Charles Stross has made an interesting point on the view that there is only a very short supply of useable nuclear fuel:
firstly, the supply of known uranium deposits will only last 80-100 years if we don’t recycle it and start burning MOX. I’d like to note that today’s light water reactors are horribly inefficient — they only extract 3% of the available energy from their fuel before it is considered “spent” and reclassified as waste. If we use high burn-up reactors such as the EPR, we can get a whole load more energy out of the same amount of fuel. And if we use fast breeders and run a plutonium cycle we can convert U238 into Pu239 and burn that instead of U235: there’s 500 times as much U238 lying around.
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Secondly, we haven’t even tried to build a thorium reactor yet, although we’ve got good reason to believe it would work — and thorium is considerably more abundant than uranium.
As I have mentioned before, nuclear really should be part of the future energy mix of any industrialised country. Renewables can provide a large chunk (depending on local availability) of our energy needs but that still leaves a gap that needs to be plugged with something reliable and non-carbon-dioxide emitting.
David JC MacKay has more on nuclear power in his excellent free online textbook Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air.
there’s a good google talk on molten salt (i.e. thorium) reactors here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F0tUDJ35So&feature=channel
Sustainable energy has to happen; the senators and congress have to put aside their stakes in oil companies and get it done, or all the money in the world won’t matter when they’re sitting in a dark house with no gas to go anywhere in their car.
The CANDU reactor can burn unenriched natural uranium as well as MOX and thorium, so technically there are at least 29 thorium reactors they just aren’t burning thorium.