There's an application being processed for a new second reactor at the Clinton IL plant site. Long way off, though. Also, the fact that the first unit came in hideously over original estimates won't help sell the project.

They backed into it, by proclaiming that global warming was the biggest problem in the world.

Its just that the left's preferred solution to that "crisis" is that the peasants should live live good 13th century peasants actually did -- with the farm animals, in mud huts, and offering their daughters up for droit d'siegnure. Nuclear power is the intellectually correct answer to the GW fear campaign that was supposed to drive the masses back to their collective farms (where they belong).

Terry Savage interviewed some economist who has a good track record on calling thing - he said there's not enough uranium to go around. Takes 10 years to dig a uranium mine.

Betcha Cheney has lotsa friends and associates at GE and Westinghouse.

Sandy, not so. The mines are currently underutalized. further, used reactor fuel can be recycled, but we are not doing that because Dhimmi Carter thought it was a bad idea.

Sandy:

Uranium is about the 4th or 5th most plentiful metal in the ground - it's just not very well concentrated. But the amount needed for reactors is not great - and while the price has surged in recent years, for the longest time (since about 1975) it stayed low.

Thus the world's present measured resources of uranium in the lower cost category (3.5 Mt) and used only in conventional reactors, are enough to last for some 50 years. ... and a doubling of price from present levels could be expected to create about a tenfold increase in measured resources, over time.

... This still ignores the technological factor mentioned below. It also omits unconventional resources such as phosphate deposits (22 Mt U recoverable as by-product) and seawater (up to 4000 Mt), which would cost two to six times the US$ 80/kg price to extract.

Widespread use of the fast breeder reactor could increase the utilisation of uranium sixty-fold or more. ...
UIC Nuclear Issues Briefing Paper # 75: Supply of Uranium (September 2005)

Some more tid-bits from Bill Woods' excellent link, all emphasis added:

Unlike the metals which have been in demand for centuries, society has barely begun to utilise uranium. As serious non-military demand did not materialise until significant nuclear generation was built by the late 1970s, there has been only one cycle of exploration-discovery-production. [...]

The first exploration and mining cycle for uranium occurred about 1970 to 1985. It provided enough uranium to meet world demand for some 80 years. [...]

This initial cycle has provided more than enough uranium for the last three decades and several more to come. Clearly, it is premature to speak about long-term uranium scarcity when the entire nuclear industry is so young that only one cycle of resource replenishment has been required. It is instead a reassurance that this first cycle of exploration was capable of meeting the needs of more than half a century of nuclear energy demand. [...]

The significant investment in uranium exploration during the 1970-82 exploration cycle would have been fairly efficient in discovering exposed uranium deposits, due to the ease of detecting radioactivity. Still, very few prospective regions in the world have seen the kind of intensive knowledge and technology-driven exploration that the Athabasca Basin of Canada has seen since 1975. This fact has huge positive implications for future uranium discoveries, because the Athabasca Basin history suggests that the largest proportion of future resources will be as deposits discovered in the more advanced phases of exploration. Specifically, only 25% of the 635,000 tonnes of U3O8 discovered so far in the Athabasca Basin could be discovered during the first phase of surface-based exploration. A sustained second phase, based on advances in deep penetrating geophysics and geological models, was required to discover the remaining 75%.

Another dimension to the immaturity of uranium exploration is that it is by no means certain that all possible deposit types have even been identified. Any estimate of world uranium potential made only 30 years ago would have missed the entire deposit class of unconformity deposits that have driven production since then, simply because geologists did not know this class existed.

Thorium as a nuclear fuel

Today uranium is the only fuel supplied for nuclear reactors. However, thorium can also be utilised as a fuel. [...]
Neutron efficient reactors, such as CANDU, are capable of operating on a thorium fuel cycle, once they are started using a fissile material such as U-235 or Pu-239. Then the thorium (Th-232) atom captures a neutron in the reactor to become fissile uranium (U-233), which continues the reaction. Some advanced reactor designs are likely to be able to make use of thorium on a substantial scale. [...]

Thorium is about three times as abundant in the earth's crust as uranium.

Posted by: Michael Herdegen at January 17, 2006 5:10 AM