Sir, – Your letter writers ( August 14th) make some valid points in response to my earlier letter (Letters, July 26th) highlighting some of the limitations of nuclear power in an Irish context.
I thank Paul Cosgrove for pointing out that some modern nuclear power plants have the capacity to increase or decrease their output on a short timescale and that this is used to some extent in France. However, the power balance in France is still made up predominantly of exports and to a lesser extent hydroelectricity. It remains the case that nuclear power is best suited to provide baseload rather than balancing power.
Paul Cosgrove and Brian Marten both make some optimistic claims about the long-term availability of uranium. Already, a quarter of the world’s known viable reserves of uranium have been extracted. France exhausted its own uranium deposits a long time ago, and the US has exhausted three-quarters of its deposits.
The plain fact is that 92 per cent of the world’s uranium production comes from just seven countries: Kazakhstan, Namibia, Canada, Australia, Uzbekistan, Russia and Niger, with over 40 per cent from Kazakhstan alone.
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About three-quarters of the world’s economically recoverable reserves are concentrated in the same countries, plus South Africa. Of those reserves, many will never be mined because they are in protected areas, like the largest uranium deposit in the southern hemisphere in the middle of Australia’s Kakadu National Park and world heritage area, where all mining ceased in 2012 following a decades-long conflict with the Aboriginal traditional owners of the area.
It is not enough to point out that uranium is relatively common both in seawater and in the ground (everywhere that has radon gas has uranium). Barring a 10-fold or more increase in the price of uranium, it will not be feasible to use these unconcentrated resources for reactor fuel, even ignoring environmental and social issues related to resource extraction. The only way that nuclear fission will remain a significant contributor to our energy systems for more than about a hundred years is through widespread deployment of breeder reactors, which can create more fissile material than they burn.
Maintaining and expanding nuclear fission power may be a sensible plan for countries with existing infrastructure. For Ireland, it would do nothing to improve our energy security, and given that it would most likely be 2050 before any reactor is completed (at a cost we can only guess at), it would do nothing to decarbonise our economy. This does not seem to be a wise investment. – Yours, etc,
JON-IVAR SKULLERUD,
Department of Theoretical Physics,
Maynooth University,
Maynooth,
Co Kildare.