Sustaining the Wind, Part 3: Is Uranium Exhaustible?

[NNadir]

This is my own work, which has been published at Brave New Climate, a website owned and maintained by Professor Barry Brook of the University of Tasmania in Australia, a widely published academic ecologist.

Sustaining the Wind, Part 3: Is Uranium Exhaustible?

Some excerpts:

In part 2 of this series[2], we discussed the claim of Udo Bardi, an academic “peak oiler” out of the University of Florence, that uranium supplies are subject to exhaustion, this because, according to Bardi, and a correspondent evoking, if not actually citing, him in this space, extracting meaningful amounts of uranium from seawater, where its mass vastly outstrips the quantities obtained from domestic ores, is too expensive in terms of energy and cost. According to Bardi, we face “peak uranium” just as we face “peak oil,” the latter being Bardi’s main focus, although my cursory impression is that, many, if not most “peak oilers” are also “peak uranium” types. As a practical matter, I am really neither of these. I acknowledge that the world might run out of oil, but unlike most “peak oilers” as I understand them, I’m unconcerned about its consequences. As far as I’m concerned, the sooner we run out of oil, the better. In my opinion, the replacement of oil is straight forward, which is neither to say “easy” nor to say “cheap” but nonetheless, in the golden age of chemistry, clearly technically feasible, and clearly desirable. My problem with petroleum has to do with the status of the main dump for its waste, this being the planetary atmosphere. A secondary concern has to do with the diversion of oil to make weapons of mass destruction, a routine practice on this planet, as well as the hysteria about oil as a cause of wars of mass destruction, followed by a concern about oil terrorism, which among other things, lead to the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City...

...Although overall this series is entitled “Sustaining the Wind,” we will not be focusing very much in this part on wind energy itself, but rather on this fuel for nuclear energy, uranium, considering very dilute sources, one of which will be seawater. Part 3 of this series is all about the concept of “peak uranium” as raised by Bardi and many others, including a vast segment of the population that knows nothing at all about nuclear energy, but hates it anyway.

There is good reason for doing this in a series on wind energy. First, if one spends any amount of time looking into the claims of those who advocate for so called “renewable energy” one will quickly see that for many of the advocates for this expensive, and thus far essentially useless form of energy, are often less interested in replacing dangerous fossil fuels than they are in displacing nuclear energy. (In Part 5 we will look at some prominent academics associated with this tragic anti-nuclear, pro-“renewable energy” rhetoric, focusing mainly on Mark Z. Jacobsen, Professor of Civil Engineering at Stanford University.) Since nuclear energy remains, despite much caviling, the world’s largest, by far, source of climate change gas free primary energy, easily outstripping all others, we should suspect that these advocates are spectacularly uninterested in climate change and other forms of air pollution, which I assure you, are far more dire catastrophes than the reactor failures at Chernobyl and Fukushima that so obsess this sort. Secondly, if nuclear energy is safe, clean, and infinitely or nearly infinitely sustainable, the rationale for constructing truly massive numbers of wind turbines collapses...

...Opponents of nuclear energy often lump it with dangerous coal, and the other two dangerous fossil fuels, dangerous petroleum and dangerous natural gas. While overall this is absurd, in one way it has a modicum of truth: Like dangerous petroleum, dangerous natural gas, and dangerous coal, uranium and thorium are irreversibly consumed when used for the generation of primary nuclear energy, and on the surface however, it would seem, therefore, theoretically that there are limits to the sustainability of access to these fuels.

When we looked at indium in part 2 we saw that because the ocean remains slightly basic despite the policy failures that are leading to its slow but steady acidification – one such policy failure is to regard fossil fuels as “transitional” while we wait, like D’Estragon waiting for Godot, for so called “renewable energy” to become a significant source of energy – and because indium hydroxide is one of the most insoluble hydroxides known, ocean water cannot be considered to be a dilute ore for that element. We saw that where indium is concerned, the only likely source is likely ever to be likely available are terrestrial zinc – and possibly lead – ores, as well as industrially insignificant quantities as a fission product of plutonium...

...As for uranium in seawater, we can attempt to provide a better estimate than Bardi’s (with the understanding that this is also a blog post) of the situation with respect to the total amount of uranium in seawater: The literature connected with the isolation of uranium from seawater is motivated by the recognition by scientists around the world that the ocean naturally contains vast quantities of uranium. The issue has been studied for more than half a century.[8] The total quantity of uranium in seawater is, of course, a function of the total amount of seawater, a somewhat slippery target. In recent times, many efforts have been undertaken to measure the mass and volume of the earth’s oceans, this connected with the desire to measure and record the rate at which seawater might inundate coastal land masses and low lying islands. These levels, again, of course fluctuate to a certain degree as a function of temperature, composition gradients, season and weather – the GRACE scientific satellite mission[9] was designed to measure these fluctuations. Nevertheless a fairly sophisticated calculation based on measurement of the earth’s gravitational fields[10] estimates that the mass of the oceans is 1.36 X 10²¹ kg...

...Dr. Bardi’s calculation of the energy content of uranium, 40 MWh/kg, assumes, arbitrarily, that people in a putative nuclear powered world would be dullards who choose to isolate uranium from dilute sources and then choose to throw most of it, the 238U isotope which dominates the mass of terrestrial uranium, away. (This requirement – a culture of dullards in a nuclear powered world – is counterintuitive, given that the only way for a nuclear powered world to exist would be to have a generally scientifically literate population, a situation, regrettably, not generally observed at present.) For the record, the per kg energy content of a kg of plutonium (the 239 isotope into which 238U can be transmuted under breeder conditions) is 22,300 MWh/kg, suggesting that Dr. Bardi’s calculations are, um, a little off, by a factor of more than 550. If uranium should cost $460/kg, this would represent a raw material fuel cost, and if the uranium is consumed after transmutation into plutonium, of $0.00002 per kWh.

For comparative purposes, Germany and Denmark, two officially anti-nuke “pro-wind” countries which happen to feature the most expensive electricity in Europe[13], have electricity prices approaching $0.40 (US) per kwh, as opposed to US prices – which are rising with the inane or insane popularity of so called “renewable energy” – of roughly $0.12 (US)/kWh, and France, roughly $0.20 (US)/kWh...

...Riverine and to some extent wind driven dust and volcanic ash continually deliver this uranium on exposed and weathered surfaces to the ocean.[21] For example, the rivers draining into Canada’s Hudson Bay, despite the fact that the flows – particularly from the Nelson River – have been reduced because of hydroelectric plants by up to 30%, and despite the fact that many rivers flow actively only seasonally, deliver 3.4 X 105 moles (about 80 tons) of uranium into the bay each year.[22] Chabaux collected[23] reported data from 33 major rivers and found that these rivers transport more than 5400 tons of uranium per year. Major rivers like the Nile, the Danube, the Volga, the Murray Darling, and the Colorado, for just some examples, weren’t included.

In the case of the Colorado, it’s just as well: The need for so called “renewable energy” as well as the exigent need to provide for water for fountains in Las Vegas, carwashes in LA, and golf courses in the Mohave Desert have completely destroyed the Colorado River Delta and its ecosystem and the river is almost always dried up before a drop of its water makes it to the Gulf of California. Thus the uranium in the river – which should be expected to be significant owing to the fact that the river snakes through a region of rich uranium ores, some of which have been mined – all ends up where the water ends up. This, of course, includes the agricultural fields of the Imperial Valley[24], the source of much of the winter table produce of the United States...

...A publication[51] in 2009 evaluated the cause of deaths among uranium miners on the Colorado Plateau and represented a follow up of a study of the health of these miners, 4,137 of them, of whom 3,358 were “white” (Caucasian) and 779 of whom were “non-white.” Of the 779 “non-white” we are told that 99% of them were “American Indians,” i.e. Native Americans. We may also read that the median year of birth for these miners, white and Native American, was 1922, meaning that a miner born in the median year would have been 83 years old in 2005, the year to which the follow up was conducted. (The oldest miner in the data set was born in 1913; the youngest was born in 1931.) Of the miners who were evaluated, 2,428 of them had died at the time the study was conducted, 826 of whom died after 1990, when the median subject would have been 68 years old.

Let’s ignore the “white” people; they are irrelevant in these accounts.

Of the Native American miners, 536 died before 1990, and 280 died in the period between 1991and 2005, meaning that in 2005, only 13 survived. Of course, if none of the Native Americans had ever been in a mine of any kind, never mind uranium mines, this would have not rendered them immortal. (Let’s be clear no one writes pathos inspiring books about the Native American miners in the Kayenta or Black Mesa coal mines, both of which were operated on Native American reservations in the same general area as the uranium mines.) Thirty-two of the Native American uranium miners died in car crashes, 8 were murdered, 8 committed suicide, and 10 died from things like falling into a hole, or collision with an “object.” Fifty-four of the Native American uranium miners died from cancers that were not lung cancer. The “Standard Mortality Ratio,” or SMR for this number of cancer deaths that were not lung cancer was 0.85, with the 95% confidence level extending from 0.64 to 1.11...

...Lung cancer, of course, tells a very different story. Ninety-two Native American uranium miners died of lung cancer. Sixty-three of these died before 1990; twenty-nine died after 1990. The SMR for the population that died in the former case was 3.18, for the former 3.27. This means the expected number of deaths would have been expected in the former case was 20, in the latter case, 9. Thus the excess lung cancer deaths among Native American uranium miners was 92 – (20 +9) = 63...

...On the other hand, roughly 7 million people will die this year from air pollution.[52] Of these, about 3.3 million will die from “ambient particulate air pollution” – chiefly resulting from the combustion of dangerous coal and dangerous petroleum, although some will come from the combustion of “renewable” biofuels. Every single person living on the face of this planet and, in fact, practically every organism on this planet is continuously exposed to dangerous fossil fuel waste, and every person on this planet and practically every organism on this planet contains dangerous fossil fuel waste. The only way to stop dangerous fossil fuel waste from accumulating in your flesh is to stop breathing, which is, of course, what some people do as a result of such accumulation, many of them as a result of, um, getting lung cancer. This means that about 6.3 people die every minute, on average, from “ambient particulate air pollution.” Seen in this purely clinical way, this means that all of the Native American uranium miners dying from all cancers, 93 lung cancer deaths and 54 deaths from other cancers, measured over three or four decades, represent about 23 minutes of deaths taking place continuously, without let up, from dangerous fossil fuel pollution...

It's a rather long post, but fun, I think. I particularly enjoyed writing the notes to references 32 and 34, the first of which is about stunts pulled by the (exposed) assholes at Greenpeace, and the second of which examines the laughable notion that liberalism can be defined as enthusiasm for a car ad.

It's a rather cynical piece, but I have done my best to draw out the bad thinking that is causing such destruction to humanity.

[tech3149]

1. that's a pretty serious and substantial effort

I commend you for the work. I'm pretty secure in my judgement that harvesting energy from the sun is the best and safest alternative we have. I grew up in coal country, had a coal furnace till I was 15. I know all too well the harms of fossil fuels. I also know that transitioning will be an absolute boom for employment and that's one thing we desperately need.
I'm also a kindred spirit with Dr. Caldicott. There is no such thing as a safe dose of radiation.

[NNadir]

2. "Dr." Caldicott is one of the most clueless and illiterate commentators on energy there is.

Bernard Cohen, who was what she has never been, made mincemeat of her very toxic and very dangerous rhetoric. Of course, unlike Caldicott, he was a scientist.

Nuclear energy saves lives, and it follows that belief in "Dr." Caldicott's absurd fantasies cost lives. She has obviously never taken a course in radiobiology and it is very clear that were she to do so, even at an undergraduate level in a substandard university, she would clearly fail it.

As for radiation, I would note that there being 5 billion tons of uranium in the planetary oceans, and 500 billion curies of radioactive potassium-40 in it as well - both being the at the lowest level ever observed in the history of this planet - it is very clear that all living things evolved bathed in radiation.

If you hold the position that no level of radiation is safe, one wonders why you have never died from eating a banana. Or perhaps you keep them all behind lead shielding. I don't know, and I wouldn't care, except that ignorance costs lives.

[tech3149]

4. Your reply says it all n/t

[NNadir]

6. Thank you for noticing. I does indeed. N/T.

[Finishline42]

3. What Nnadir refuses to acknowledge in his blind support for nuclear

What Nnadir refuses to acknowledge in his blind support for nuclear energy is that nuclear plants are not very fault tolerant. Even with all of their safety systems and redundant operational systems they still have catastrophic failures. And those failures completely change the economics of their use to generate electricity (not to mention the safe disposal of the tons of radioactive waste generated by each and every power plant the world over).

Not only do we have Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima for examples of these failures but also in the mining and processing of uranium are there problems. The facility in Paducah, KY has underground seepage that is very close to the Ohio River. Care to imagine what the implications and the cost of that will be if it's not stopped?

[NNadir]

5. And I guess your position is that air is very coal tolerant. In 2011, several nuclear plants in...

...in Japan were completely destroyed by an earthquake. More than 20,000 people died, not because of the nuclear plants, but because of buildings, cars, and drowning in a low lying city.

The nuclear plants failures were, in terms of lives lost, trivial.

Seven million people die each year from air pollution, and here I am not even referring to the number of dead people killed by climate related effects, merely those who die from the chemotoxicity of dangerous fossil fuel waste.

And yet...and yet..and yet...

I hear endlessly that nuclear power plants are required to meet standards for safety that zero other forms of energy can meet. Let's be clear, coal in Kentucky is killing thousands, if not tens of thousands of people each year. I'm not hearing a damned word about it from any one.

How come we don't have any anti-nukes who carry on insipidly about Fukushima about banning coastal cities? Which killed more people in this century, the inundation of cities in the Indian and Pacific ocean in 2004 and 2011 respectively, or all the nuclear power operations over the last half a century?

I have demonstrated, in the link offered in the opening post, that practically every damn river in the world carries uranium in it, major rivers such as the Mississippi, hundreds of tons a year. This uranium is called in the scientific literature NORM, "naturally occurring radioactive materials." If one was interested in the science behind these issues, one could begin by simply opening the many references provided in Sustaining the Wind. If you were really, really, really, really, serious about knowing some science beyond offering glib selective attention statements that are oblivious to the millions of lives that would be lost if nuclear plants were shut, you could go to a good science library and read one of the many tens of thousands of papers written on the subject of air pollution, dangerous fossil fuel mining,and yes, radiation, each year.

NORM has existed since the beginning of time, well before there were people dumb enough to fear them. In fact, and again this would involve caring about the world and making simple comparisons, NORM is very much involved in the massive radiation releases associated with fracking in the Marcellus shale, because of the radioactive equilibrium with natural uranium with its decay products radium and radon. Environ. Sci. Technol., 2015, 49 (15), pp 9347–9354 "Fate of Radium in Marcellus Shale Flowback Water Impoundments and Assessment of Associated Health Risks"

And let's be clear about something, OK?

The people who hate nuclear energy because of selective attention, the raising of specious and insipid objections about theoretical and observed interactions of nuclear power plants with earthquakes are responsible for this state of affairs.

They continuously and assiduously assert that every damned person on the planet, every damned living thing on the planet has to face unacceptable, and clearly dangerous and, in many millions of cases each year, fatal exposure to billions of tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste because they have their heads of their asses about an unstable atom appearing in the Ohio River, even though there has been such atoms in the Ohio River ever since its formation.

Seven million people die each year from air pollution: Lancet, Volume 380, No. 9859, p2224–2260, 15 December 2012 (For air pollution mortality figures see Table 3, page 2238 and the text on page 2240.) "A comparative risk assessment of burden of disease and injury attributable to 67 risk factors and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010" This is the comprehensive work of more than 100 research physicians, research epidemiological scientists and other health authorities. The paper cites 194 references. Nowhere, absolutely nowhere does the risk of nuclear power plants appear, simply because it is too small to measure.

I'm refusing to acknowledge something? In comparison to what? Is it possible that you are not even remotely acknowledging a vast tragedy which is not theoretically involved with a few atoms in the Ohio River while, right in front of our eyes, available to anyone who gives enough of a rat's ass to look, 70 million people die every damned decade from air pollution, more people than died in World War II?

Nuclear energy need not be perfect, need not be without risk, need not address every selective attention fantasies of every fool on earth to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which, happily it is.

Nuclear energy saves lives: Environ. Sci. Technol., 2013, 47 (9), pp 4889–4895 "Prevented Mortality and Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Historical and Projected Nuclear Power"

Here's what selective attention in this case is: It's tragic to the point of disgusting.

Have a nice weekend.