Uranium 235 is currently used at about 60K tons per year. World reserves are estimated to be 8M tons. Increasing the number of NPPs of current designs by a factor of ~10 means it’s about 15-20 years until it’d no longer be economically viable to mine U235. Combined with the time scales & costs of building & mothballing NPPs, that’s pretty useless. So while some new constructions might make sense, it’s not good as a central pillar of a strategy.
Due to the cost of NPP construction etc., nuclear power is way more expensive than all other options. Price of renewables is likely to continue to fall, widening the gap even further. So nuclear is economically very unappealing, and that’s most likely just getting worse with time.
Research into new tech takes time (e.g. designs that could use the other 99.3% of available Uranium that’s not U235), and the currently available or soon-to-be available candidates aren’t looking much better, they’re unreliable and/or likely cost even more (at least initially).
That does not count uranium in seawater. While we currently can’t mine it at the same cost from seawater as we can mine it elsewhere, we can mine from seawater.
Sabine Hossenfelder’s assessment (quickly) summarized (and possibly somewhat distorted by that):
Uranium 235 is currently used at about 60K tons per year. World reserves are estimated to be 8M tons. Increasing the number of NPPs of current designs by a factor of ~10 means it’s about 15-20 years until it’d no longer be economically viable to mine U235. Combined with the time scales & costs of building & mothballing NPPs, that’s pretty useless. So while some new constructions might make sense, it’s not good as a central pillar of a strategy.
Due to the cost of NPP construction etc., nuclear power is way more expensive than all other options. Price of renewables is likely to continue to fall, widening the gap even further. So nuclear is economically very unappealing, and that’s most likely just getting worse with time.
Research into new tech takes time (e.g. designs that could use the other 99.3% of available Uranium that’s not U235), and the currently available or soon-to-be available candidates aren’t looking much better, they’re unreliable and/or likely cost even more (at least initially).
That does not count uranium in seawater. While we currently can’t mine it at the same cost from seawater as we can mine it elsewhere, we can mine from seawater.
https://cen.acs.org/materials/Fishing-uranium-ocean-spider-silk/97/web/2019/07 suggests that currently, the price for uranium from seawater is six times as expensive as other sources. The price of uranium is not very important for the price of nuclear energy and paying six times as much for it wouldn’t be a problem.