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60 Years of U: Perspectives on resources, demand, and the evolving role of nuclear energy
Recent years have seen growing global interest in nuclear energy and rising confidence in the sector. For the first time since the early 2000s, there is renewed optimism about the industry’s future. This change is driven by several major factors: geopolitical developments that highlight the need for secure energy supplies, a stronger focus on resilient energy systems, national commitments to decarbonization, and rising demand for clean and reliable electricity.
Erich A. Schneider, William C. Sailor
Nuclear Technology | Volume 162 | Number 3 | June 2008 | Pages 379-387
Technical Paper | Miscellaneous | doi.org/10.13182/NT08-A3963
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
We address the long-term uranium supply from first principles, summarizing estimates of the abundance of uranium in the crust of the earth as a function of concentration and accessibility. Defining the supply curve as a functional relationship between the cumulative quantity of uranium extracted and the cost of extracting the next unit of uranium, we note that a supply curve requires a crustal abundance model plus a correlation between ore grade and extraction cost. Surveying a number of supply curves that appear in the literature, we observe that while estimates vary widely (we observe an order of magnitude difference in forecasts of the quantity of uranium available at $100/kg U or less), they generally reflect expectations that uranium availability will be significantly greater than the Red Book numbers imply. Furthermore, by comparison with historical data for more than 40 other minerals, we show that the assumption of time invariance when formulating a supply curve is not borne out by experience. In fact, the price of most other minerals has decreased with time as well as with cumulative quantity extracted. Neither the Red Book nor the other supply curves we survey explicitly accounts for the unit-based technological learning that fosters this behavior.