14 DAY TRIAL // Over the past few years, governments around the world have started turning their attention to nuclear energy again, mostly because other energetic sectors are becoming increasingly susceptible to price fluctuations on the international market. With global warming and climate change, using fossil fuels becomes an increasingly risky option, and dependency on foreign oil and natural gas is already beginning to be frowned upon in many states. As such, nations turned their eyes to nuclear power plants, which are seen as the heralds of energetic independence, and also as a means for a country to keep the faith of its energy security in its own hands.
But Michael Dittmar, an expert at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, shows in a four-part series of articles published in the journal arXiv that this perception may be drastically misleading authorities into a new nuclear race. With countries such as the United Kingdom scheduled to green-light a large number of new nuclear power plants, the issue of stock becomes an increasingly hot topic for international debate. Dittmar reveals that believing uranium is plentiful on the planet, and therefore fit to sustain a growing nuclear industry, is dim-witted to say the least.
All of the world's power plants, the scientist says, consume more than 65,000 tons of nuclear-grade uranium every year. While this may not seem like much, Dittmar highlights the fact that only 40,000 tons are being extracted from mines around the globe. The remaining quantities come from civilian and military sources, as well as from reprocessed fuel and re-enriched uranium. “But without access to the military stocks, the civilian western uranium stocks will be exhausted by 2013,” the expert writes in his exhaustive analysis of the global nuclear industry, quoted by Technology Review.
He is even skeptical about the new generation of reactors known as fission breeders, which are hypothesized to be able to produce fuel and nuclear fusion. “Their huge construction costs, their poor safety records and their inefficient performance give little reason to believe that they will ever become commercially significant,” he reveals, adding that the future of nuclear fusion as a standalone technology is equally as bleak. “No matter how far into the future we may look, nuclear fusion as an energy source is even less probable than large-scale breeder reactors,” Dittmar adds.