Also I read somewhere that the waste products can now be re used, is that true?
In: Planetary Science
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We wouldn’t. For reference, Coal has about 20-ish KiloJoules of energy per KG or something like that
Uranium has 76 million.
its hard to say and there are conflicting estimates, but if you just used uranium once, about 90-200 years with the current designes, but these designes also produce other fuels you can use in other reactor designs for about 1000-20000 years depending on what is actually possible and what is only theory.
if you use thorium reactors instead, you can pull 100000 years or so
It would really depend how desperate we become to extract.
I attended a course probably close to a decade ago that gave predictions on predicted fuel reserves which put uranium at around 120yrs remaining and so e other reactor type fuels has 200-250years. But that was based on predicted usage increases not total conversion so probably only about 50-60 years total with current found resources
If you only want commercially viable reactors and I think that is the only type that makes sense, on current tech power plants that use highly concentrated Uranium around 20 years. Different kinda techs like breeder reactors that are available and would just need to be designed and built maybe 300 on current energy usage as they would use the same Uranium more efficiently. Future tech that may or may not work thousands of years.
If we start farming the ocean for Uranium that would also more than 100x current reserves, and those reserves would be replenished by Uranium essentially being mined by the ocean.
Though the reserves aren’t really the problem, it’s that only 3% of current energy usage comes from nuclear and building 30x more nuclear power plants than currently are available would take massive amounts of investment capital that would only start paying dividends thirty to fourty years after completion of the plant. The world simply can’t afford that so they opt for renewables which take much less capital expenditure per effective GW capacity and they pay dividends much earlier.
Something to consider in this question is that there exist “breeder reactors”. Normal nuclear reactors use a rare isotope of uranium to produce the fission reaction in nuclear power plants. Most (99%) of natural uranium is U-238 which is not ~~radioactive~~ fissile, and the U-235 which is ~~radioactive~~ fissile is only 0.72% of natural uranium. The rare U-235 needs to be refined to around 3 to 5 percent for use in a nuclear reactor, or up to 90% for use in a nuclear weapon.
A “breeder reactor” though can take regular U-238 and by exposing it to the neutron flux of a fission reaction create more fissile material than they use. In other words they convert the 99% of useless uranium into useful fuel uranium!
By using breeder reactors it is estimated that humanity’s energy needs could be fulfilled for approximately 4 billion years, or until the sun destroys Earth entirely. Even if we assume that the energy requirements are vastly underestimated it is probably *plenty* to last until a better solution can be found.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor)
Breeder reactors can also, besides unenriched Uranium, convert Thorium (3x more abundant than Uranium) and Plutonium (decommissioned warheads).
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfWB4CsQwyw&ab_channel=gordonmcdowell](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfWB4CsQwyw&ab_channel=gordonmcdowell)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4&list=PL9p3Ws-jomR6Ej09TOPZ5fDOedeOl5Zhe&ab_channel=gordonmcdowell](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9M__yYbsZ4&list=PL9p3Ws-jomR6Ej09TOPZ5fDOedeOl5Zhe&ab_channel=gordonmcdowell)
This question is a bit loaded.
The people who are answering you are factoring in the current know uranium mines and reserves when answering this question. Uranium is generally not surveyed for specifically because, currently there are no future plans to have a sudden boom in nuclear power. The only known deposits are areas where uranium was found back when we were searching for it and locations that have accidentally been found when looking for other resources and it happened to be near by. If we actively started surveying for uranium we could easily fine we have hundreds of times more than we thought we did or we could discover that we have found every source of uranium on the planet.
On top of the above, uranium isn’t the only nuclear fuel in existence. There are also thorium reactors that have been heavily researched and produce a viable fuel weight to power output ratio. So even if we did completely run out of uranium it wouldn’t stop us from being able to use nuclear reactors.
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