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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> Uranium is so damn energy dense and abundant enough that there's little need to set up these complicated recycling systems

Uranium is abundant, but not homogenously so [1]. (China has some. But not a lot. And it's bound up expensively. And it's by their population centres.)

For the Americas, Europe, Australia, southern Africa and Eastern Mediterranean, burning uranium makes sense. For China, it trades the Strait of Malacca for dependence on Russia and Central Asia.

[1] https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/Pub1800.pdf

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Uranium can be stockpiled for years in advance, relatively easily. Enough to tide over a small war while you're setting up domestic production. And China should have enough low-grade ores for that.

> Uranium can be stockpiled for years in advance, relatively easily

So can oil. Energy security is an important priority for a global power.

Stockpiles are good. Own supply chains are better.

Uranium is far, far energy denser than any fossil fuel, and thus much easier to stockpile.

> Uranium is far, far energy denser than any fossil fuel, and thus much easier to stockpile

Sure. That doesn't remove stockpiles' inherent disadvantages: finiteness and vulnerability. Relying on uranium stockpiles would immediately put China at a known limit in a war of attrition that wouldn't constrain their adversaries.

A sufficiently large stockpile of uranium gives China time to simply pivot away from depending on imported Uranium (either by building new mines locally or building out solar or such). An equivalent stockpile of oil simply isn't feasible, if only because oil is usually used directly and not via a source-agnostic electrical grid.

Is 150 vs 250 years of energy reserves a disadvantage in practice?

> Is 150 vs 250 years of energy reserves a disadvantage in practice?

Reserves != stockpiles.

I know. I am not saying I got the order of magnitude exactly right, just pointing out beyond a certain threshold the size of the stockpile doesn't matter. I suspect that if a nation state puts its mind to it, stockpiles great enough to last a war are totally possible.

Which is why renewables are even better. Zero fuel input.

Well no, no country on earth has 5 years worth of oil stockpile, logistically it's impossible.

Nothing can compete with the energy density of uranium.

Arguably Qatar does, as do most other nations who produce it locally. That is exactly GP's point.

Oil is relatively easily, inexpensively, and quickly mined and refined. Compared to, say, uranium.

That's not a stockpile, they have to extract and refine it to use it. Russia understood it the hard way with the refineries attacks.

And no, oil is more expensive (especially nowadays) to extract than uranium.

There's a reason nobody ever became rich with a uranium mine, all the value is in the plant and the market price barely covers extracting it, some mines even closed because of the price being too low.

We're not talking about ore, rather fuel. Uranium ore might be inexpensive, I don't know, but converting that ore into fuel is not an easy task. I'm guessing that the reason it's not profitable is that so little of it is actually needed, relative to oil.

Also, they can bring it in by rail from Russia. So they can avoid the seaward path.

> they can bring it in by rail from Russia

Uranium is better for Chinese energy security than oil. But this still leaves China at Moscow's mercy. That's not too differet, energywise, than the situation is now.

China imports substantially all of its uranium from Kazakhstan and Namibia, and a tiny bit from US. Russia is insignificant.

https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/CHN/yea...

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