Let's go Uranium shopping!

All the world loves to hear of abundant fuel sources. And when an institution like MIT promises there is more than plenty of Uranium to run more than ten times the present number of 400 nuclear plants, everyone will want to go nuclear. Right?

The report, which comes in the backdrop of the US administration deliberations on whether to go full-scale nuclear or not, finds that uranium resources are not likely to run out in the next century, even if the U.S. alone builds as many as 1,000 nuclear reactors. Therefore, either reprocessing or recycling spent nuclear fuel, as the French and Japanese do, is likely to be a waste of money better spent on improving the light-water reactors presently in use.

Light water reactors are what the report calls attention to, with regard to improvisation while arguing against complicating the fuel cycle in considering alternate fissile fuels such as thorium. The M.I.T. report predicts that even if the world's fleet of more than 400 nuclear power plants grew to be 4,000 such plants that then operated for a century, the cost of the electricity from those facilities would rise by a mere 1 percent as a result of the increased demand for uranium.

Regarding spent fuel reprocessing, the report suggests a cycle involving light-water reactors, reprocessing of the spent fuel, and disposal of small "packages" of highly radioactive nuclear waste in deep boreholes. And to tackle proliferation, a leasing program, in which countries with the capability to enrich uranium fuel supply it to other countries and then take back the spent fuel for disposal in one form or another at the end of its useful life.

Fuel reprocessing like the kind it suggests have proved cost prohibitive, and the leasing issue has its own problems. The central issue still remains the 'abundance' of uranium and waste disposal from 4000 plants!