How much uranium do we have

Breeder reactors can power all of humanity for more than 4 billion years. By any reasonable definition, nuclear breeder reactors are indeed renewable. However, billion-year sustainability does require advances in seawater uranium extraction , reactor construction performance , and public acceptance. We have developed breeder reactors in the past , but they remain a small minority of our current fleet. We are talking about all primary energy here rather than just electricity.

The rest is for transportation, industrial heat, etc. This is available for free on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Because non-breeders are x less fuel efficient than breeders, it has long been considered impractical to use low-grade uranium resources like seawater or crustal nuclear fuel in non-breeders. The energy to get the material out is too high given the return. Solar thermal technology avoids many of the scalability problems facing nuclear technology.

For instance, although a solar thermal farm requires a little more land area than the equivalent nuclear power infrastructure, it can be located in unused desert areas. It also uses safer, more abundant materials. Most importantly, solar thermal can be scaled to produce not just 15 TW, but hundreds of TW if it would ever be required.

However, the biggest problem with solar thermal technology is cloudy days and nighttime. Abbott plans to investigate a number of storage solutions for this intermittency problem, which also plagues other renewable energy solutions such as wind power, in a future study.

In the transition period, he suggests that the dual-use of natural gas with solar thermal farms is the pathway to building our future energy infrastructure.

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