Was wondering about how long nuclear power would be sustainable for. Could we run out of the elements required?
Is there a time line if we shift to all nuclear.
In: 9
Fissile materials (nuclear fuel) are a finite resource, but also comprise a not-insignificant percentage of the total mass of Earth’s crust.
Uranium, for example, can be harvested from seawater, and there is very likely enough there to power humanity for millions of years.
Eventually, nuclear fuel is non renewable. But we’re talking about a fuel source that has accessible energy that would make the entire energy expenditure of mankind to this date completely insignificant. Technically every energy source on earth is non renewable on a long enough timeline. The sun will run out of fuel. The core will cool. Entropy gets us all eventually.
There’s estimated 200+ years of known uranium reserves at today’s consumption rate. If the Thorium cycle finally progresses from experimental to large scale, there’s enough reserves for 1000+ years.
With current data, depending on what you consider reasonable sources of nuclear fuel, the reserves will be somewhere around a few decades to over a hundred years. The time frames depends on the energy consumption, the industrialization of poorer countries, shift to other sources of power, re-using nuclear weapons, discovering new usable sources (speculative resources) and technologies where we get creative with physics.
As our climate problems increase we could indeed see a sharp rise in the cost of nuclear power due to limited supply … one reason more switch to a regenerative source of power for most of our demands and use limited sources of power for balancing things out.
SYL
By rough estimation, using economically accessible uranium (because mining uranium from the ocean floor or from asteroids is *not* currently feasible) many nuclear scientists say we could run on nuclear energy for about 200 years at current consumption rates. This is assuming a complete cessation of fossil fuels, and it also does not include renewables like solar/wind/hydro/geothermal energy. This also does not account for any new developments in nuclear energy nor does it account for increasing energy demand.
In short, it’s extremely difficult to “calculate” how long nuclear energy would last us, given how many variables are unknown. Right now, the two greatest limitations to nuclear energy are that extracting uranium from ore is *very* expensive compared to harvesting oil and natural gas, and we also are in the infancy stage of nuclear development. We don’t even have fission reactors figured out yet, which are orders of magnitude more efficient than fusion reactors. It is the difference between steam engines powered by coal and combustion engines powered by refined gasoline. Leagues apart in efficiency and scientific sophistication.
[deleted]
Latest Answers