Supply-Demand Balance of Nuclear Fuels

Hitoshi Sakamoto
Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs
University of Minnesota

December 2000

Abstract

Inventories of nuclear fuel supply system and those of the demand system are studied. The present study confirms that known uranium resources are available for the next 82 years, agreeing with the IAEA’s recent statement, and that production capacity for ore processing, conversion and uranium-fuel fabrication exceed the annual reactor requirements. Whether the demand exceeds the enrichment capacity is not addressed even though it seems like the case according to the literature. Finally, the price of each production stage is reviewed and converted to examine how much each component shares in the price of nuclear-fired electricity.

Background:

I wrote this for a Environmental and Resource Economics course when I was a graduate student at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. The article found the IAEA estimate of 82 years of uranium resource was based on the assumption of constant reactor capacity. If the global capacity continues to increase, the resource will be depleted in less than 82 years. It is reasonable, however, to think that the resource will last longer than 82 years, even with constant capacity, because of future discovery of resources. What was more important in the study was that reprocessed fuels would be much more expensive than fuels using uranium from the mines. The bottleneck for this is not the few number of reprocessing plants but the lack of technology to actually reprocess the hot fuel rods from the reactor.