India plans massive nuclear power expansion

[phongn]

Nations eye India's vast nuclear market

The US Senate passed a deal Wednesday to let America join Russia and France in supplying India's huge energy needs.

By Mark Sappenfield | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
from the October 3, 2008 edition

New Delhi - With an emphatic vote Wednesday, the US Senate assured that America will take part in India's $100 billion nuclear-energy sweepstakes.

The 86-to-13 vote to resume civilian nuclear trade with India for the first time since 1974 is a signature diplomatic achievement for the Bush administration, cementing ties with a nation seen as a counterweight to China.

But it is also a major piece of business. In 20 years, India aims to increase its nuclear power 10-fold, and will rely on international businesses to do it.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh struck a deal Tuesday to open nuclear trade with France – a deal the Indian Chamber of Commerce estimates to be worth $29 billion. Russia is already helping India build two reactors.

Before Wednesday, US business leaders were worried about being left behind. They estimate that the deal could create 200,000 jobs in the US and revive an industry that has not built a new plant in the US for a decade.

India's plans involve "a huge amount of money," says Ted Jones of the US-India Business Council. "Even a modest slice of it is huge."

President Bush is expected to sign the bill into law. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will visit Delhi this weekend to mark the finalization of the deal, which was first proposed in 2005.

Since then, the US and India have had to convince the world that India is a trustworthy nuclear steward. Until last month, countries that sold civilian nuclear technology to India were subject to sanctions as India hadn't signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

But with the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) last month lifting the ban on civilian nuclear trade with India, other nations have begun to move in. France was first, with its deal Tuesday. The same day, Mr. Singh told a gathering of European business leaders that he hoped to conclude similar deals across the continent.

Russia is already working in India after signing a deal before Russia joined the NSG. Ministers in both nations have already discussed substantially increasing Russia's input in India's nuclear industry.

The opportunities presented by India are alluring. Currently, nuclear reactors in India produce about 3,500 megawatts of electricity – 3 percent of the country's total power output. But on average, India's energy demands exceed its supply by about 12 percent, making power outages ubiquitous and threatening economic growth. Nuclear power is seen as a key part of the solution. By the mid-2020s, India wants 30,000 to 60,000 megawatts of nuclear power.

India will have to look abroad to meet these goals, says Sudhinder Thakur, director of corporate planning for the Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd., a state-owned business that runs India's nuclear power plants. The best Indian reactor currently under design can produce 700 megawatts. The top international reactor produces more than 1,600 megawatts.

The list of businesses capable of building nuclear reactors is short. It includes French company Areva, Russian state-owned enterprises, and two US-based operations: General Electric and Westinghouse.

[Ekiqa]

A couple things.

Canada also has the ability to build nuclear reactors, AECL's Candu's.

Also, the world uranium supply is limited. According to http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.html there is only 5.5 million tons, roughly 80 years at the current (2007) consumption. With dozens of reactors being built or planned in China, France, USA, UK, and Canada, to name a few, that 80 year supply will dwindle pretty quickly.

[Crayz9000]

Which is why we need more reprocessing, and if we don't do it, the French or Russians will.

[Duckie]

98% of uranium used can be reprocessed, or so I am led to believe, so that means that an extra 78.5 years can be done on that 80. And you can reprocess it more than once at more reduced yields no? And IIRC there are better efficiency reactors nowadays too- pebble beds or something?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

98% of uranium used can be reprocessed, or so I am led to believe, so that means that an extra 78.5 years can be done on that 80. And you can reprocess it more than once at more reduced yields no? And IIRC there are better efficiency reactors nowadays too- pebble beds or something?

Actually, there's no limit to reprocessing as long as the fuel is of a certain type, just the percentile efficiency that prevents it from becoming a perpetual motion machine, more or less. But the efficiency can be much higher than just 98% with certain types of reactors. Fast Breeders would also help, of course.

And those figures about Uranium availability are heavily disputed and by no means accurate (I do not believe they are, for one) with other figures suggesting substantially more. Simple comparisons of consumption versus estimated yields show substantially higher figures. Also thorium is three times more common in nature than uranium and is quite viable as a fuel, and even more uranium (enough for thousands of years) is suspended in seawater and the extraction process does appear to be feasable, if expensive.

[Sikon]

Also, the world uranium supply is limited. According to http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.html there is only 5.5 million tons, roughly 80 years at the current (2007) consumption. With dozens of reactors being built or planned in China, France, USA, UK, and Canada, to name a few, that 80 year supply will dwindle pretty quickly.

No, there's enough uranium to last for literally millions of years of current power generation without more than a small increase in nuclear power generation cost at most.

You should fully read your own link. The 80-year figure comes from the amount of uranium in earth's crust in unusually high-grade ores able to be mined at similar to current uranium sale price. What makes that utterly invalid in the context of whether nuclear power can be expanded is that even increasing the mining cost by several times would have a small effect on the total price of nuclear power generation. Currently, uranium itself accounts for on the order of 2% of the total cost of generating nuclear electricity (illustration).

Most of total production cost consists of capital expense for power plant construction, maintenance & operations costs, enrichment of the fuel, and other expenses which are separate from the comparatively tiny expense of mining the uranium. Such should not be surprising as it is a result of the high energy content of uranium compared to chemical fuels, like a few pounds of nuclear fuel having the power to blow up a city versus a few pounds of gasoline having the lesser energy to drive one vehicle around for a few miles. However, it is illustrated in detail with references in a past post here.

With tested methods such as polyethylene fiber adsorption, uranium can be extracted from seawater at a cost around 3 to 6 times that of current land extraction or less, as discussed in detail in posts here and then here. The result would be a rise on the order of 0.1 to 0.4 cents or less per kilowatt-hour in nuclear electricity production cost, which can be acceptable since the total electricity cost and sale price is typically around 5 or more cents per kilowatt-hour anyway.

There are 4.6 billion tons of uranium within the oceans, a trace concentration among the quadrillions of tons of seawater. Without usage of breeder reactors, that would last for many millennia at any power generation remotely comparable to that today. With usage of breeder reactors, that would last for millions of years, except over such long timeframes there is replacement by more entering solution (from some of the literally trillions of tons at low concentration in earth's crust), resulting in such nominally lasting for up to billions of years as described here. (Breeder reactors and reprocessing can make use of the U-238 that comprises more than 99% of natural uranium instead of just the 0.7% which is uranium-235; even after some losses, the result is at least 30+ times more power generation per unit mass of uranium than today obtainable, currently prohibited in the U.S. for political reasons).

Actually, there's also some more uranium ore on land in between reserve figures based on current criteria and the preceding, and thorium reactors are workable with more thorium in earth's crust than uranium. But the above already suffices for the point.

[Sikon]

98% of uranium used can be reprocessed, or so I am led to believe, so that means that an extra 78.5 years can be done on that 80. And you can reprocess it more than once at more reduced yields no? And IIRC there are better efficiency reactors nowadays too- pebble beds or something?

Actually, it's a far bigger difference if more than a portion of the 0.7% of uranium that is U-235 gets fissioned. The result is an increase from 80 years to 2500+ years nominally for that segment of the uranium supply alone, aside from other sources at an acceptable cost increase that would allow literally millions of years of today's power generation.

Example:

Uranium 2005: Resources, Production and Demand - also called the "Red Book" - estimates the total identified amount of conventional uranium stock, which can be mined for less than USD 130 per kg, to be about 4.7 million tonnes. Based on the 2004 nuclear electricity generation rate of demand the amount is sufficient for 85 years, the study states. Fast reactor technology would lengthen this period to over 2500 years.

However, world uranium resources in total are considered to be much higher. Based on geological evidence and knowledge of uranium in phosphates the study considers more than 35 million tonnes is available for exploitation. [...]

From here

This is in fact suggested in the IAEA-NEA figures if those covering estimates of all conventional resources are considered - 10.5 million tonnes (beyond the 5.5 Mt known economic resources), which takes us to over 200 years' supply at today's rate of consumption. This still ignores the technological factor mentioned below. It also omits unconventional resources such as phosphate/ phosphorite deposits (22 Mt U recoverable as by-product) and seawater (up to 4000 Mt), which would be uneconomic to extract in the foreseeable future.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf75.html
(The above is from the very link of Ekiqa's post).

As previously discussed, what is described as uneconomic is just a few times increase in uranium fuel cost leading to just a few percent increase in total electricity generation expense, perhaps significant for a business if competition from a coal power plant is close but not prohibiting nuclear power as a national policy in the slightest.