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

Summary

---

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.

See the full content of this document

Extract

---

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

No other significant power source can match nuclear costs. For wind, adding to the energy pur...

See the full content of this document

---