The Future of Nuclear Energy: Facts and Fiction Part III

For more than 40 years, the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the United Nations have published a bi-annual document with the title “Uranium Resources, Production and Demand.” This book, known as the IAEA/NEA 2007 Red Book, summarizes data about the actual and near future nuclear energy situation and presents the accumulated world-wide knowledge about the existing and expected uranium resources. These data are widely believed to provide an accurate and solid basis for future decisions about nuclear energy. Unfortunately, as it is demonstrated in this article, they do not.
The conventional world-wide uranium resources are estimated by the authors of the Red Book as 5.5 million tons. Out of these, 3.3 million tons are assigned to the reasonably assured category, and 2.2 million tons are associated with the not yet discovered but assumed to exist inferred resources. Our analysis shows that neither the 3.3 million tons of “assured” resources nor the 2.2 million tons of inferred resources are justified by the Red Book data and that the actual known exploitable resources are probably much smaller.

Despite many shortcomings of the uranium resource data, some interesting and valuable information can be extracted from the Red Book. Perhaps most importantly, the Red Book resource data can be used to test the “economic-geological hypothesis,” which claims that a doubling of uranium price will increase the amount of exploitable uranium resources by an even larger factor. The relations between the uranium resources claimed for the different resource categories and their associated cost estimates are found to be in clear contradiction with this hypothesis.

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