The sparsely populated province thinks node balancing its far flung grid would work
Brad Wall, the entrepreneurial provincial premier of Saskatchewan, (right) knows that just mining 20% of the world’s uranium supply won’t fuel the region’s economy forever. For years Wall has wanted to move up the value chain.
A while back he floated the idea of getting Canada into the uranium enrichment business. Now Wall, and his energy minister Bill Boyd want to develop a plan to deploy small modular reactors (SMRs), e.g., with less than 300 MW, across the wide open spaces of Saskatchewan.
Wall said at an energy conference Jan 20 he plans to push the province beyond uranium mining by investigating the possibility of developing a partnership with an as yet unnamed vendor of SMRs to produce electricity and also to support manufacturing of medical isotopes. The second objective could be a deal maker because some SMRs, which use higher levels of enriched uranium, can perform double duty.
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4 comments:
The Indians have built well over a dozen 200 MW PHWRs, very similar to the Canadian CANDU reactor built by the Canadian company, AECL. AECL should be able to license the Indian design at a reasonable cost, and buy some low cost parts from India too boot. This would be a very practical Canadian/Indian route to a tested small reactor.
You know, one thing I wouldn't be terribly surprised to see at some point is the emergence of an OPEC-style cartel controlling uranium (and thorium, if that ever starts to be used as fuel) pricing.
Why? Simply put, the value proposition of nuclear fuel is so high (at least, if you breed and recycle it and extract all the energy from it), and the effect of the price of fuel on the cost of nuclear energy so low (double or triple the price and the LCOE moves something like 2 percent), nuclear fuel is, really, the most valuable stuff on earth.
Plus, if nations start using closed fuel cycles, it's a product with enormous value that you can only sell a very small quantity of (per reactor).
For decades, nations have been selling off the raw uranium fairly cheaply, but I predict that the enormous profit potential for a uranium/thorium cartel will eventually cause it to happen. At least, if nuclear ever really takes off.
Right now it's too soon for a cartel - might scare people off nuclear before they've become dependent, but I would really expect it to happen sooner or later.
Jeff Schmidt wrote:
I wouldn't be terribly surprised to see at some point is the emergence of an OPEC-style cartel controlling uranium (and thorium, if that ever starts to be used as fuel) pricing.
This might work for uranium, but only so far. At some price point uranium extraction from sea water becomes economical. The other factor limiting cartels and the ultimate price of uranium is the breeder reactor. With breeders, the cost of even expensive uranium becomes a negligible cost of energy production. Or said another way, expensive uranium makes breeders attractive, at which point the market demand for uranium levels off and eventually collapses.
The best proposals for thorium usage such as the LFTR are breeder-type reactors, so many of the same arguments apply.
@donb: "The other factor limiting cartels and the ultimate price of uranium is the breeder reactor. With breeders, the cost of even expensive uranium becomes a negligible cost of energy production."
That's exactly my point - right now, Uranium sellers are kind of screwing themselves. It's very, very probable, it seems to me, that at some point, breeding is going to become common, as uranium supplies shrink and the cost goes up.
The Uranium sellers should accept breeding as a foregone conclusion, and sell every tonne of uranium they can at as high a price point as they can get - even though that will accelerate the move to breeding, the alternative is (and in some ways, it's already too late - the U.S. has something like 1000 or 5000 years' worth of 'reserve breeder fuel' stockpiled around the nation), that they sell the uranium 'cheaply' giving all the value to the power companies that extract the power in reactors.
Don't get me wrong, as a consumer, I'm excited by the possibility that in the future, energy might become very cheap, but part of me just thinks that the uranium sellers are shortchanging themselves, allowing others to get rich off their assets.
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