*That ought to prove interesting, if there's anything to it.
*Inevitable peak-uranium pro-nuke / anti-nuke cranks are invited to go comment on the Technology Review blog, where you'll find plenty of flame-flinging company to assure you that you have no idea what you are talking about, because any five-year-old child can determine the fate of the nuclear industry with a four-minute Google search, etc etc.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24414/?nlid=2521
"The world is about to enter a period of unprecedented investment in nuclear power. The combined threats of climate change, energy security and fears over the high prices and dwindling reserves of oil are forcing governments towards the nuclear option. The perception is that nuclear power is a carbon-free technology, that it breaks our reliance on oil and that it gives governments control over their own energy supply.
"That looks dangerously overoptimistic, says Michael Dittmar, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich who publishes the final chapter of an impressive four-part analysis of the global nuclear industry on the arXiv today.
"Perhaps the most worrying problem is the misconception that uranium is plentiful. The world's nuclear plants today eat through some 65,000 tons of uranium each year. Of this, the mining industry supplies about 40,000 tons. The rest comes from secondary sources such as civilian and military stockpiles, reprocessed fuel and re-enriched uranium. "But without access to the military stocks, the civilian western uranium stocks will be exhausted by 2013, concludes Dittmar.
"It's not clear how the shortfall can be made up since nobody seems to know where the mining industry can look for more.
"That means countries that rely on uranium imports such as Japan and many western countries will face uranium .shortages, possibly as soon as 2013. Far from being the secure source of energy that many governments are basing their future energy needs on, nuclear power looks decidedly rickety.
"But what of new technologies such as fission breeder reactors which generate fuel and nuclear fusion? Dittmar is pessimistic about fission breeders. "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 says.
"And the future looks even worse for nuclear fusion: "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."...
