Exploitation or Exploration?

I am sure that you all have observed the negative feelings that exist toward oil exploration.  It is to the point that "exploration" is almost a dirty word being associated with drilling and places such as ANWR.  So it is obvious that the oil and gas industries have problems with exploration, but the truth is that the nuclear industry also needs to rely on exploration to validate its future.

There is a popular myth out there which says there is only enough Uranium on the Earth to power us for roughly the next 50 years.  This statement is based upon the Uranium reserves that we knew about in the 1950s though and does not represent the true situation.  Interestingly enough, it seems that it is this fact which drives many to believe that by choosing nuclear power, we are only going down the same path as we have with oil and coal.  To them, it is a finite resource which will only run out in the near future.

What our reserves actually tell us is how much Uranium we know about.  Thus, if we don't look, our reserves will be really small.  It is not that there is only a small amount of Uranium available, but it is that we just have not looked for it.  Doing some reading this week, I stumbled on an interesting article detailing the history of our Uranium reserves.  I recommend that you read this article to really understand how important this resources really is.

The article shows that we have not invested much into finding Uranium reserves.  Some have even said that we have invested less in Uranium exploration that we had in oil exploration in the early 1900s.  Yes, this is probably a bit of an exaggeration, but there is a lot of truth in the statement.  We have not looked.  In 2007, there were some substantial funds invested in Uranium exploration, and this resulted in a significant increase in our Uranium reserves in under two years.  The graph below is a visual representation of the data collected by the World Nuclear Association on Uranium reserves.  It is a bit complicated, but take a minute to look at it.

Graph from http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.html

The dotted line in the graph shows the funding trend for Uranium exploration over time with the funding values being shown on the left-side axis.  The shaded green part of the graph represents the known Uranium reserves separated into three cost categories.  The categories aren't too important for my point, so don't worry about them here.  Notice how well that the reserves seem to correspond to how much we invest into finding more.  It is almost a linear relationship at this point, meaning that it is directly related to how much we spend as to how much we have.  This is one reason for believing that we are just beginning to tap the resource.

Another advantage nuclear power has over its competitors such as oil and coal is that its cost to the consumer is not greatly affected by the cost of the fuel.  This stems from the fact fuel is not the large cost in operating a nuclear plant.  Maintenance on a nuclear power plant is the largest operating cost, but really the only real expense of a nuclear plant is permitting and building it.  But I digress...  The fact that the fuel is so small in the operating cost means that the price of the fuel can rise drastically without effecting the cost of the power to the consumer.  When the price of a resource such as Uranium can vary so much without having a large effect on its demand, it becomes more cost effective, when needed, to extract the resource as a higher cost.  This means we can get it from difficult places, where resources such as oil become unfeasible economically when the price of extraction greatly increases.

This opens up many possibilities.  Some of the largest reserves of Uranium actually lies in sea water, but as of now this is an expensive and unneeded process.  We have so much Uranium right now that we are not even being conservative with it.  As of now, we are operating reactors that burn through large amounts of fuel inefficiently and we are not heavily promoting reprocessing.  

Also, I am just talking about Uranium reserves, but this is not the only nuclear fuel.  It is just the most convenient because in its natural form it is easy to manage.  In fact, fuels such as Thorium are even more plentiful than Uranium and technologies such as breeder reactors along with the large amounts of Uranium in the Earth's granite crust offer us an essentially limitless power supply.  That should be enough time to get the renewable energies right!  Until then, nuclear power will be here for us.