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...
https://www.tiktok.com/@nuclearsciencelover/video/7092135813...
Fuel costs are 10% of the cost of nuclear electricity. 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.
Bent makes a sensible argument for SMR reactor technology in that book too.
> Why do people bother mining it?
> Because mining it is relatively cheap.
Something does not add up here.
(Though I have no real opinion on whether seawater extraction really is just as good...somewhat dubios)
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
suggests the possibility of economically producing nuclear fuel from the ocean.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
2. Who said anything about no risk?
Not much different than most HN comments which 90% of the time are only one or two sentences.
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...