[BLANK_AUDIO] This video provides an overview of the nuclear industry. And since we're focusing our discussion on primary energy resources, when we say nuclear, we're really talking, at least for the purposes of this discussion, about the, the fuel used for nuclear power. And that is to a large extent, uranium. So, I'm going to base this conversation about uranium. And we'll talk very briefly about a few other fuels towards the end, and maybe few other technologies. But you can research that. For the most part, when I say uranium here, though, it's a general placeholder for fuel that goes into nuclear reaction. So since fuel is a mined mineral, the value chain for nuclear is going to look a lot like the value chain that we discussed when we talked about coal. We begin with mining and we end with electrical generation actually even more, so in this with coal the vast majority of coal went into electrical generation, some went into home use here it's even more so the case that was just trace amounts of nuclear fuels that would go into any other use other than electricity generation. But in contrast to coal where when we talked about coal, the intermediate state, we really highlighted was the transportation stage. Here, I want to talk a little bit about the processing that turned mined uranium ore into fuel usable in a nuclear reactor. So as with coal uranium can be mined from the surface. Or it can be recovered by underground methods. The main surface mining method with uranium would typically be open pit. One of the big challenges is that it requires lots and lots of water to minimize dust, which, you know, the, the dusts when you are mining uranium would be, would be hazardous to health because it is radioactive. Underground mining would be used well, there is two different types of underground mining. One would be shaft methods and actually this is relatively uncommon. You would use shaft mining methods when the ore deposits are quite deep, but there is very significant risks to worker health due to heightened exposure to radon gas if you're mining underground. So, unless prices get really really high you know, it probably doesn't justify the risks and expense of worker protection and those kinds of things. So, thats not super common. Actually, of all of these methods I think one of the most common and certainly in a lower price environment one of the most common would be in-situ leaching, so leaching refers to using acid to dissolve some constituent part of a solid mass into the, the, the fluid. And in in-situ leaching, what you're doing is you're just you're taking, you're actually putting acid, some kind of acid solution into the ground, assuming that the, that the uranium bearing material the, the ore if you will is sufficiently porous and permeable then you can trickle basically the solution through it, it will dissolve the uranium and then you can pumped out from a separate location in the area you know, with wells. And then you'll actually separate the uranium out of that liquid. So, this requires, you know not only porosity and permeability That makes it technically feasible, but it also has to be either geographically or at least geologically oriented in a way that groundwater is not at risk. So geographically it could be very, very remote from any kind of other human use for the ground water. Which would mean if there is some risk to ground water, it's very far away. Or geologically if there actually is an impermeable barrier somewhere in the, in the proximate to the ore that really separates and protects the groundwater then that would be more of the ideal situation. But in-situ leaching around the world is wanted, because of the cost effectiveness is one of the most One of the most common methods of recovering uranium. Now once we recover the uranium, there's a degree of processing that has to take place before you can actually make use of it as a fuel and for, in a nuclear reactor. Some of this processing will occur at the mine site. Okay, so for for physically removed or like in a pit mining or, or shaft mining operations you'll have to actually mill that or down to a powder and then you'll typically use a what's called heap leaching just a different kind of leaching method where you'll use acid, but you'll apply it to these surface piles. of, of milled ore. It will dissolve the uranium and you'll actually collect it at some, you know, the downstream end of, of the pile. But whether you use one of those methods that requires heap leaching or, or you actually use in situ leaching, ultimately you'll also dry and filter it and what you produce is something called yellowcake. So this is sort of the first stage of processing. The additional processing required, then, will either take place at the mine or typically not terribly far from the mine, because the yellowcake is you know, there is still a significant volume and and it is has hazardous materials. So you wouldn't want to move it if you don't have to. So what you will find is typically these, these processing facilities, final processing facilities co-located with the mines or at least to where mines historically were. There, you know, we may be shipping to use installed capas, processing capacity at this point but we'll often find is that wherever that processing capacity was, at some point in history there may have been a mine that was relatively close. So after you have the yellowcake there are two basic ways of making useful uranium. One is you would just basic smelting. You would, would drive off impurity as in turn the yellowcake into, uranium oxide fluorides, and then there is additional processing that can take place because it, it, it's not necessary. Those fluorides that come off of the smelting process of the yellowcake are actually usable in many types of reactors, but you can actually improve the quality of the fuel by additional processing what we call rich meant, if it's only in enriched to some limited degree we typically call the output from that enrichment process, fuel grades highly enriched uranium is what we might think of as weapon grade, weapon grade uranium. So the final step in the, the value stream of course, it's actually making use of it. Now, the vast, vast as I said of, are, nuclear fuels are going to be used for electrical generation. There is a very small amount that will go into, say, some military uses like transportation for nuclear submarines and, and weapons of course. But the vast majority is going to wind up in typically, you know, the sort of textbook case would be a fission reaction or a fission reactor. Here the, the process I would encourage you to read a, a bit about it. I'm not going to hold myself out as an authority on this, I just want to give you a very brief broad outline here of some of the key aspects of electrical generation with, with uranium fuel as fuel. So the basic process is that the neutron is absorbed into uranium nucleus which splits into, you know? New different like different type of material, so it's no longer uranium when it, when it actually changes its elemental form. But that process of breaking the nucleus splitting the nucleus is what releases an enormous amount of energy. So when we harness that energy, we're basically able to do thermal work and this is, this into steam generating heat and steam, steam driven turbines basically, and that's how the electricity is generated. Just to give you some rough idea of the amount of energy that you can, that you can get out of uranium. It's about, yellowcake of course is, is you know, less processed than the uranium fuel itself, so it's about. Half the density, so about two cubic inches of yellow cake would be equivalent to about 1 cubic inch of uranium fuel. So basically you know, that amount of a large sugar cube, the amount of energy you can get out of that in principle is equivalent to about four train load tr train car loads, four hopper cars. If you've ever seen a coal train going down the tracks, basically four of those train car loads would be required to produce the amount of energy that you, you can pull out of a cubic inch of uranium fuel and principle. Or if you're not familiar with train car loads you know, it would be about eight sort of neighborhood standard, residential neighborhood sized swimming pools. So if you have you know, familiar with those sort of 16 by 32 in the ground pools. It'll be about eight of those full of coal Is what it would take to produce the amount of energy and principle that you can pull out of a large sugar cube size of uranium fuel, and that makes you understand why advocates are you know, such advocates of what this fuel can do. It, it said that you know, there are so many potential sources for us to recover uranium from including something as basic as sea water. That we actually have the potential to get enough energy out of uranium to basically supply the earth for as long as the earth is anticipated to exist and co-existence with the sun. So, when you think about that and the fact that it has very little or no greenhouse gas emissions, you can understand why nuclear energy is considered somewhat of a green technology. You know, this is why it's considered basically renewable, even though strictly speaking it's a finitely available it's a, it's a resource that with infinite availability here on the earth it's hard to imagine if it's put to use through this technology of nuclear fission how exactly through this process of, of nuclear fission and, and, and technology in nuclear reactors. It's hard to imagine how we could actually use it all even for the energy needs that we currently conceive of. The big downside of course, you know, this, these are great upsides, but the big downside of course Is that the solid waste is radioactive and, and you know, it's hazardous and it's not obvious how exactly you store it safely. So the downside over the long period of time is what exactly would we do with these materials even though we're getting great energy efficiency, what would we do with the, with the waste. And then of course that's just assuming that you could sort of plan and manage all of the outcomes that unfold over time. The reality is that we know there are, you know, weather related and human related accidents. So the, so the risks associated with those events, and I'm thinking of, you know, the kinds of terms that are going to come to mind are Three Mile Island and Chernobyl and Fukushima. These kinds of things are, you know, raise very serious very serious issues for thinking about just where nuclear power fits in our global energy portfolio. [BLANK_AUDIO]
