- #1
Posty McPostface
- 27
- 7
Here's a simple article that presents the case that nuclear is actually a renewable resource.
An excerpt:
Any thoughts on the matter?
Do other countries consider nuclear as renewable? Japan only comes to my mind.
An excerpt:
However, the big deal about extracting uranium from seawater is that it makes nuclear power completely renewable.
Uranium is dissolved in seawater at very low concentrations, only about 3 parts per billion (3 micrograms/liter or 0.00000045 ounces per gallon). But there is a lot of ocean water – 300 million cubic miles or about 350 million trillion gallons (350 quintillion gallons, 1,324 quintillion liters). So there’s about 4 billion tons of uranium in the ocean at anyone time.
However, seawater concentrations of uranium are controlled by steady-state, or pseudo-equilibrium, chemical reactions between waters and rocks on the Earth, both in the ocean and on land. And those rocks contain 100 trillion tons of uranium. So whenever uranium is extracted from seawater, more is leached from rocks to replace it, to the same concentration. It is impossible for humans to extract enough uranium over the next billion years to lower the overall seawater concentrations of uranium, even if nuclear provided 100% of our energy and our species lasted a billion years.
In other words, uranium in seawater is actually completely renewable. As renewable as solar energy. Yes, uranium in the crust is, strictly speaking, finite. But so is the Sun, which will eventually burn out. But that won’t begin to happen for another 5 billion years. Even the wind on Earth will stop at about that time as our atmosphere boils off during the Sun’s initial death throes as a Red Giant.
According to Professor Jason Donev from the University of Calgary, “Renewable literally means 'to make new again'. Any resource that naturally replenishes with time, like the creation of wind or the growth of biological organisms for biomass or biofuels, is certainly renewable. Renewable energy means that the energy humans extract from nature will generally replace itself. And now uranium as fuel meets this definition.”
So by any definition, solar, wind, hydro and nuclear are all renewable. It’s about time society recognized this and added nuclear to the renewable portfolio.
Any thoughts on the matter?
Do other countries consider nuclear as renewable? Japan only comes to my mind.