France has recently given up entirely on fast reactors, mothballing their proposed new program.

https://www.powermag.com/france-scraps-fast-nuclear-reactor-...

In addition to be bad news for fast reactors, this also means France does not see nuclear being a major factor in avoiding global warming (a nuclear powered world using burner reactors would run out of uranium very quickly, or would need to tap vast new sources at dubiously low cost.)

The French Superphenix is the butt of jokes, but France really has led the world in (1) reprocessing spent fuel, and (2) really fabricating the extracted plutonium into MOX fuel and putting it back into reactors. Everybody else has been too scared of the high energy ball mill and the plutonium nanoparticles that it makes.

(Ok, the Russians are serious too about using MOX in fast reactors but they've developed an alternative to the high energy ball mill.)

The supply of uranium is vast if you consider seawater as a resource. If burner reactors can be made economical in terms of capital cost we could possible make seawater uranium work. With a breeder cycle seawater uranium would certainly be affordable, we'd wind up spending a lot more on the rest of the fuel cycle.

Reprocessing only makes sense if you're going to put that separated plutonium into a fast reactor. MOX fuel's value for LWRs is so marginal that it's not worth reprocessing spent fuel to make it.

Seawater uranium extraction would have to be scaled up by a factor approaching a trillion if nuclear w. LWRs is going to fuel the world (to in excess of 1 million tonnes of natural uranium per year), and it would only last a few thousand years.

A few thousand years is plenty of time to come up with alternatives.

It's illustrative of the scale of U extraction that would be needed. A single 1 GW(e) burner reactor would require a field of U absorbers covering 170 km^2 of continental shelf (and to supply 18 TW of primary thermal energy would need about 6000 such reactors). The power/area would be considerably worse than solar (with solar capacity factor taken into account).

Anyway, I don't believe France (or anyone else) has any major program to bring seawater uranium extraction to market either.

At least it gave up building them as public projects. They really want to control costs. Get the most boring thing possible and make more of it cheaper. (The EPR 2 project.)