LLAW’s All Things Nuclear #762, Thursday, (09/26/2024)
LLAW’s All Things Nuclear #762, Thursday, (09/26/2024)
“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity”
TerraPower begins SMR nuclear plant construction south of Kemmerer, Wyoming
LLAW’s NUCLEAR VIEWS, ISSUES & COMMENTS, Thursday, (09/26/2024)
The following story is not in this edition of TODAY’S NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS, but I am posting it here this evening because it caught my attention because I began my career in the nuclear/uranium industry in the fall of 1969 as an accountant at the largest uranium mine in the state. I have many questions about the reality of all of the glamour and hope being poured into the state with the speculation involving Bill Gate’s experimental SMR (Small Nuclear Reactor)Terra Power near Kemmerer along with the much hoped for rebirth of profitable uranium mining in Wyoming (or anywhere else for that matter). Cheap, high-grade, uranium ore has been used up long ago and the lower the ore grade, the more expensive it is to mine, mill, and refine. So not only is the end-product extremely dangerous it is extremely expensive, and the costs will continue to grow so long as the nuclear power industry exists.
Then too, the entire nuclear industry seems to have forgotten or ignored the fact that uranium is not a renewable fuel, but rather a rare mineral element mined and milled (and enriched) product that is very expensive to produce and fuel nuclear reactors. It is more rare as a an energy producing product than coal, oil, natural gas, or any other of the usual fuels used for producing power —therefore extremely expensive to produce and therefore more expensive to the end user such as your local power company. It is also a non-renewable product like other fossil fuels of course, and herein lies the crux of the problem. Uranium will never resolve the global warming/climate change problem.
So at least some of the newly-designed future SMR plants, e.g. TerraPower, eventually hope to use fuel produced from what has always been considered as an ore far too low-grade rare earth element called thorium in order to have a sufficient quantity of fuel to operate for the foreseeable future. But at what price? Uranium has bounced between $100 and $70 a pound recently. and low-grade uranium and/or thorium will drive the price per pound well into the hundreds and even thousands of dollars per pound range. When I began my career in 1969 uranium yellowcake (or U3O8) was $8 per pound, and thorium was never considered economic to mine and, and probably, if the industry had any sense of practical economics, never will be.
So the most important question, other than the deadly danger of human and other life’s man-caused 6th Extinction from all nuclear fuel products like nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors, will be what happens if we blindly continue on this path? Given the unlikely event of an accident-free, or war-free, or terrorism-free lifetimes of use all around the world is this one — is there enough economic uranium to go around as the industry experiences it’s much sought-after rebirth, and if so, for how long? The answer is a resounding, “No!” ~llaw
Texas-Based Uranium Energy Buys Wyoming Processing Plant For $175 Million
Texas-based Uranium Energy Corp. is making yet another acquisition in Wyoming, snapping up the state’s only conventional uranium mill for $175 million. The move sets it up to be the largest domestic producer of uranium.
September 24, 20245 min read
Texas-based Uranium Energy was already North America’s largest uranium-focused company with several Wyoming assets in play, but it’s about to get an even bigger Wyoming footprint with the $175 million acquisition of the Cowboy State’s only conventional uranium processing mill and its assets.
The mill, which is about 40 miles northwest of Rawlins, belonged to British-Australian company Rio Tinto, a global mining and metallurgy giant. The mill operated from 1981 to 1983, and has a licensed capacity of 4.1 million pounds of yellowcake refined uranium per year, or 3,000 tons per day.
The purchase includes around 175 million pounds of existing uranium resources, ready and waiting to be captured.
Taken in concert with Uranium Energy’s 20 or so other sites in Wyoming, this is a move that further solidifies the state’s groundbreaking position as ground zero for an innovative nuclear energy renaissance.
Not only are resources set to be mined here, but used here as well. Bill Gates-backed TerraPower has already started constructing its proposed Natrium nuclear plant in Kemmerer, while Wyoming awarded a two-year contract to nuclear submarine power plant maker BWXT to examine the feasibility of deploying 50 MW micro-reactors.
“These are exciting times for the Wyoming uranium industry, and we’re on the edge of another boom,” Wyoming Mining Association Executive Director Travis Deti told Cowboy State Daily. “What we’re seeing today is a growing interest in reliability. Fossil fuels and nuclear power fueled by Wyoming uranium are going to be critical to meet the projected increased electricity demand to power the growth in artificial intelligence and data centers in the very near future.
“And when you’re talking about emissions, nuclear is really your best option to provide emission free power with necessary reliability. This is something wind and solar simply cannot do.”
When It Comes To Uranium, Wyoming Is King
Wyoming has the largest uranium reserves in the United States but, initially at least, TerraPower had told Cowboy State Daily it would likely have to source its uranium from Ohio or New Mexico.
Not long after that, however, Uranium Energy announced that it had signed a memorandum of understanding with the TerraPower nuclear plant that Bill Gates is building in Kemmerer to supply the 345 MW sodium-cooled fast reactor with uranium from Wyoming after all.
Some further processing of that yellowcake will be required, and that is still likely to take place outside of Wyoming — at least for now.
“There’s a converter in Illinois which is in the U.S., and there’s one in Canada and another one in France,” UEC’s Senior Vice President of U.S. Operations Brent Berg said. “So there, the product will go through the next stage of processing, and then it goes to an enrichment plant, where they enrich the Uranium 235 content.”
After that, it will be formed into pellets that could then return to Wyoming for use by the TerraPower nuclear plant.
Whether all of those additional processing steps could eventually happen in Wyoming wasn’t something Berg could comment about Tuesday.
“It would be great to have all of those things right in the state,” he acknowledged.
For now, the company is focused on a rapid restart of uranium production in Wyoming.
“This acquisition really provides some synergies with shared infrastructure as well as project personnel expertise that made a lot of sense for the company,” Berg said. “We recently restarted production at Christensen Ranch and Irigaray operations. This is just another tool in the toolbox that will be not only beneficial for UEC, but for Wyoming.”
Bolt-On Acquisitions Not Rocket Science
Given that these new acres from Rio Tinto are adjacent to areas UEC is already exploring, it wasn’t rocket science to pick up the property.
In addition to the bolt-on resources and the licensed uranium mill, the acquisition includes a database of more than 6 million feet of drilling for new projects.
“This allows us to really look at those properties in greater detail than we could have in the past,” Berg said.
While UEC has started some preliminary uranium production, the company is not yet ready to report production volumes yet. That’s something Berg said it anticipates doing closer to the end of the year.
But he does expect the company will have the greatest amount of uranium resource in the U.S., as well as the most licensed production capacity, positioning it to become the “leading uranium developer, not only in Wyoming, but in the United States.”
Given what Berg has seen lately — with even the mothballed 3 Mile Island coming back to life — he’s optimistic about what the future holds for both UEC and Wyoming, which has one of the world’s richest uranium deposits.
“I think more and more people are seeing nuclear power as clean base-load energy,” he said. “And I think it just makes a lot of sense for the United States.”
On Tuesday, uranium was trading for just over $79 per pound, down from a peak of more than $105 earlier this year.
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