Thursday, March 17, 2011

Where the nuclear reserves are

The full list of major uranium reserve holders is:
Australia - 31%
Kazakhstan - 12%
Canada - 9%
Russia - 9%
South Africa, Namibia, Brazil, Niger, the US, and China all have between 3 and 5% of reserves.

Uranium isn't the only thing you can use in reactors, although my knowledge gets very shaky.

Plutonium: largely (entirely?) derived from uranium, I believe.

Thorium: If I understand correctly, thorium has been used in experimental reactors for breeding uranium. Not sure if this is meaningfully still a going concern; need to understand reactor tech better than I do... Anyway, the big holders seem to be the US, Australia, Canada, and India.

1 comment:

  1. My impression of the thorium cycle is that path dependence is a big problem; thorium has a lot to recommend it in principle, but there's a whole different set of technical challenges from uranium reactors, many of which have not been worked on all that thoroughly.

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