> Uranium is so damn energy dense and abundant enough that there's little need to set up these complicated recycling systems

Uranium is abundant, but not homogenously so [1]. (China has some. But not a lot. And it's bound up expensively. And it's by their population centres.)

For the Americas, Europe, Australia, southern Africa and Eastern Mediterranean, burning uranium makes sense. For China, it trades the Strait of Malacca for dependence on Russia and Central Asia.

[1] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1800.pdf

Uranium can be stockpiled for years in advance, relatively easily. Enough to tide over a small war while you're setting up domestic production. And China should have enough low-grade ores for that.

> Uranium can be stockpiled for years in advance, relatively easily

So can oil. Energy security is an important priority for a global power.

Stockpiles are good. Own supply chains are better.

Uranium is far, far energy denser than any fossil fuel, and thus much easier to stockpile.

> Uranium is far, far energy denser than any fossil fuel, and thus much easier to stockpile

Sure. That doesn't remove stockpiles' inherent disadvantages: finiteness and vulnerability. Relying on uranium stockpiles would immediately put China at a known limit in a war of attrition that wouldn't constrain their adversaries.

A sufficiently large stockpile of uranium gives China time to simply pivot away from depending on imported Uranium (either by building new mines locally or building out solar or such). An equivalent stockpile of oil simply isn't feasible, if only because oil is usually used directly and not via a source-agnostic electrical grid.

Is 150 vs 250 years of energy reserves a disadvantage in practice?

> Is 150 vs 250 years of energy reserves a disadvantage in practice?

Reserves != stockpiles.

I know. I am not saying I got the order of magnitude exactly right, just pointing out beyond a certain threshold the size of the stockpile doesn't matter. I suspect that if a nation state puts its mind to it, stockpiles great enough to last a war are totally possible.

Which is why renewables are even better. Zero fuel input.

Well no, no country on earth has 5 years worth of oil stockpile, logistically it's impossible.

Nothing can compete with the energy density of uranium.

Arguably Qatar does, as do most other nations who produce it locally. That is exactly GP's point.

Oil is relatively easily, inexpensively, and quickly mined and refined. Compared to, say, uranium.

That's not a stockpile, they have to extract and refine it to use it. Russia understood it the hard way with the refineries attacks.

And no, oil is more expensive (especially nowadays) to extract than uranium.

There's a reason nobody ever became rich with a uranium mine, all the value is in the plant and the market price barely covers extracting it, some mines even closed because of the price being too low.

We're not talking about ore, rather fuel. Uranium ore might be inexpensive, I don't know, but converting that ore into fuel is not an easy task. I'm guessing that the reason it's not profitable is that so little of it is actually needed, relative to oil.

Also, they can bring it in by rail from Russia. So they can avoid the seaward path.

> they can bring it in by rail from Russia

Uranium is better for Chinese energy security than oil. But this still leaves China at Moscow's mercy. That's not too differet, energywise, than the situation is now.

China imports substantially all of its uranium from Kazakhstan and Namibia, and a tiny bit from US. Russia is insignificant.

https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/CHN/yea...

There's not that much Uranium actually that's economically sensible to extract. The NEA says in their 2024 report on Uranium [1]:

> Considering both the low and high nuclear capacity scenarios to 2050 presented in this edition, and assuming their 2050 capacity is maintained for the rest of the century, the quantities of uranium required by the global fleet – based on the current once-through fuel cycle – would likely surpass the currently identified uranium resource base in the highest cost category before the 2110s.

Their "high" scenario assumes having a bit more than double of today's capacity by 2050; today we have about 4-5% supply from nuclear energy worldwide.

[1] https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_103179/uranium-2024-resourc...

Out of curioosity, do they forecast at what point it becomes cheaper to breed than mine?

There are tons of mines which were shut down a long time ago, but could be reopened if there was much of a uranium market again.

The actual efficiency of breeding thorium is so low, it would take a HUGE scarcity to actual make any sense.

Local scarcity, not necessarily global scarcity. Especially during times of conflict. China has no uranium, so this may make sense for them.

Also, currently all transport channels for uranium are oil dependent, which is becoming a scarce resource in the relevant timeline - decades.

China has massive Uranium reserves [https://www.nucnet.org/news/chinese-state-media-announces-di...].

And I hate to pollute this thread with more AI fear-mongering, but AI inference is already showing its effects on the energy sector and it is expected to grow very rapidly. Energy demands may likely grow at a stronger rate than initially expected.

It's a bit different. Higher demand will lead to higher price, opening more options to mine. Now uranium is too cheap to open new mines and exploration

Sorry, but there are quite a few things you are missing. Nuclear engineering is well, nuclear engineering. The first big difference is that you can use the Thorium in a liquid fueled reactor instead of a solid fueled one. This allows you to burn far more of the fuel. For example, 2-4% of a solid fuel rod would fission, while in a liquid fueled reactor you can get to 90+%. This is good economically for 2 reasons: 1) more energy per unit of fuel and 2) the waste lasts far less time.

There are also other advantages of a liquid fueled reactor. The big one is that it is far easier to run because it self regulates. When a liquid heats up it expands (slowing the reaction) and when it cools it contracts (speeding up the reaction). So its safer to run, makes less waste and gets 20+X more power per unit of fuel.

There is one final thing to know about this stuff. A nuclear reactor is several billion in infrastructure supporting reactors that cost 10s of millions using a fuel load that costs less than your car. The way we scale and handle nuclear reactors just makes no sense economically. Each NPP is custom and they are built so rarely that everything has to be custom made. When you start building stock reactor designs with consistent supply chains, the cost goes way down. And most of the cost is lawsuits, lobbyists and PR. For developed countries, using or not using nuclear power is a political choice. One that we have been making badly. When you realize that the only real choices for baseload are FF and nuclear, the real political situation makes sense. Once again, the cause is just the excuse, not the real issue.

There's also the choice to match our energy consumption dynamically to intermittent power sources (e.g. solar), reducing the baseload demand. This is entirely orthogonal to decisions about where the baseload generation should come from.

That's called load following. That's also a thing a liquid fueled reactor can do that a solid fueled reactor can't.

doesnt make a difference to the economics of a nuke plant. Fuel consumption is a tiny fraction of the cost of nuke power, its almost all fixed cost - amortized construction costs, operations, etc. You need to run it at as close to 100% always to have any chance at payback & economical $/kw. Thats why they arent getting built.

No, it's the opposite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_side_management. Load-following is a good property for a power plant to have, though, especially if the plant is suitable for baseload generation.

You need to go tell the French that what they've been doing for decades isn't possible, then.

EPR has shown that the French have lost the ability to build reactors rapidly and on budget.

> Nuclear engineering is well, nuclear engineering.

Not sure I get what you are trying to say. Are you saying that you are a nuclear engineer and I am not? Because, frankly, the rest of your comment does not read as one written by a nuclear engineer.

You can get +- same efficiency with classic breeding and purex/pyroprocessing

> When you realize that the only real choices for baseload are FF and nuclear, the real political situation makes sense.

That’s not really accurate. Many countries already meet a substantial portion of their baseload power requirements with renewables and are building out more and more renewable generation because it is cheap and fast to build.

This requires dispatchable backup generation to cover low wind periods, but that may only need to run a few weeks a year. This is by far the cheapest and fastest way to get to 90% carbon free power since most of the cost in gas generation is the fuel itself rather than the capital for the plant.

Nuclear is the opposite so cannot economically fill that role so it seems little is likely to be built.

and we still don't know where to store the trash. Thorium seems better (but my knowledge is close to zero here, I must admit:-) )

> we still don't know where to store the trash

We really do. Nuclear waste is less toxic than plenty of trash we just bury. And calling it "waste" is a bit reductive, given it almost certainly becomes valuable to reprocess within another century or two.

No, you really do not.

Long term storage is still up in the air in the US. Yucca mountain was the plan but didn't happen

Correct me if I'm with m wrong

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain

That's a political problem, not a technical one.

We also know that we could re-cycle nuclear waste with other nuclear plant designs, but the US chooses not to.

Radioactive waste is decidedly nasty stuff, but the total volume of it is tiny. There are plenty of chemicals that are just as nasty that were simply buried in the ground in much larger quantities over the years with nary a peep from the population. Nuclear waste is a political problem not a technological one.

The crazy part is that people want to insist that the sites need to be absolutely safe even if they aren't maintained for 1,000 years, but by that point the radioactivity would be no more than the base ore anyway so demanding these extended timelines doesn't make anybody safer. They're just red tape.

It's a political problem, maybe.

It's peculiar that it's a political problem in pretty much every country though? I know Finland is well on its way for long term storage but that's the only example I know of.

There's also quite a few cases where it is a technical problem. Gorleben in Germany for example.

> peculiar that it's a political problem in pretty much every country

It's a political problem in every country that shares its nuclear heritage from the ashes of WWII.

What trash? Where’s the waste?

Point to the nuclear waste.

If there’s so much of it somebody must be able to point it out to me.

Russians recycle it

Joking here since it would be impractical, but I guess you can bury it under my house. I'd not be bothered at all to live on top of a modern nuclear waste deposit like Finlands.

Waste from modern nuclear power plants seems to be a giant nothingburger. And yes, I came from the other side but flipped as I learned more about the technicalities, how Finland has solved it and how near you need to get hurt.

Have you come across the ‘coke can of thorium’ vs ‘800 elephants of coal’ guy yet?

Dr Barry Brook. Reading his stuff 15 years ago flipped me.

You know. In US it's yucca mnt, similar to onkalo. Its just not politically pursued as a priority. Recycling is banned

The reason TMSR is appealing is that U-233 is hard to use for weapons purposes because it produces a lot of gamma radiation, which makes it hard to work with. There is also the claim that TMSRs are much safer designs than is possible with Uranium. It's possible that if TMSRs were mass produced that we could see them installed in many countries where we don't want to see Uranium or Plutonium reactors for proliferation reasons.

At this point few care about this topic. It's not like it's easy to make a bomb with classic pwr

With a Uranium-based reactor you need a) a source of enriched Uranium (see proliferation risks), b) inspectors to check that you're not post-processing fuel rods to extract Plutonium.

With Thorium if the operator country wants to extract the U-233 you think "maybe let them, they won't like it".

With classic pwr rods can't be used for weapons because of parasitic isotopes. At best you need to run the reactor in a specific way that would trigger global attention looking at power fluctuations. And still it'll not be easy afterwards. You can buy enriched uranium from others. With th- I'm not sure but don't you need enriched material anyway to kickstart it?

> abundant enough

It's not uniformly distributed. Countries like India, for ezample, has an abundance of Thorium but they have to buy Uranium for use in any large scale application.

Question is if it's cheaper vs passive seawater extraction of uranyl. China already got it somewhat comparable to classic uranium

It's cheaper with unlimited fusion energy, which defeats the point.

Hm, is that really the case? Nextgen reactors are not just about lowering the cost of U. Or "saving the environment" from waste. Bonuses, sure. Real strength is increasing efficiency, which means: 1) lower buildout costs, 2) faster time to first iphone charged, 3) smaller, safer designs. They're a way around the giganto-plants of the past, on the way to making nuclear power the ubiquitous reliable utility it should be.

I also like to think of U/nuclear as "Civilizational thinking" - it's the only solid power we can trust to stay by us through 10,000s of years, through cataclysims, and planet migrations, and it's ideal (before we find something more abundant, dense, and reliable) to take us from Earth, to a multi-planet, local-cluster exploring species, I think.