Uranium natural: cost

The economics of switching from natural uranium to SEU depend on the cost of uranium, the cost of enrichment, and the burnup achieved by the SEU fuel. Use of slight enrichment is even more attractive if the enriched material is RU. 

It might be imagined that because the heavy water natural uranium fuelling costs are so low, there would be little advantage in striving for the lowest cost. 

The high cost of isotope separation has limited, the use of separated isotopes in nuclear reactors to specific cases where substitutes that do not involve separated isotopes are not available. The most important example is that of uranium-235 [15117-96-17, the most abundant naturally occurring... 

Natural gas is the fuel of choice wherever it is available because of its clean burning and its competitive pricing as seen in Figure 1-30. Prices for Uranium, the fuel of nuclear power stations, and coal, the fuel of the steam power plants, have been stable over the years and have been the lowest. Environmental, safety concerns, high initial cost, and the long time from planning to production has hurt the nuclear and steam power industries. Whenever oil or natural gas is the fuel of choice, gas turbines and combined cycle plants are the power plant of choice as they convert the fuel into electricity very... 

We now appreciate the reasons for the high cost of enriched uranium. The single stage separation factors are low, as is the natural abundance. This leads inexorably... 

Meanx hile, success in the development of the natural uranium fuelled CANDU concept had led to very low cost fuelling and effective utilization of uranium even without recovery through reprocessing. AECL therefore decided to set aside work on reprocessing and concentrate instead on the once-through fuel cycle with storage of the irradiated fuel. The evidence indicated that the zirconium clad UO fuel could be stored under water for many decades until a decision was needed regarding recycle or disposal. 

POLONIUM. [CAS 7440-02-06], Chemical element, symbol Po, at. no. 84, at. wt. 210 (mass number of the most stable isotope), mp 252,JC. bp 960°C, sp gr 9.4. The element was first identified as an ingredient of pitchblende by Mane Curie in 1898. The element occurs in nature only as a decay product of thorium and uranium, Because of limited availability and high cost, relatively few practical uses for the element have been found, Meteorological instruments for measuring the electrical potential of air have used small quantities of the metal, It is interesting to note that when Mme. Curie first identified polonium, she found that an electroscope was... 

The advantages of nuclear power plants include the fact that they operate at a 90% capacity factor (loading). Also, 1 kg of natural uranium generates about as much electricity as 20,000 kg of coal. In contrast to fossil fuels, nuclear power does not contribute to global warming. In the past, the cost of... 

Fuel cost increase during the last decade Coal 25- 140/ton Natural Gas 2.50- 10 per 1000 ft3 Oil 15-over 100/barrel Uranium 10- 75/kg None... 

All the components of the nuclear-fission power system are fully operational except for ultimate waste disposal. However, spent fuel is not reprocessed in the United States because there is currently an adequate supply of natural uranium and enrichment services availab 1 e domestically and from other countries at a 1 ower cost than that of the recovered fissionable material from spent fuel. Also, the United States unilaterally declared a moratorium on reprocessing in the early 1980s in an attempt to reduce the spread of nuclear weapons. Current economics do not favor a return to reprocessing and fuel recycling in the United States at this time in as much as it does dramatically increase the amount of interim and final waste storage capacity that is required. 

A similar set of processes has been partially developed for the thorium-uranium system but is not discussed here because it is not expected to be employed in the next several decades. The important feature of the thorium cycle is that it could be used to achieve breeding (to produce more fissionable material than is consumed) in thermal reactors, but nuclear as well as chemical factors have frustrated this development (for more information, see Reference 22). The increasing cost of the natural uranium supply for the ura-nium/plutonium cycle may, several decades in the future, justify development of the thorium cycle. 

Heavy-water reactors utilize heavy water (D2O) as a moderator. They can be operated with natural uranium, since the capture cross-section for the thermal neutrons, necessary for controlling nuclear chain reactions, is very low for D2O compared with H2O. Enrichment of U is therefore not necessary. The high price of heavy water (only present as 0.015% in natural water) is, however, a disadvantage. The resulting higher investment costs... 

The occurrence of isotopes among the 83 most abun-dantelements is widespread, but separation methods are complicated and costly. Twenty-one elements have no isotopes, each consisting of only one kind of atom (see note below). The remaining 62 natural elements have from 2 to 10 isotopes each. There are 287 different isotopic species in nature noteworthy among them are oxygen-17, carbon-14, uranium-235, cobalt-60, and strontium-90, all but the first being radioactive. 

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