Uranium

U238 and breeders would ensure centuries, if not more, of fuel. Hell, we should be reburning "spent" fuel as it is considering only a small % of u235 is actually consumed in PWRs.

>modern
There are no modern reactors aside from the ap1000s in china and those burn u235 and u238. Thorium isnt a prevalent fuel in reactors.

I think thorium is practically a drop-in upgrade. Some retooling and redesign might be needed but I don't think you'd have to rebuild your existing powerplants or throw away all the machinery and processes you use to build "conventional" uranium plants, no?

About tree fiddy

Can't the "waste" be almost indefinitely reused at like 99% efficiency?

There is not a single nuclear reactor using thorium on earth today and plutonium is generally made from uranium because it's rarely found in nature.

Any amount until Uranium extraction from seawater becomes profitable. Then it balances out again.

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Barrels
>the amount of gasoline barrels consumed yearly
GasE
>the amount of energy produced by burning a barrel of gas (between 0 and 1)
Eff
>the average Efficiency of car engines
UE
>the energy created by using 1kg of Uranium fuel
Ueff
>the average efficiency of a nuclear plant

U of kg per year needed
= Barrels*GasE*Eff÷(UE*Ueff)

Should give you a ballpark figure

Then take that number and divide it by the average U consumption of nuclear power plants to get the number of plants you need

Unfortunately no. The physics are different and the nrc are assholes. Would talk more but going on shift at my nuke plant.

>fag wants uranium
>not plutonium
>not sci-fi materials
>Kys

>I think thorium is practically a drop-in upgrade
- user on the internet, 2018

It's double funny because she removed the nuclear plants for short term political gains.

Answer seems pretty simple desu

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And what about the second half of the question?

When it comes to resource depletion discussions, people tend to do these things:

1. Figure out what the known reserves are for a given resource
2. Figure out the current and projected consumption rates of said resource
3. Calculate a date at which consumption exceeds known reserves
4. Panic

This thinking ignores the reality that much of Earth's surface has yet to be properly, systematically explored. Modern mineral exploration techniques will continue to add to current known reserves and the date of consumption exceeding supply will always be pushed back.

There is enough uranium on the surface for us to keep powering things along until we figure out the holy grail; fusion power. Major advancements in high temperature superconduction have injected a bit of hope into this becoming a reality sooner rather than later.

nuclear energy isnt even real ffs

>I think thorium is practically a drop-in upgrade.
Basically the complete opposite. You would literally have to flip the entire thing upside down just to get started.

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What?

about 9000 globally isn't really that much
the problem is trusting certain nations with nuclear technology and thus weapons potential

archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/29541495/

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Need an international coalition in charge of processing spent fuel. Set up a facility within some radius of countries with reactors to handle their used fuel, extract usable isotopes, and potentially prepare fuel to be reburned

an international energy consortium "could" be ideal but it would absolutely turn into a sort of global aristocracy of energy based feudalism where the small elite hands it out as they fee fit.
like the world bank but much worse

Sadly true. You'd think combating climate change would be a worthy enough cause that'd be free from such bickering and corruption. We're fucked

>about 9000 globally isn't really that much

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It really isn't. The world is a big place.

that fission.
if we somehow can control fusion, its probably far less.

Uranium manufacture is a complex process that relies on taking trace amounts of uranium located in earth or seawater and refining into a gas and then into a solid. It takes many thousands of tons of uranium rich material to create even trace amounts of uranium.

So, in a sense, its not really how much uranium we have, its investing in refineries and having the means to produce it quickly.

Truth be told I have no idea how much Uranium there is or how much we hold in reserve, it could be a massive amount or it could be very little, the governments of the world are very secretive about this sort of thing and its almost impossible to tell.

The fact that the US has depleted most of its oil reserves is fairly easy to intuit, however, and if you had accurate data (which may be impossible to find given how intelligence and nuclear agencies are constantly leaking false or misleading data) you might intuit the same thing about uranium.

Coal pants go through more uranium than nuclear power plants today

For instance, Matt Damon made a movie about the CIA staging an assassination, (while simultaneously killing the leader heir) of an african nation that was sitting on a large reserve of fissile ore, which was based on historical accounts of declassified documents.

If we were searching for fissile material in other countries and trying to procure those reserves back when this movie occurred, it might be reasonable to assume that american reserves were in limited supply, especially when correlated with other data.

However, it could have been other factors, such as rising anti-nuclear sentiment in the U.S. Some people draw a parallel with oil, claiming labor costs and market manipulation where responsible for the migration of exploratory drilling in the US, but those arguments don't really hold water.

Earth isn't flat, it's Velociraptor shaped!!!

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>Uranium

Why not Fusion, retard?

Because its an ephemera that exists in a state of fuzzy logic.

and also because even if you had an unlimited source of power, you could not convert coal to petroleum fast enough to keep up with demand.

nevermind I figured it out

*gentoo
ftfy

this is today
look up coal plants in Europe or America 50 years ago

also a "reactor" doesn't need to be as huge as current existing ones are

Uranium can be reprocessed. Even using uranium as we use it now (once through) we could last 600 or more years with current reserves. Start reprocessing waste and they could last thousands of years.

The Energiewende is one of the biggest scams of this half of the century and retards worldwide want to repeat it.

> the US has depleted most of its oil reserves
Wut?

>when the interviewer asks you where you see yourself in 10 yeara
I'd rather just build a massive spaceship and go from planet to planet harvesting the resources over a couple of decades, building the ship even larger, and then once the plannet is a barren waste we move on.

All hail the machine god!

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Nuclear energy has been purposefuly killed in it's infancy when lots of very rich people saw that it was about to render their empires obsolete.