Some other *renewable* energies. Nuclear isn't generally considered renewable.
Renewable, to my mind, means energy that will be there in a million years. Solar. Wind. Waves. That kind of thing.
If you don't like that, then there's also concentrated solar. We're not going to run out of mirrors.
Fissile isotopes on the other hand, once they're gone, they're gone. You can build new reactors that run on different fuel but that's not the same thing as you were doing before, so you can't call the original process renewable.
It takes 18.6 tons of natural uranium to produce 1 TWh of electricity with light water reactors.
The world consumes ~30,000 TWh each year.
65 Trillion / (18.6 * 30,000) = 1x10^8 years worth of uranium with present day technology, no elves required.
Think we can figure out breeder reactors in 180 million years? If we're going all nuclear, I'd expect them in under 1,000 years, but I'm not an expert.
> The European Commission said in 2001 that at the current level of uranium consumption, known uranium resources would last 42 years. When added to military and secondary sources, the resources could be stretched to 72 years. Yet this rate of usage assumes that nuclear power continues to provide only a fraction of the world's energy supply.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining
Or depends also on what we're willing to pay for the power but critics already call it too expensive compared to be viable given renewables' price and price history
The estimate is outdated but I didn't quickly find newer info and it's just generally not a weird notion to say it's exhaustible
Imo we should make use of what we have and not wait for everyone to put solar on their roofs to supply like 10% of what we need and then wonder how else we're going to reach net zero (especially in local winter), but that's another discussion
- breeder reactors will not exist in time
- we will not find more uranium on Earth than we have already
- we will not be able to economically extract uranium from seawater, phosphate minerals, coal fly ash or other sources
- other materials besides uranium will not be used in the future
- synthetic production will not become viable
To say that nothing will change in the next 40-70 years and we will simply run out of material and stop using nuclear altogether, just seems quite far-fetched in my opinion.