would never be implemented in the West but if China or Russia was desperate for energy I doubt they would have qualms about it. At one time peaceful use of nuclear weapons was a goal. And if China or Russia started the ball rolling, countries in the West might well follow.
Hmmm, sounds a bit Oppenheimerish! Maybe contained fusion in purpose built facilities would be safer, albeit, decades away - still, never say never!
The safety question is looking like a joke nowadays. As we now know very well our big risk is bioweapons, genetically engineered, financed by our own governments in places like Ukraine, China & Georgia far removed from public scrutiny. And the MSM and our own governments could care less.
I think more likely to stimulate breeder reactors that can burn spent fuel from existing reactor fleet. Thorium may come, but it will take a while.
There was just an agreement signed between NAAREA of France and Thorizon of The Netherlands to develop Thorium fueled Small Modular MSRs:
Good News: Small Nuclear Thorium Reactors are Coming to Europe, Sabine Hossenfelder:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf4XahwtJUk
"Phasing out nuclear power is the dumbest thing the Germans have ever done. Each time I say this on twitter, people come and tell me that Hitler did a few things that were even dumber. I disagree. Hitler wasn’t dumb, he was evil, he knew full well what he was doing. I’m not at all sure the current German government knows what it’s doing, and that isn’t a good thing either.
The German opposition to nuclear power is especially curious as our next door neighbors, the French and Dutch have no hesitation to use nuclear power to its full potential. Indeed, companies in both countries recently teamed up to bring small thorium reactors to Europe. Let’s have a look at what’s new. "
Exactly and we need new nuclear yesterday
RR SMRs can be relatively quickly deployed over the next 20-30 years in the background to fracked gas CCGT supplying the heavy lift period between
A new 1500MW (twin turbine) CCGT can be built in 6 months, so multiple builds together, can reasonably quickly remove an ever increasing number of parasitic renewables off grid, giving greater grid stability, reliability and affordability
The only problem for the net zero mob then, is where to bury all the wind turbines & solar panels (the same problem they’ll have in years to come as they are forced to replace aging units)
Thorium and MSRs are both necessary to economically utilize spent fuel; plutonium breeders will require lavish subsidies, and burning waste should not be the primary goal, and certainly not something we pay extra for. Going down that path will clamp the growth of nuclear, which I suspect is also the true goal of those pushing HALEU; continuing to utilize only ~1/200th of mined uranium will limit scaling of nuclear. Reactors can be mass manufactured and almost arbitrarily cheap given the right regulation and technology. However, there is no shortcut for sourcing fissile, or rather, thorium is that shortcut, and the reason to start now.
A perfected LFTR and even fast reactors can wait; the prime goal (of advanced nuclear) should be converting thorium to U-233, using excess neutrons from fissioning transuranics in an MSR. Their fuel salt is the residual component after removing the unused uranium from spent fuel, which is a relatively simple process, since MSRs are not averse to hot fuel or fission products. The recovered (essentially natural) uranium could be sold, and the U-233 could turn CANDUs into thorium breeders overnight, also freeing up their uranium supply.
The converter MSRs need not be breeders; plutonium burns fine in the thermal spectrum, and would still greatly reduce the waste volume. Fast reactors could later finish the job, increasing the rate of U-233 production. The process doesn't need to be perfect, but we should at least be moving in that direction, instead of backwards. U-233 also has tremendous value for medicine (https://youtu.be/ltiU5ZUXKCE), and LFTR can afford to pay a premium for it, since very little is needed, and it is truly a one time cost. It is offset by the ability to indefinitely consume essentially free fuel at near 100% efficiency, producing almost no waste.
Spent fuel represents a tremendous opportunity, that if used wisely, could accelerate the replacement of fossil energy by many decades, because it completely bypasses the mining and enrichment bottlenecks. HALEU and plutonium breeders make it worse; HALEU needs yet more LEU and enrichment, and doesn't substantially improve uranium utilization, while fast reactors require an enormous amount of fissile, and each needs many decades to breed enough plutonium for another core. Plutonium breeding makes no sense, but replacing the fertile U-238 with thorium in fast reactors, allows them to produce enough U-233 to start a new thorium breeder every year, more or less.
Excellent article David! Clear, easy to understand, & addresses the bias and updates like production shortages.
Any thoughts on higher cost of nuclear energy relative to the alternatives? Unfortunately UK and many countries have to import natural gas.
As it happens, yes I do.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/how-to-make-nuclear-power-cheaper
Also check this article out:
Nuclear Power not only should be cheap; it was cheap: 3 cents/kWh cheap:
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/p/nuclear-power-not-only-should-be
Back when the UK was considering a new reactor for Hinkley Point, GE offered to build PRISMs that would burn the UKs excess reactor grade plutonium and SNF, which they claimed they really wanted a solution for. At a much lower electricity cost than the French EPR boondoggle, the most expensive, poorly designed GenIII reactor on the planet. They could have gone with the South Korean APR-1400 at a far lower cost for a far better reactor, as the UAE did. Of course they would have had to have the cojones to tell the EU dictatorship to F-OFF and the meddlesome Austrian government should have been sued for maybe $100B. After sending the Austrian ambassador home with a good swift boot to his rear end and told never to come back. Unfortunately the British government woozed out, as usual.
http://prismsuk.blogspot.com/
They had an excellent SMR design in the UK, Moltex Stable Salt Reactor, which Pratt's analysis concluded it would be the cheapest electricity in Britain. And would run on the spent nuclear fuel the Government is always whining about, that they need to do something with. And they were not allowed to develop them in the UK. So they had to move to Canada where they have passed their 1st stage licensing. And this while the UK gov't claimed to have an SMR program and were promoting their development. Lying, corrupt politicians.
'Self described elite' are 'deliberately DISMANTLING' Western democracy - Neil Oliver - YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATWG0bBWe_o
"'The time has come again to be rid of the whole rotten lot of them'. Neil Oliver says the 'self described elite' have been carefully and deliberately dismantling Western democracies and holding on to power for too long."
Thank you Hillary Clinton. The “absurd conspiracy theory” was really a set up. https://www.nationalreview.com/the-campaign-spot/how-hillary-let-russia-buy-20-us-uranium-production-capacity-jim-geraghty/