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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Building future nuclear power fleets: The available uranium resources constraint

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Abstract According to almost all forward-looking studies, the world′s energy consumption will increase in the future decades, mostly because of the growing world population and the long-term development of emerging countries. The effort to contain global warming makes it hard to exclude nuclear energy from the global energy mix. The availability of natural uranium resources is a major constraint in terms of meeting this demand. In line with the scenarios floated by various international organisations and taking into consideration only current uranium-consuming light water reactors technologies with slow neutrons, 4 to 7 Mt of uranium could be consumed by 2050, namely, all identified or known resources barring uncertainties. Recovering uranium from seawater would guarantee a virtually infinite resource of nuclear fuel, but its technical and economic feasibility has yet to be demonstrated, and huge advances need to be achieved in this direction. According to different recent publications on phosphate reserves, the potential amount of uranium recoverable from phosphates can be estimated at around 4 MtU. Furthermore, the production of uranium as a by-product of phosphate is determined by the world production of phosphoric acid. Uranium recovery as a by-product of phosphate rocks could be competitive for the moment, but limited at the most to 10 ktU per year, i.e. less than 20% of current world demand. The only way to lift the constraint of phosphate capacity production is to produce uranium as a primary product of phosphates. Unfortunately, this solution is very unlikely due to its high unit cost. So, conventional uranium resources and unconventional resources, from seawater or phosphate rocks, are inadequate for expanded nuclear generating capacity required to combat global warming. Therefore we need to find more conventional uranium resources, in new deposits, or optimize the consumption by reprocessing/recycling spent nuclear fuel on a larger scale and deploy fast breeder reactors.