American West at Risk by Wilshire Howard G.; Nielson Jane E.; Hazlett Richard W. & Jane E. Nielson & Richard W. Hazlett

Author:Wilshire, Howard G.; Nielson, Jane E.; Hazlett, Richard W. & Jane E. Nielson & Richard W. Hazlett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2008-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

The fearful link

The United States mines uranium mainly from sedimentary deposits in 5 of the 11 western states.78 Dangerous underground uranium mining (see chapter 7) ended in 1992, and ores now come out of open pits. The ores are either leached in place or in heaps to extract the uranium. The United States is estimated to have 112,000 tons of known recoverable uranium at $36 per pound—enough for seven to eight years with no rise in consumption. Increased prices and improved reactor efficiencies could substantially extend the resource’s life, while building more nuclear power plants will shorten it.

Proven world uranium reserves could provide approximately a 52-year supply for today’s conventional reactors, assuming no growth in consumption.79 The richest uranium lodes have been found and exploited, and the lower grade ores now require much larger energy inputs per pound to produce and process (see chapter 4). Claims that a virtually limitless supply can be produced from ocean seawater and unmineralized rocks ignore the prohibitive energy costs of extracting uranium from common rocks and the vast environmental impacts of mining our back yards.80

India and Israel acquired their nuclear arsenals by reprocessing byproduct plutonium from power plants, and the more politically unstable Pakistan and North Korea, and perhaps Iran, have based or will base their nuclear weapons programs on highly enriched uranium from facilities that produce uranium power plant fuel. Until the 1980s, the United States had intended to extract plutonium from breeder reactors, but the power plant–to–atom bomb linkage led western nations to abandon that plan, hoping to restrain nuclear weapons proliferation.81 In addition, the breeder process yields plutonium very slowly. It reaches the point of energy break-even—when more fuel has been produced than consumed—only after decades of operation.82

Post-Cold War U.S.–Russian agreements to disassemble nuclear warheads could supply highly enriched uranium for power plant fuel. But instead of turning the bombs into peaceful fuels, the U.S. government decided instead to store decommissioned warheads. As a result, three of nine types of nuclear weapons, all designed during the Cold War, have had their useful lifetimes extended by 30 years (over the designed 20 years) at a very high price.83

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