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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

There is way way more uranium than that. It is surprisingly common. And harvesting it from seawater opens up a supply that dwarfs any mining concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_in_the_environment

>> Uranium is a naturally occurring element found in low levels within all rock, soil, and water. This is the highest-numbered element to be found naturally in significant quantities on earth. According to the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation the normal concentration of uranium in soil is 300 μg/kg to 11.7 mg/kg. ... It is considered to be more plentiful than antimony, beryllium, cadmium, gold, mercury, silver, or tungsten and is about as abundant as tin, arsenic or molybdenum.

How uranium ore becomes fuel rods: (Actually a rather simple process imho.)

https://youtu.be/9x7DozCqLxU

https://youtu.be/c7ehyxRBMbw

View on HN

Nuclear is renewable for the same reason geothermal is renewable, and you can get uranium out of seawater for the same price as mining it

https://www.tiktok.com/@nuclearsciencelover/video/7092135813...

Why do people bother mining it?

Because mining it is relatively cheap. So cheap, in fact, that it is economical to throw away >95% of the fuel rather than try to burn it all or recycle it.

Fuel costs are 10% of the cost of nuclear electricity. The vast majority is financing.

> The vast majority is financing.

The financing for nuclear is expensive primarily because:

1) The costs of construction are so high - so huge amounts of financing needed.

2) The amount of time before investors see any ROI is very long.

A long time ago, when electricity markets were fully monopolized end to end, the long-term ROI on nuclear and other generating assets was guaranteed by the government, and the financial risk was borne by society.

Now, electricity markets have been liberalized (at least at the generation level). Simultaneously, far less capital-intensive generation technologies have been created (renewables, combined-cycle gas, and increasingly storage). These technologies provide an earlier ROI for risk-averse capitalists.

And as Bent Flyvbjerg mentions in "How Big Things Get Done", projects that last for a very long time are all but guaranteed to encounter one or more black swan events and/or recessions.

Bent makes a sensible argument for SMR reactor technology in that book too.

> you can get uranium out of seawater for the same price as mining it

> Why do people bother mining it?

> Because mining it is relatively cheap.

Something does not add up here.

Mining exists and is cheap enough that there is no incentive to invest in something new, even if it might just as good. Particularly because "just as good" is rarely a good reason for changing and investing, it would have to be significantly better.

(Though I have no real opinion on whether seawater extraction really is just as good...somewhat dubios)

FWiW the latest in a long line of seawater extraction papers is (2020):

https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/ta/d0ta0...

https://sci-hub.ru/10.1039/D0TA07180C

which has the weasel phrases

     uranium production costs could be reduced to $80.70–86.25 per kg of uranium with this fiber, which is similar to the uranium spot price of $86.68 per kg of uranium

and

    suggests the possibility of economically producing nuclear fuel from the ocean.

Not to disrespect their work, many small scale lab tests confidently assert that costs could be reduced and might possibly be economic.

The fine print is that so far no pilot plants exist and no estimates on the capital plant costs for industrial scale extraction to achieve the possible unit throughput prices as yet exist.

This may yet happen.

There may also be a slip between paper and industrial plant at scale.

> This may yet happen.

Yeah. But probably not for a long time as Uranium from present sources is cheap (enough) and plentiful (enough) and if that should ever get more expensive we can start looking at the huge stockpiles of 95% unspent fuel that we call "nuclear waste". Burning that would (a) give us a lot of electricity and (b) reduce the radioactivity of whatever is left dramatically.

To be clear: I'm not arguing for one or the other, I'm pointing out that one of the above statements doesn't align with the other.

If the other costs are equal (remember I said if) then extracting it from seawater would undoubtedly be easier overall simply because of abundance, and the non-destructive nature of collecting it would mean there's no issue with environmental challenges due to the destructive nature of mining.

Not really. If the costs are equal, then there is no point in investing in a new technology, new plants etc. that don't provide a competitive advantage.

What's the startup question again?

What about your new product is 10x better than the incumbent?

Not sure too many VCs have advised companies as follows: "Hey your new product is exactly as good as the incumbent, you have an absolute winner on your hands here. Where do we need to send the check?"

> What about your new product is 10x better than the incumbent?

Well let's just ignore the idea that mining megacorps operate in any way like a startup does. At the top of the uranium mining food chain, even a 1% reduction in costs (or increase in extraction) would be add around $13M a year to their revenue, so fuck it lets play hypoethetical.

If someone came along and said "hey we have a startup that's exactly as profitable as YouTube, but there's essentially no risk of people protesting our business and using ad-blockers to deprive us of revenue" the VC vultures would be on that shit like a fat kid on cake.

As I said before: seawater is ubiquitous and for the purposes of human scale, essentially limitless everywhere, unlike mined uranium which to be cost effective, is only mined in certain areas where the return is higher.

1. Not lower cost, same cost. Maybe.

2. Who said anything about no risk?

So we moved from using Twitter as a source to TikTok? We live in dark times...

You can also get the same information from here, which has an extensive reference section at the bottom. Disclosure: I wrote it.

https://whatisnuclear.com/nuclear-sustainability.html

Nice work. Do you know of any studies looking at the cost of powering the world that way? And the time need to transition?

I get the old man yells at sky reaction but it's just a short video... A snapshot of information which directly references with overlayed text a citation to the study he's discussing.

Not much different than most HN comments which 90% of the time are only one or two sentences.

None of this is true. Highly upvoted hn comments (the ones people read) bring receipts. This is just someone’s low effort opinion.

For what it’s worth, the cost to extract uranium from seawater is actually a very complicated subject. It is generally cited that the cost is approximately 2x the mining cost, but that’s based on estimates for seawater extraction.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280745206_Cost_Esti...

Well, at the very least give a short summary of what you are linking to.

TikTok is not credible. You can’t click the links or easily verify the conclusions. It’s the ultimate in trust me bro science.

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