Namely, do you think it has a future in the wave of next gen clean energy sources? If you support it, do you think it will always be viable or that it should only be a temporary measure to get us off fossil fuels while our renewable infrastructure grows?
Its not gonna be much use once Uranium runs out, and that might be rather soon.
Good article about it (in Spanish, but with graphics in English)
Good point. Hadn’t thought of that, I always assumed that there’d be plenty of Uranium in the Earth.
What about Thorium reactors.
“After 50 years of exploitation we still haven’t arrived at the level to create a reactor that’s comercially viable.”
And it links to this blog post which explains that in a lot of detail it seems: http://theoildrum.com/node/5929
The logic of the article doesn’t really follow? It implies there’s no uranium just because there’s no profitable way to extract it in France and the US at the current dirt cheap prices. It even acknowledges there’s plenty of Uranium ore in Kazakhstan, but provides no data about it.
You could multiply the price of uranium in the graphs by 100 and it would barely impact the cost of electricity: nuclear power is extremely fuel efficient, even a price of 10000 $/kg of natural uranium implies less than 0.1 $/kWh of electricity in fuel costs.
Capitalist mining companies will never survey more uranium mines when uranium demand has been dwindling for the last 2 decades due to the anti-nuclear media campaign and the inherent low rate of profit of such a capital-intensive industry.